“Our time in this life is brief. Let’s make it rich, and make it better, and not just for ourselves” should be a mantra for all. Thank you as always, Nia!
Thank you so much, Lindsey, that means a lot! (I only closed comments because I want the book-reading experience to feel different and definitely less time-pressured for people. Can always email me or comment elsewhere!) I REALLY appreciate you reading. I know it’s a big undertaking for everyone!
I'm very excited to read what you release about private property. Your point about stewardship is so bittersweet. Where I live, it seems like land needs to be conserved by some sort of governmental intervention (e.g. conservation easements, or a municipal government buying the land outright) or it gets quickly subdivided into inefficient and inequitable sprawl. The muni government where I work is trying to figure out how to care for land and allow people to connect with it in ways that are sustainable for everyone, including tribes that were stripped away from their right to be here. Government ownership is more public than private ownership, especially when the land is technically bought with tax dollars, but it doesn't automatically mean that a given piece of property is open to the public. How do we balance collective ownership encouraging the nourishing connection with natural space and place and creatures that so many of us lack, without letting people run rampant everywhere, creating social trails through sensitive habitat, disrespecting the spatial needs of wildlife, and denigrating the livelihoods of industries like grazing and farming (hopefully the sustainable kinds) that require large swaths of land? I don't know.
The second question, about how we share the space without ruining it, is really at the heart of what people do with commoning. It requires pretty solid rules and ecological understanding (Frontiers of Commoning has a number of episodes with people doing this kind of work). It's an ancient system that works really well when it's allowed to.
But the bigger problem is I think the one you stated first, which is what to do with all the damage and injustices we've inherited. With "stewardship," I was thinking more the multi-generational ranchers in the West who defend their benefiting from the original theft by pointing to their good stewardship of the land, but you're right that it's a MUCH bigger action and responsibility than that, including by local governments.
And yeah -- I have a number of friends in Montana who are very critical of conservation work. I understand *why* they're critical, but at some level I'm just grateful that humans/settler-colonial culture have managed to not wreck everything yet.
All I can say is that I think the more we understand about what's happened, and the more conversations we have about that, the suffering caused, facing the reality of the injustices, the better chance we'll have of at least attempting better answers to the problems. And so many issues require, I feel, a wholesale revolution in the way the dominant culture values anything. Which is ... daunting.
Thanks for the article link, I'll have to check it out!
I think, not infrequently, about how incremental change is fine but a wholesale reset would probably work a lot better. Not psychologically, that is; humans don't do great with a lot of change all at once. But systemically, starting with a blank piece of paper might help us drop some of the baggage that we manage to carry on through our progress eras. I don't know how to do this, though, and you make a good point that it's about values. If we rewrite a Constitution, for example, but we don't do the work of reflecting on our values, we might just end up with the same document as before.
I wish I could say I didn't get stuck on this question all the time but ... I get stuck on this question all the time. I have strong "burn it all down" urges (which is part of why I harp on about the need to build new structures, so there are already frameworks and systems in place), but the reality is that whenever a human society burns it all down, it's always the most vulnerable who suffer the most.
There's a good point in what you wrote there, though -- it doesn't hurt to do some work reflecting on and clearly articulating values anyway! No matter what kind of change happens, or we try to make happen, those are needed.
Congrats on the introduction — and on your progress. I suspect I'm late to the game with this, or that you've seen it already, but for that "hinge point" of yours on ownership, theft and oppression, if you have the time and inclination maybe consider this powerful and disturbing film?
I did! I saw it when it came out. A subscriber actually recommended it. Did it get as much attention as it deserved, I wonder? I haven't heard a lot of people talk about it, but just the way it portrayed the brutality of taking and oppression ... it's so important to really *see* that.
I did it! Exactly those ones, too, actually, how serendipitous! They were carpeted all over where I was just camping with my family. At least, I THINK so! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/170548879
Wonderful column! I have similar reactions driving across the land. We recently drove 800+ miles (and back😁) to Burlington, Iowa to get a new puppy and looking across the vast landscapes, thoughts about how it all came to be owned and partitioned, as well as what it looked like 10,000 years ago were constantly on my mind. Driving through the mountains of course is different out West, as a lot of the land is still 'owned' by the government(s) (and railroads). I look forward to your book!
