I’d like to start this post by officially acknowledging that the land that my homestead occupies is the ancestral and contemporary territories of the Myaamia, Shawnee, Kaskaskia, Hopewell Culture, Adena Culture, and Ofo Peoples. (Source: https://native-land.ca/)
Whether I mean for it to be or not, my homestead is an act of resistance. What do I mean by resistance? I recently finished reading Living Resistance by Kaitlin B Curtice where the author lays out a framework for finding wholeness in life through living resistance - to fight against oppression and colonialism. This framework is made up of four realms - personal, communal, ancestral and integral. In the book, Kaitlin gives everyday ways to practice living resistance in each realm. The theme of the book is to ask questions of facts and history and of ourselves and our truths.
Oppression & Colonialism in Homesteading
I’d be doing Kaitlin’s writing a disservice if I didn’t mention that homesteading has a deep history of oppression and colonialism. Like any other conversation in America about home ownership and land, we must recognize how we came to be proprietors of land and who we have stolen it from. Homesteading is historically celebratory of white farmers who, against all odds, made a home off the land. Creating something out of nothing. It’s a sentiment that resonates with me and one of the many ways that I find pride in living a homesteading lifestyle. Honoring our ancestors for cultivating “open” lands is ignoring and perpetuating the oppression of the indigenous people who came before us. The lands were, in fact, not open or empty, but occupied and intentionally cultivated by indigenous people. Even the word homesteading is a term born of colonialism - first appearing as The Homestead Act of the 1800s that gave European settlers land (under the conditions of creating pasture, garden and a house on said land) and worked directly with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that “legally” displaced indigenous people. This is the history of the land that I occupy today.
My ancestors (White European people) claimed this land as their own, pilfered skills learned from the indigenous people and stamped their own names on them while simultaneously discarding indigenous culture and displacing its people. I have been questioning the term homesteading for a while now but I didn’t think to look at the history of it, out of ignorance, until reading Living Resistance. In asking these questions I came across this dissertation by Jessy Lee Saas that I recommend you explore (I read the abstract and introduction as it’s nearly 150 pages, but have it bookmarked to continue reading).
The grassroots Land Back movement has brought the effects of the displacement and attempted erasure of Indigenous people to mainstream media attention. This article on Civil Eats highlights how losing over 99% of their ancestral lands has resulted in extremely high rates of food insecurity due loss of food pathways to laws regulating land and water, hunting, fishing and foraging, and indigenous land management practices. The article describes rematriation, a process of reclaiming and restoring relationships with the land and other “more-than-human” ancestors (plants, animals, spirits, etc.) as part of the Land Back movement. This movement, more than land, is about food sovereignty - getting back the foods and food practices of ancestors. It involves much more than the food or land itself, but the rebuilding of cultural and spiritual pathways to connect with our planet and nourishment for ourselves and our communities. Our food system as we know and interact with it today was created by colonialism. Rebuilding the lost and forgotten history of our lands through food, food access, and ancestral food practices as demonstrated and championed by the Land Back movement is resistance (Civil Eats).
This sounds a lot like what we think of as homesteading, doesn’t it?
Homesteading as a Mindset
I came across this blog in my research and the author sums up their meaning of homesteading in a way that really resonates with me:
“And while I do teach homesteading skills so we can reclaim a handmade life back from the industries that we willingly gave it away to, I also teach that the real richness, that we’re still missing even if you have all the sustainability pieces in place, is that the daily actions of a homesteading life are deeply connective rituals that act as an ongoing rites of passage, to keep us connected with the Earth, the spirit world and our ancestors.”
It’s time that we question our own ancestors instead of heralding them for the challenges they faced in making a life off the land. We should turn instead to the ancestors of Indigenous people, the people from whom our ancestors stole this land. I can only speak for myself, but defining homesteading as “a mindset that creates a life that connects you daily to the Earth and your ancestors” is a sentiment that I’ve shared publicly many times before and is in alignment with how Indigenous people are reclaiming their food pathways through food sovereignty. It’s not a coincidence.
