TRIBAL MUSINGS
In the spring of 1970, I chanced to arrive at a pueblo commune in the Taos, New Mexico area late in the evening. I was not permitted to enter the buildings, so I slept fitfully on the narrow rear seat of a Jeep owned by a stranger. I shivered as I slept, not so much because it was so cold, but because I had spent all the daylight hours trying to hitchhike out to Colorado in isolated butte country, buffed by a relentless and chilly 40-mph dry gale.
At daybreak I awoke and stepped outside the vehicle to survey my surroundings, squinting through the first pins-and-needle rays of sunlight. Black against the sun stood massive, rambling stucco structures. The size and heft of the pueblo buildings had quite the impact on me. I was thoroughly impressed the freeform design built entirely of free local materials.
That experience, and reading the works of Scott and Helen Nearing and Wendell Berry, greatly influenced my young thoughts, got me thinking about ways of forging an alternative lifestyle out of a suburban Westchester childhood. I began to teach myself how to do things that I had never done before, such as construct wooden buildings, wire and plumb homes, grow food in gardens and in greenhouse environments, butcher animals for meat, generate solar heat passively, cut firewood and heat with wood, dig a pond and a septic system by hand, and so forth. I became possessed with the desire to know how to provide goods and services for myself without spending money, or, that is, much money.
Today, such activity is termed “prepping” and the people who practice such things are called “preppers”, but I was at it before the label was applied. Homesteading was the common term then. The moniker ‘prepper’ carries with it a calling to stockpile weapons and ammunition in preparation for some sort of apocalyptic event that is anticipated as being just over the horizon. Homesteading devotees did not shoulder that heavy load of fear, and a gun and ammunition were an afterthought, something you might possess if you went deer hunting a few days a year.
There was something else, too. When I was at college in the corn lands outside of the Kansas City metropolitan area, I lived in a dormitory at the far northern edge of the campus. Beyond a quarter-mile stand of trees were the remains of the college farm, which had been closed down a decade earlier. I would often wander around among the large farm buildings and wonder why the college gave up feeding itself and stopped teaching young people to work the land and make a living from the soil. When I would go to that college farm, no one would ever come with me. Not a soul was ever there. I had the place to myself the entire time I was at school.
Why these things mattered to me, a kid from upscale suburbia, is beyond me. Somehow, instinctively, these ideas and experiences resonated as nothing else did.
Then 30 years ago, I took my young family to the Shaker Village museum at Canterbury, NH and was staggered by what I saw. Here was a compact village of absolutely beautiful and substantial architecture, filled with exquisite furnishing, all of it built by a small number of residents over ten generations. This town was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was not suburbia, that was certain. And it was not organized like a typical New England small town either.
The people who lived there could have spent an entire life in that place and have three square meals a day, enjoy well heated buildings, don fine and clean clothes, exhibit clean, healthy bodies, and travel by horse-drawn wagon to Concord, and so on. They wanted for nothing, and they produced copious products that they sold into the regional marketplace as far south as Boston.
What really resonated with me was that all the residents could live and work in one place. People could develop very strong ties and live in security and peace in the bosom of a vibrant natural environment. Contrast that, if you will, with what is going on around us today.
So, over the many years, I have developed an interest in living arrangements that do not resemble anything that we’d recognize as the norm today. My searching brought me face to face with the lifestyle model that was the foundation of all humanity and one that has been with us for 200,000 years, but which has been rendered virtually extinct over the past few hundred years.
That model is called the tribe.
In paleo-societies, daily activity was communal. There may have been divisions of labor, but all the members of small tribal clusters had to work together all the time to ensure survival. The Shakers did so, in an updated and rather sophisticated version of a tribal living arrangement. Although they were not related by blood, a good majority of Shaker adherents lived out their entire lives within their self-sufficient communities from Maine to New York to Ohio and south to Kentucky.
Independency, Minnesota, the fictional community central to the plot of my novel, Yellowstone, is my attempt to construct for myself a model of what I think a self-sufficient small communal town could look like and function like in an uncertain future. It has an economy, a somewhat diverse one based on local resources. So that’s at the core of its success. It has a reason for being, in that it is conjured up purposely to be a showcase for sustainable living, one that is intended to be exported around the world so others may follow suit and build similar sustainable self-sufficient communities of their own.
Independency is designed along Shaker lines to be beautiful to behold, to be highly functional, and to be permanent. Therefore it is an attractive place to be, one that its citizens wish to care for in the present and long into the future. It is also designed to operate fully should national energy, transportation, and communications go down temporarily or for good. The way I envisioned it, the community could operate well without any electrical and fossil fuel inputs from outside suppliers, if necessary.
Most importantly, the fictional Minnesota commune is meant to free the citizenry from dependency on the one-size-fits-all global capitalistic economic mono-system. Because the citizens do not have to rely on labor and capital a world away for necessities and services and are not subject to the whims and violent swings of the marketplace, they are independent in a manner that employees within the mass global mono-culture can’t begin to grasp.
In short, fictitious Independency, Minnestoa is meant to be a liberating force for the individual. Even its workday is designed altogether differently from that of our present-day world. I borrow from Scott Nearing’s approach to a daily schedule, whereby a third of the waking day is allotted to physical or mundane but necessary work, a third to creative endeavor, and a third to family and social life. There is even a period of rest and quiet built in after lunch.
If someone were to knock at my door with $10 million in hand, I might just go out and found an entire town based on the thoughts above. The idea would be to put such a community in place and then underwrite a second and a third and…you get the picture.