Driving through the midwest and thinking about these things is something else, isn't it? Sometimes I try to imagine even how different it would all look if we just had farms abandon monocrops and tilling. (Read a disturbing piece in AgWeek last year about how much topsoil South Dakota farms lose every year -- no-till practices definitely make a difference.)
New puppy! How adorable and I do not envy you. 😂 Having a puppy is so much like having a toddler and a baby wrapped up together in one fluffy four-legged package, so exhausting! But adorable. 🥰 Congrats!
Perfect encapsulation of a new puppy, just back from cleaning the messes on the floor 🤣, but enjoying him a lot.
Yes, it's something for sure! And driving across Montana, east on 90 to Livingston, mountains and high plains. And the WONDERFUL drive from Choteau, MT south to Augusta - I'll never forget those rolling hills and the beautiful skies we had, and of course I was imagining what it all looked like 10,000 years ago. I've researched a bit the best places to view what is left of the Tall Grass Prairies, but what I have been able to find is not very exciting. Still would like to see what is left of them in the Fall, when the grasses are at their maximum height and the sun angle is lower - I've pondered how hard it must be to photograph them, but I would like to try!
I mentioned to someone else the work of Alexis Bonogofsky, who's a writer and fourth-generation rancher near Billings, and also a wonderful photographer. I always feel like she captures the feel of the various Montana landscapes so perfectly: https://bonogofsky.smugmug.com
I love that area anywhere around Choteau. It's got so much ... everything.
Have you looked at the American Prairie Reserve? I don't know if that qualifies for what you're looking for. It's a publicly-accessible private endeavor (and politically tense within the state and especially surrounding cattle ranches) to restore prairie and bison since grasslands ecosystems are some of the most endangered in the world. I've stayed in their huts a couple times now and am going back in late summer. https://americanprairie.org
I’ve stayed in the Founders Hut (I think it is) a couple of times. This year we got a yurt. I got an email last week that a few of their smaller huts by the campgrounds have lots of openings.
My only advice would be to take warnings about the roads seriously (when they say it turns into deep, sticky gumbo in the rain it’s not an exaggeration) and I have found July to be so excessively hot it was kind of miserable. September or end of August seem to be good times! The one year I tried to go in June they were flooded but I’d like to try again sometime.
Fantastic -- THANKS SO MUCH. Both for the work of Alexis, and for the info on the American Prairie Reserve. Both of those are new to me, and look fantastic. Appreciate it! 🙏😀
I love how your work is taking shape and cannot wait to read the first chapter--hooray! Those images--I so often try to imagine the landscape as it would have been before monocultures, settlement, so many centuries of owning. I want to ramble those hills so much, and am so happy to have found them filling my mind this morning as I read. Just gorgeous. 💜
The Highwood Mountains helped keep me sane (as sane as I was, at least) when I lived in GF for a while. Wondrous views from the heights to the plains. Wildflowers.
As for the origin of the idea of privarte property (and the idea of all other forms of dominion), I was browsing through Vine Deloria, Jr.'s book God is Red the other day and it appears (I need to read more) that he believes that "astronauts" must have touched down in the Middle East and introduced concepts like partriarchy, monotheism, etc. He calls the people who emerged from that "hybrid" as opposed to indigenous.
There is not, needless to say, much evidence for that theory. But I find it [weirdly and unbelievaby] appealing (or maybe comforting is a better word?) because, otherwise, what could have motivated the ungoverned, untaxed indigenous folks of the Fertile Crescent (or anywhere else that proto-states and eventually states arose) to accept dominion? J Scott's work (Against the Grain) shows how the idea of the state failed multiple times before it stuck (which doesn't support Deloria, Jr's astronauts), but Scott doesn't get into why. Gary Snyder connects it with the discovery of writing (at least in China). You have to be able to keep records to charge taxes.
Perhaps its irrelevant. All those "No Trespassing" signs are posted and we have to figure out how to evolve from where we are (Henry George beat me to this conclusion) and go forward if we can.
I love that area so much. It's bizarre to me how much it feels like home even though I've never lived there.
I have not yet read Deloria's book (I know I need to!) and have never heard that excerpt from it. That's very interesting. And I totally get the comfort from it. I felt something similar reading "Columbus and Other Cannibals" because when you think about all of this too much it feels so inexplicable that some kind of possession or virus feels like the only logical explanation.