If this isn’t your first introduction to me, you’ll be familiar with my distaste for the word homestead. So why do I keep using it? Honestly, it is a decision that I waffle with daily. I fear that keeping it as part of my “identity” is perpetuating this history of oppression and elitist colonialism. I fear that it’s an invitation to be misunderstood. On the other hand, I feel that I can reach people using this word and term in ignorance, like I did for some time, and facilitate conversation on this topic. Maybe it’s naive but I keep using it because I believe I’m not alone in feeling turned off by the history and simultaneously shut out by the modern trad wife commentary, ultra-conservative, religiously motivated homestead movement. I believe that homesteading does not MEAN that you share those ideologies, but rather it attracts many who also happen to fall into those categories or those living in ignorance (again, as I once was). But it also attracts people like me and I think I’d be doing the whole modern homesteading movement a great disservice by shutting out my own voice, regardless that it most often feels like an echo bouncing off an empty cavern. This is resistance. I’m holding space for myself and others like me to belong where mainstream culture has decided we do not.
Living Resistance
I’ve held space for resistance in my life for as long as I can remember. In my twenties I thought of my younger self as soft, nice, and a pushover, not fully understanding my own identity. I experienced some shifts in understanding my identity in my late twenties when I was referred to as intimidating. My whole life I heard people refer to me as “the nice girl”. I always struggled with that, but I didn’t fully understand it - I thought that if others thought of me that way, that must be how I am. This created a pushover. I wasn’t a pushover. I am not a pushover. Coming into my own identity in my late twenties and early thirties, a journey that I’m still on and is seemingly neverending (in a good way), has made me realize that I was the badass resistor I longed to be all along. I have resisted the patriarchy since middle school, when I refused to be separated from the boys in gym class where I was either asked to watch them play football or asked to play a “safer” sport; when I wrote to the editor of a dictionary about the inherent sexism in their definition for female, especially when you compared it to how they defined male. I have resisted eating animals, factory farming and animal cruelty since I was 13 by adopting a vegetarian and now vegan diet. I have resisted hate and judgment of friends and strangers by using my voice to stand up for them. I have resisted capitalism in small ways by voting with my dollar, growing my own food, making my own products and bartering with friends.
I used to resent this resistance. It’s not easy to be the voice going upstream, against the current. It takes energy and perseverance. I used to see it as a trait that I adopted out of survival, not something innate like I now believe it to be. It’s ongoing - there is resistance in everything we do and my views of it are constantly changing. I am now seeing resistance as my commitment to lifelong learning, or unlearning, as is the case with my ancestors’ history on this land. I highly recommend giving Kaitlin’s book, Living Resistance, a read and start (or continue) to explore the ways you can practice living resistance. You’re here for gardening and homesteading content and if you keep reading you will find that you are already practicing a lot of resistance in how you cultivate a homegrown life.
My Food Tells the Story of Resistance
Kaitlin’s book, Living Resistance, teaches us that stories are an act of resistance. Food tells a story in many ways. What story do you want your food to tell? The story of commodifying foods and perpetuating food insecurity, heart disease and obesity through overconsumption of convenience foods? Or the story of a homegrown tomato from an heirloom seed that you can trace back generation after generation? The story that you offer gratitude for when you plant it, when the sprout first appears, when you transplant it, and when you harvest it?
My food tells the story of resistance.
Eating primarily plants is resistance.
Permaculture is resistance. So much of landscaping and gardening is manipulative of nature but permaculture teaches that nature is our guide and we must work with her, not against her.
Bartering and trading are resistance. They create space for things other than money to have value.
Cooking from scratch is resistance. Choosing to make things from scratch is resisting our culture of convenience.
Growing and cooking and preserving your own food is resistance. We’re finding transparency in our food system by making things ourselves. Resisting big food and big ag helps to shine a light on the acts and control our government has had on us (I highly recommend reading Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel to learn about how government action and globalization has greatly affected foods and food culture across the world). Awakening a consciousness to what has been and continues to be so unconscious for so much of society is resistance.
Foraging is resistance. Check out this reel by @blackforager Alexis says it much better than I ever could and I learned a lot from this post! This article on Civil Eats discusses how fear is used to prevent us from foraging, providing food for ourselves and using natural forms of medicines. It’s hard not to see conspiracy when you look at the food system and see what foods are illegal, what laws have extinguished cultural practices of feeding and healing, and how big food and government have worked together to erase centuries of knowledge all in the name of profit.