I feel like Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" built a lot on Scott's work (and I guess Polanyi's now that I've finally read it) to start getting into how some societies saw hierarchical structures clearly and intentionally rejected them. I don't know if Wengrow will continue that work. They had planned 3 books on this subject I think, and I'm hoping he'll go further into that question.
I also just started reading "The Prehistory of Private Property," by Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, which is in general on the same subject. Dismantling the idea that inequality is an inevitable state, or that pure free market capitalism provides the most freedom.
We do indeed -- thank you, Henry George -- need to figure out where to go, but honestly it feels worthwhile to try to untangle how we got here. So we don't end up perpetuating or recreating the same problems.
If I were going to move to a small out-of-the way town in MT, I would consider Fort Benton.
If its not aliens. you have to deal with really difficult ideas - evil, original sin, the will to power - that I confess I prefer to ignore. Papa Jung would laugh at the idea of ignoring the shadow, and rightly so, but one has to make peace with the world somehow.
Have you come across Martin Shaw's book Smokehole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass? A lot of content in a thin book.
Fort Benton has become pretty popular! A lot of people go there looking for some history. Still a low population, though.
"One has to make peace with the world somehow" -- I suppose we're all grappling with that in one way or another. Sometimes I do find it easier to just think of it as a virus or some kind of evil demon acting through people. More to give myself a break from trying to figure out "why?" than anything else.
I haven't read Smokehole yet. I read Courting the Wild Twin and one other book of his I'm blanking the name of. Lightning Tree maybe? It was one he presented through some audio readings on Soundcloud. He's got a lot of compelling ideas. I have to admit I unsubscribed from his Substack within a few months of it launching because it became very Christianity-focused (he was getting re-baptized), and, you know, I'm glad for him that it serves him but it opened up a whole lot of other issues and questions for me around how you can reinvigorate myths that were often quashed by Christian missions while also promoting Christianity while also not facing what institutional religions have done to people and the planet. Not that you *can't,* it's just not an area I have time to spend on, especially as someone not really interested in returning to her Christian upbringing. But I always liked what he's done for mythologies and their role in humans' relationship with the planet.
yes yes I too think about private property all the time. I often like to remind fellow white people "we are all living on stolen land." Private property is a legacy of violence and theft point blank. Always loved that part from Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land -
"Well, as I was walking, I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing"
But on the other side it didn't say nothing
That side was made for you and me!"
I've never been to Montana so love these glimpses into a terrain so unfamiliar.
It's amazing how often that bit about the "No Trespassing" sign is left out of that song when people quote it. But it was the whole point! It was interesting when Lady Gaga sang it at the Super Bowl because so many people picked up on the subversion and protest in it while many others just thought it was about patriotism.
I'm glad you like the photos! It's kind of hard to grasp the vastness of that space through an iPhone. One of the photographers who I think does this incredibly well is Alexis Bonogofsky, who's also a writer and rancher who lives near Billings: https://bonogofsky.smugmug.com/East-of-Billings
Beautiful photos! I can feel what you felt “on the east side”! There is a freedom to that side of the divide that no one can explain if you were fortunate to grow up there! And meadowlarks! ❤️❤️
I bet you can! Being there by myself actually started to worry me a bit because it felt even more like home than Whitefish does, even though I've never lived there. And so, so much, the meadowlarks. Why do I never hear them anywhere in the northern Flathead?
I have never seen one up here. Maybe Polson/Arlee area. I think they like the wide open spaces. Birds have changed so much even out here, we used to see Killdeer and have not seen them for years. Too many people with animals who chase them maybe, or climate change or…….gosh everything changes! Sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad, but the feeling I get when I go east of the mountains never changes! LOL! ❤️❤️
It does feel like things stay more even-keeled out there!
I heard a lot of meadowlarks down toward Perma in April, and on the Bison Range. But never up here. It's so odd, I always think Whitefish should have a huge variety of birds but it doesn't seem to. I guess I just expect it because of all the trees. I mentioned it to someone and she said maybe it's because we have eagles. I don't know, though, there are plenty of magpies and robins and red-winged blackbirds! Just doesn't seem like much else. I did hear a house finch yesterday, and of course have hummingbirds by the house. 🥰
Often when I read On the Commons I remember an author I fell in love with and always by the end of your enchanting writing I forget about him. Verlyn Klinkenborg introduced me to an image of Montana and particularly Big Hole country. It seems, for the both of you, Montana has a hold on you. Best wishes for the book.
That is such a compliment and weirdly (for someone born and raised here and raised by very literary parents), I have not heard of Klinkenborg so I'm going to have to look him up! Big Hole country is pretty awesome.
He is a product of the Iowa writing project and Yale. My sense is he is able to write vividly about stuff he would never do (like ranch). Lots of beautiful sentences like Cormac but not so dark. I think "The Rural Life", "Making Hay" and "The Last Fine Time" were all examples of vivid, exceptional writing. I learned about all sorts of language of rural stuff from him.
That is lovely. And it's nice to have someone like Cormac but not as dark! Have you read Ivan Doig? A lot of his books fall kind of flat for me, especially the fiction, but his "This House of Sky" about growing up near White Sulphur Springs the son of an itinerant ranch hand (kind of) visually and viscerally sticks with me.
I met a guy last night who is working through the process of legally deeding his house and land back to a local tribe in Virginia, both as "the right thing to do," and as "a great big 'fuck you' to Albemarle County." He hopes it will be a model that others can follow.
I have in mind a story where all the consumer-culture types have gone to space, and only the natives and the Amish are left down here.
I love hearing stories like this. It's something my husband and i talk about in regards to the small bit of property he's set to inherit once his mother passes. We're in western WA with two prominent tribes just within a few miles. My dream is for the state to purchase it from us (since we could really use the money), and then deed it back to the tribe. I mean it was theirs to begin with. This story about a OR professor is similar, though we really need federal reparations at this point. A few gifts here and there from individuals aren't going to cut it unless as you say other follow suit. https://www.utelandtrust.org/lands-restored
Thank you for sharing that story, I hadn't seen it before. The "how?" is something I think about a lot. A friend of mine who lives in Hawai'i has been working with the same self-question. I didn't inherit any land that was given to my family, but I still benefited from it in a lot of ways, I think. Reparations are really necessary, on so many levels. (This is why the 5% of newsletter revenue I give away each quarter is to Indigenous-led organizations in Montana.)
I love hearing that! It's so rare, but not unheard of. I just listened to reporting on a whole island being sold in Canada that a local couple bought and then gave to the local First Nations, who'd had to create a land trust to receive it. The whole story was pretty interesting because it involved a lot of moving parts and exposed a lot of how the federal government (in Canada in this case) makes it hard for First Nations to be given land back.
That story makes me think of a Douglas Adams book. :)
Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I think? The one where the Golgafrinchans put all their middle management on a spaceship and sent them off-planet. I have one of those big Adams volumes with all the books and they get muddled in my head!
I sometimes enjoy the thought of the reprehensible being barbecued in any one of the nine circles of hades. And I am positive anyone with a five-wire fence will spend eternity tangled and toasting in miles of red-hot barbed wire. Is that too harsh?? 👺
When I read some of the ways that the nobility talked about the peasants they were throwing off the land and out of their homes in England's enclosures of the commons, and then of course how those same attitudes and practices spread around the world, it's hard to say that's too harsh. Even if I don't believe in hell, I've never claimed to be a Buddhist! One can aim for compassion and fail all the time ... 🫣
"The mass trespass of Kinder Scout was a trespass protest at Kinder Scout in the Peak District, Derbyshire, England, on 24 April 1932. The protest sought to highlight that walkers were denied access to areas of open countryside which had been fenced off by wealthy landowners who forbade public access"
The Kinder Scout trespass was, I feel, a real watershed! The Right to Roam eventually came out of that because (I think) it kept alive the knowledge that these paths belonged to everyone, and had been taken. It's so important to remember that! Hard to defend rights when almost everyone has forgotten they existed. Thanks for the song! I hadn't heard that one before.
“Our time in this life is brief. Let’s make it rich, and make it better, and not just for ourselves” should be a mantra for all. Thank you as always, Nia!
It’s hard, but at least we’re in it together!
Commenting here because comments aren’t closed - I loved your introduction! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Thank you so much, Lindsey, that means a lot! (I only closed comments because I want the book-reading experience to feel different and definitely less time-pressured for people. Can always email me or comment elsewhere!) I REALLY appreciate you reading. I know it’s a big undertaking for everyone!