Supporting local farmers and shopping at farmers’ markets is resistance. Supporting small, local businesses helps create a resilient food system and is a way to combat big ag and big food.
Growing your own medicine is resistance. I find medicine in herbs and flowers to be an intentional way to approach my health and wellbeing, all while still respecting and using our Western medical system. Prevention is resistance.
Collecting rain water is resistance. Many cities have long banned rain water collection under the guise of safety however it’s really about money. Collecting rain water to use in your garden or yard is resisting the capitalism in our natural elements and a great way to help conserve water and protect the Earth.
Rescuing farm animals is resistance. Creating sanctuary for animals that are often bred for food is countercultural.
Composting your own food scraps is resistance. Creating your own fertile soil out of food scraps is, to me, one of the most poetic acts of resistance we can find around the homestead.
Some other ways that gardens and growing food have historically been used as an act of resistance:
War & Refugee Camps - soldiers in World War One created gardens in the trenches. Growing food as an act of resistance - showing that they are human and refused to fully give into being killing machines. Refugees fighting to find an element of food sovereignty by creating gardens from seeds they’ve saved from their meals or seeds that they have lovingly curated and traveled with as they fled their homes.
HOA Gardens - my work is primarily in HOAs where the company I work for does high-end residential renovations. I love seeing gardens in these communities because they are very rare. Rare because the homeowner is often fined for growing their own food as it’s against the community guidelines.
Guerilla Gardening
Vacant lot gardens - my brother and sister-in-law grow in containers in a vacant lot next to their apartment building and it brings me a lot of joy!
Hell strip gardens - hell strips are the area of grass between sidewalks and roads. Many people have removed the grass and started using this area to grow food and flowers. This area of land is technically property of the city, town or state.
Free planting - inviting a communal aspect to growing food by creating edible landscapes that are accessible to all.
Making what you consume is an act of resistance towards our consumption culture. Fight the illusion of needing to have something as quickly as a few thumb strokes on your screen and instead see if you can make it yourself, find it second hand, or simply go without. There are a lot of examples of this from our own homestead, whether it’s a dryer, dishwasher or microwave that breaks or, right now, our vacuum that only half works. I find it amusing to see how long I can stand going with something half broken, trying to fix it myself, or living without it for a while. We spent two years without a dryer, two years without a dishwasher and are on year 7 without a microwave. We started applying this process to smaller (non-appliance) purchases in 2024, either leaving items in our carts or adding them to a note to come back to. Most of the time we have failed to purchase the item or a substitute all together. It’s a fun challenge, and an act of resistance, that I invite you to try next time you reach for your Amazon app.
A lot of what we do on a homestead can be categorized as an act of independence. Anything that reduces the control that corporate America and our government has over us is an act of resistance (for the record, I’m not anti-government…but I'm not pro-government either). I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post - I’ve put a lot of thought, time researching, and a lot of care into writing and editing this post. It’s a hard subject, one that I’m barely scratching the surface of, and one that is made even more uncomfortable by my ignorance and the role that my ancestors’ played in the displacement and erasure of Indigenous people and culture. I hope this inspires you to check out Kaitlin’s book and read some of the articles I have linked. Please share any related work and your own thoughts on acknowledging the harmful history of homesteading and how we can practice living resistance as homesteaders in the comments.
My Dream for Homesteading
To draw this emotional and thought-provoking post to a close I’d like to end with my dream for homesteading. Kaitlin says that dreaming is resistance, an act that falls into the integral realm where the personal, communal and ancestral realms all come together. As a daily dreamer, I understand how. It’s holding space for hope and change and finding ways to create a role for yourself among that change. This is perhaps my greatest act of resistance because it’s ultimately why I continue using the term homesteading, as a way to make amends for its history and push for it to begin to mean something healing and connective, spiritual and good.
My dream for homesteading is
Contentment over content
Creation over consumption
Teaching over preaching
Listening over ignorance
People over screens
Bartering over money
Conversations over defenses
Spiritual over secular
Creating space over creating capital
Transparency over gatekeeping
Mindset over labels
Connected to the past, living in the present, planning for the future.
What a thought-provoking and beautifully expressed post! You are truly living the maxim, “Be the change you want to change in the world.” Thank you for your wisdom.