I'm very excited to read what you release about private property. Your point about stewardship is so bittersweet. Where I live, it seems like land needs to be conserved by some sort of governmental intervention (e.g. conservation easements, or a municipal government buying the land outright) or it gets quickly subdivided into inefficient and inequitable sprawl. The muni government where I work is trying to figure out how to care for land and allow people to connect with it in ways that are sustainable for everyone, including tribes that were stripped away from their right to be here. Government ownership is more public than private ownership, especially when the land is technically bought with tax dollars, but it doesn't automatically mean that a given piece of property is open to the public. How do we balance collective ownership encouraging the nourishing connection with natural space and place and creatures that so many of us lack, without letting people run rampant everywhere, creating social trails through sensitive habitat, disrespecting the spatial needs of wildlife, and denigrating the livelihoods of industries like grazing and farming (hopefully the sustainable kinds) that require large swaths of land? I don't know.
The second question, about how we share the space without ruining it, is really at the heart of what people do with commoning. It requires pretty solid rules and ecological understanding (Frontiers of Commoning has a number of episodes with people doing this kind of work). It's an ancient system that works really well when it's allowed to.
But the bigger problem is I think the one you stated first, which is what to do with all the damage and injustices we've inherited. With "stewardship," I was thinking more the multi-generational ranchers in the West who defend their benefiting from the original theft by pointing to their good stewardship of the land, but you're right that it's a MUCH bigger action and responsibility than that, including by local governments.
And yeah -- I have a number of friends in Montana who are very critical of conservation work. I understand *why* they're critical, but at some level I'm just grateful that humans/settler-colonial culture have managed to not wreck everything yet.
All I can say is that I think the more we understand about what's happened, and the more conversations we have about that, the suffering caused, facing the reality of the injustices, the better chance we'll have of at least attempting better answers to the problems. And so many issues require, I feel, a wholesale revolution in the way the dominant culture values anything. Which is ... daunting.
Given your work, you might be interested in this article, which was in a recent High Country News. It gets into the fraught nature of trying to restore justice along with the land itself: https://www.hcn.org/issues/55.6/history-the-many-legacies-of-letitia-carson
Thanks for the article link, I'll have to check it out!
I think, not infrequently, about how incremental change is fine but a wholesale reset would probably work a lot better. Not psychologically, that is; humans don't do great with a lot of change all at once. But systemically, starting with a blank piece of paper might help us drop some of the baggage that we manage to carry on through our progress eras. I don't know how to do this, though, and you make a good point that it's about values. If we rewrite a Constitution, for example, but we don't do the work of reflecting on our values, we might just end up with the same document as before.
I wish I could say I didn't get stuck on this question all the time but ... I get stuck on this question all the time. I have strong "burn it all down" urges (which is part of why I harp on about the need to build new structures, so there are already frameworks and systems in place), but the reality is that whenever a human society burns it all down, it's always the most vulnerable who suffer the most.
There's a good point in what you wrote there, though -- it doesn't hurt to do some work reflecting on and clearly articulating values anyway! No matter what kind of change happens, or we try to make happen, those are needed.
Congrats on the introduction — and on your progress. I suspect I'm late to the game with this, or that you've seen it already, but for that "hinge point" of yours on ownership, theft and oppression, if you have the time and inclination maybe consider this powerful and disturbing film?
https://www.hbo.com/exterminate-all-the-brutes
I did! I saw it when it came out. A subscriber actually recommended it. Did it get as much attention as it deserved, I wonder? I haven't heard a lot of people talk about it, but just the way it portrayed the brutality of taking and oppression ... it's so important to really *see* that.
Okay, well, next up to see: Twinflower! 😝
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=16&subview=map&taxon_id=77780
I did it! Exactly those ones, too, actually, how serendipitous! They were carpeted all over where I was just camping with my family. At least, I THINK so! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/170548879
Yaaaaayyyyyyyy! This makes my day!
😂 💚 🥰
By the way, nice orange checkmark you got there (not that we're counting). 🤭❤️
Wonderful column! I have similar reactions driving across the land. We recently drove 800+ miles (and back😁) to Burlington, Iowa to get a new puppy and looking across the vast landscapes, thoughts about how it all came to be owned and partitioned, as well as what it looked like 10,000 years ago were constantly on my mind. Driving through the mountains of course is different out West, as a lot of the land is still 'owned' by the government(s) (and railroads). I look forward to your book!
Driving through the midwest and thinking about these things is something else, isn't it? Sometimes I try to imagine even how different it would all look if we just had farms abandon monocrops and tilling. (Read a disturbing piece in AgWeek last year about how much topsoil South Dakota farms lose every year -- no-till practices definitely make a difference.)
New puppy! How adorable and I do not envy you. 😂 Having a puppy is so much like having a toddler and a baby wrapped up together in one fluffy four-legged package, so exhausting! But adorable. 🥰 Congrats!
Perfect encapsulation of a new puppy, just back from cleaning the messes on the floor 🤣, but enjoying him a lot.
Yes, it's something for sure! And driving across Montana, east on 90 to Livingston, mountains and high plains. And the WONDERFUL drive from Choteau, MT south to Augusta - I'll never forget those rolling hills and the beautiful skies we had, and of course I was imagining what it all looked like 10,000 years ago. I've researched a bit the best places to view what is left of the Tall Grass Prairies, but what I have been able to find is not very exciting. Still would like to see what is left of them in the Fall, when the grasses are at their maximum height and the sun angle is lower - I've pondered how hard it must be to photograph them, but I would like to try!
I mentioned to someone else the work of Alexis Bonogofsky, who's a writer and fourth-generation rancher near Billings, and also a wonderful photographer. I always feel like she captures the feel of the various Montana landscapes so perfectly: https://bonogofsky.smugmug.com
I love that area anywhere around Choteau. It's got so much ... everything.
Have you looked at the American Prairie Reserve? I don't know if that qualifies for what you're looking for. It's a publicly-accessible private endeavor (and politically tense within the state and especially surrounding cattle ranches) to restore prairie and bison since grasslands ecosystems are some of the most endangered in the world. I've stayed in their huts a couple times now and am going back in late summer. https://americanprairie.org
Any recommendations on specific huts? This place looks FANTASTIC!
I’ve stayed in the Founders Hut (I think it is) a couple of times. This year we got a yurt. I got an email last week that a few of their smaller huts by the campgrounds have lots of openings.
My only advice would be to take warnings about the roads seriously (when they say it turns into deep, sticky gumbo in the rain it’s not an exaggeration) and I have found July to be so excessively hot it was kind of miserable. September or end of August seem to be good times! The one year I tried to go in June they were flooded but I’d like to try again sometime.
It’s really beautiful!
Thanks, and I was thinking of September to see the colors change and no skeeters :-).
Fantastic -- THANKS SO MUCH. Both for the work of Alexis, and for the info on the American Prairie Reserve. Both of those are new to me, and look fantastic. Appreciate it! 🙏😀
My pleasure!
I love how your work is taking shape and cannot wait to read the first chapter--hooray! Those images--I so often try to imagine the landscape as it would have been before monocultures, settlement, so many centuries of owning. I want to ramble those hills so much, and am so happy to have found them filling my mind this morning as I read. Just gorgeous. 💜
Thank you, Freya! Those hills are far more beautiful than I can bring to life through photos. I can very much picture you rambling among them!
The Highwood Mountains helped keep me sane (as sane as I was, at least) when I lived in GF for a while. Wondrous views from the heights to the plains. Wildflowers.
As for the origin of the idea of privarte property (and the idea of all other forms of dominion), I was browsing through Vine Deloria, Jr.'s book God is Red the other day and it appears (I need to read more) that he believes that "astronauts" must have touched down in the Middle East and introduced concepts like partriarchy, monotheism, etc. He calls the people who emerged from that "hybrid" as opposed to indigenous.
There is not, needless to say, much evidence for that theory. But I find it [weirdly and unbelievaby] appealing (or maybe comforting is a better word?) because, otherwise, what could have motivated the ungoverned, untaxed indigenous folks of the Fertile Crescent (or anywhere else that proto-states and eventually states arose) to accept dominion? J Scott's work (Against the Grain) shows how the idea of the state failed multiple times before it stuck (which doesn't support Deloria, Jr's astronauts), but Scott doesn't get into why. Gary Snyder connects it with the discovery of writing (at least in China). You have to be able to keep records to charge taxes.
Perhaps its irrelevant. All those "No Trespassing" signs are posted and we have to figure out how to evolve from where we are (Henry George beat me to this conclusion) and go forward if we can.
I love that area so much. It's bizarre to me how much it feels like home even though I've never lived there.
I have not yet read Deloria's book (I know I need to!) and have never heard that excerpt from it. That's very interesting. And I totally get the comfort from it. I felt something similar reading "Columbus and Other Cannibals" because when you think about all of this too much it feels so inexplicable that some kind of possession or virus feels like the only logical explanation.
I feel like Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" built a lot on Scott's work (and I guess Polanyi's now that I've finally read it) to start getting into how some societies saw hierarchical structures clearly and intentionally rejected them. I don't know if Wengrow will continue that work. They had planned 3 books on this subject I think, and I'm hoping he'll go further into that question.
I also just started reading "The Prehistory of Private Property," by Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, which is in general on the same subject. Dismantling the idea that inequality is an inevitable state, or that pure free market capitalism provides the most freedom.
We do indeed -- thank you, Henry George -- need to figure out where to go, but honestly it feels worthwhile to try to untangle how we got here. So we don't end up perpetuating or recreating the same problems.
Maybe it's just aliens all the way down!
If I were going to move to a small out-of-the way town in MT, I would consider Fort Benton.
If its not aliens. you have to deal with really difficult ideas - evil, original sin, the will to power - that I confess I prefer to ignore. Papa Jung would laugh at the idea of ignoring the shadow, and rightly so, but one has to make peace with the world somehow.
Have you come across Martin Shaw's book Smokehole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass? A lot of content in a thin book.
Fort Benton has become pretty popular! A lot of people go there looking for some history. Still a low population, though.
"One has to make peace with the world somehow" -- I suppose we're all grappling with that in one way or another. Sometimes I do find it easier to just think of it as a virus or some kind of evil demon acting through people. More to give myself a break from trying to figure out "why?" than anything else.
I haven't read Smokehole yet. I read Courting the Wild Twin and one other book of his I'm blanking the name of. Lightning Tree maybe? It was one he presented through some audio readings on Soundcloud. He's got a lot of compelling ideas. I have to admit I unsubscribed from his Substack within a few months of it launching because it became very Christianity-focused (he was getting re-baptized), and, you know, I'm glad for him that it serves him but it opened up a whole lot of other issues and questions for me around how you can reinvigorate myths that were often quashed by Christian missions while also promoting Christianity while also not facing what institutional religions have done to people and the planet. Not that you *can't,* it's just not an area I have time to spend on, especially as someone not really interested in returning to her Christian upbringing. But I always liked what he's done for mythologies and their role in humans' relationship with the planet.
yes yes I too think about private property all the time. I often like to remind fellow white people "we are all living on stolen land." Private property is a legacy of violence and theft point blank. Always loved that part from Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land -
"Well, as I was walking, I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing"
But on the other side it didn't say nothing
That side was made for you and me!"
I've never been to Montana so love these glimpses into a terrain so unfamiliar.
It's amazing how often that bit about the "No Trespassing" sign is left out of that song when people quote it. But it was the whole point! It was interesting when Lady Gaga sang it at the Super Bowl because so many people picked up on the subversion and protest in it while many others just thought it was about patriotism.
I'm glad you like the photos! It's kind of hard to grasp the vastness of that space through an iPhone. One of the photographers who I think does this incredibly well is Alexis Bonogofsky, who's also a writer and rancher who lives near Billings: https://bonogofsky.smugmug.com/East-of-Billings
wow, I don't watch the super bowl and missed out hearing about that saga.... and thanks for the link to Bonogofsky's work. I will check it out.
I don't follow sports at all, can't remember how I ended up seeing that! I think I might have still been on Twitter then. Random pop culture!
Beautiful photos! I can feel what you felt “on the east side”! There is a freedom to that side of the divide that no one can explain if you were fortunate to grow up there! And meadowlarks! ❤️❤️
I bet you can! Being there by myself actually started to worry me a bit because it felt even more like home than Whitefish does, even though I've never lived there. And so, so much, the meadowlarks. Why do I never hear them anywhere in the northern Flathead?
I have never seen one up here. Maybe Polson/Arlee area. I think they like the wide open spaces. Birds have changed so much even out here, we used to see Killdeer and have not seen them for years. Too many people with animals who chase them maybe, or climate change or…….gosh everything changes! Sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad, but the feeling I get when I go east of the mountains never changes! LOL! ❤️❤️
It does feel like things stay more even-keeled out there!
I heard a lot of meadowlarks down toward Perma in April, and on the Bison Range. But never up here. It's so odd, I always think Whitefish should have a huge variety of birds but it doesn't seem to. I guess I just expect it because of all the trees. I mentioned it to someone and she said maybe it's because we have eagles. I don't know, though, there are plenty of magpies and robins and red-winged blackbirds! Just doesn't seem like much else. I did hear a house finch yesterday, and of course have hummingbirds by the house. 🥰
Often when I read On the Commons I remember an author I fell in love with and always by the end of your enchanting writing I forget about him. Verlyn Klinkenborg introduced me to an image of Montana and particularly Big Hole country. It seems, for the both of you, Montana has a hold on you. Best wishes for the book.
That is such a compliment and weirdly (for someone born and raised here and raised by very literary parents), I have not heard of Klinkenborg so I'm going to have to look him up! Big Hole country is pretty awesome.
He is a product of the Iowa writing project and Yale. My sense is he is able to write vividly about stuff he would never do (like ranch). Lots of beautiful sentences like Cormac but not so dark. I think "The Rural Life", "Making Hay" and "The Last Fine Time" were all examples of vivid, exceptional writing. I learned about all sorts of language of rural stuff from him.
That is lovely. And it's nice to have someone like Cormac but not as dark! Have you read Ivan Doig? A lot of his books fall kind of flat for me, especially the fiction, but his "This House of Sky" about growing up near White Sulphur Springs the son of an itinerant ranch hand (kind of) visually and viscerally sticks with me.
I have not but maybe one for the TBR!
I met a guy last night who is working through the process of legally deeding his house and land back to a local tribe in Virginia, both as "the right thing to do," and as "a great big 'fuck you' to Albemarle County." He hopes it will be a model that others can follow.
I have in mind a story where all the consumer-culture types have gone to space, and only the natives and the Amish are left down here.
I love hearing stories like this. It's something my husband and i talk about in regards to the small bit of property he's set to inherit once his mother passes. We're in western WA with two prominent tribes just within a few miles. My dream is for the state to purchase it from us (since we could really use the money), and then deed it back to the tribe. I mean it was theirs to begin with. This story about a OR professor is similar, though we really need federal reparations at this point. A few gifts here and there from individuals aren't going to cut it unless as you say other follow suit. https://www.utelandtrust.org/lands-restored
Thank you for sharing that story, I hadn't seen it before. The "how?" is something I think about a lot. A friend of mine who lives in Hawai'i has been working with the same self-question. I didn't inherit any land that was given to my family, but I still benefited from it in a lot of ways, I think. Reparations are really necessary, on so many levels. (This is why the 5% of newsletter revenue I give away each quarter is to Indigenous-led organizations in Montana.)
I love hearing that! It's so rare, but not unheard of. I just listened to reporting on a whole island being sold in Canada that a local couple bought and then gave to the local First Nations, who'd had to create a land trust to receive it. The whole story was pretty interesting because it involved a lot of moving parts and exposed a lot of how the federal government (in Canada in this case) makes it hard for First Nations to be given land back.
That story makes me think of a Douglas Adams book. :)
Which one?
Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I think? The one where the Golgafrinchans put all their middle management on a spaceship and sent them off-planet. I have one of those big Adams volumes with all the books and they get muddled in my head!
I sometimes enjoy the thought of the reprehensible being barbecued in any one of the nine circles of hades. And I am positive anyone with a five-wire fence will spend eternity tangled and toasting in miles of red-hot barbed wire. Is that too harsh?? 👺
When I read some of the ways that the nobility talked about the peasants they were throwing off the land and out of their homes in England's enclosures of the commons, and then of course how those same attitudes and practices spread around the world, it's hard to say that's too harsh. Even if I don't believe in hell, I've never claimed to be a Buddhist! One can aim for compassion and fail all the time ... 🫣
can't help but think of this track: https://youtu.be/pqg1PgEPLZU
"The mass trespass of Kinder Scout was a trespass protest at Kinder Scout in the Peak District, Derbyshire, England, on 24 April 1932. The protest sought to highlight that walkers were denied access to areas of open countryside which had been fenced off by wealthy landowners who forbade public access"
The Kinder Scout trespass was, I feel, a real watershed! The Right to Roam eventually came out of that because (I think) it kept alive the knowledge that these paths belonged to everyone, and had been taken. It's so important to remember that! Hard to defend rights when almost everyone has forgotten they existed. Thanks for the song! I hadn't heard that one before.
Crucial, what you are up to here. Much success.
Thank you! Overall, as you've pointed out in your messages, this is a group effort, even if we're still finding one another ...