This article is a follow-up to a previous one written by Trevor Swoverland, with the link to that first article in the first paragraph below. It provides an anecdotal experience of home with a consideration of the tendency to equate urbanization and success in the overculture.

In a recent piece (Colonized Colonizers: The Consequences of Alienation from People, Culture, and Land) I used forced urbanization during the early days of the growth of the industrial revolution as an example of colonization that was inflicted on rural populations in Europe, and the conversation went on to suggest that increasing urbanization and alienation of rural people from the land against their will continues to provide an example of the agenda many colonizers have. Additional thoughts ensued thereafter regarding the connection of place to identify, and how that is woven into the development of tribal and community relationships. If spiritual damage is done forcing people to leave the lands to which they’ve been rooted, it stands to reason that at least part of that is inflicted by the severing of interdependent relationships common in small rural communities. The relationship of this idea to the reconstitution of heathen tribal relationships may be obvious to some, but a story may provide a good illustration.

I was very close to my paternal grandparents. I spent several years in childhood living between several dairy farms outside of a very small farming village settled by German immigrants a hundred years before. My grandparents lived in this village, where they ran the local tavern and my grandfather ran heavy equipment doing road construction, as well as helping out on various local dairy farms. The last ten years of his life the two of them lived in a small home next door to the tavern. My grandfather died in 1995, and my grandmother moved a few miles away to a town down the road for a year before she passed in 2006. An area family had bought the house from her. He recently died and his sons are selling that home now, and I remembered a couple of fixtures my grandfather had made that I was hoping to get for my own house. They were happy to oblige and so I went back home last weekend to take them off of the house.

While I was there taking down the fixtures, a man came across the street. I immediately knew who he was. I remembered him from my childhood and adolescence. Back then he was a younger adult who lived with his parents in the home across the road from my grandparents. He was always very kind, and when I moved away from home and relocated 160 miles away, he often went over to shovel snow or mow the lawn for my grandmother and to do other odd jobs she had trouble taking care of on her own but which needed more frequent doing than we could provide for at the time. He recognized me immediately and was happy to have a chance to get re-acquainted. We talked about old times in this little piece of heaven, back in the 1980s and 1990s when I was growing up there. We talked about things he is doing now and about my family and his, and we had a good time just shooting the breeze. Eventually, he had to keep walking, as the village brush pile was due to be burned and he was one of the guys responsible for ensuring it was done safely. We said our goodbyes and exchanged well-wishes, and both talked about hoping to see one another again before another 20 years had passed.

As I watched him walk down the road past the tavern my grandfather had built and run and around the shop in which my grandfather had taught me to make sauerkraut and fillet bluegills, I was struck by the way things had simultaneously changed so dramatically in the world since I was younger and how simple things in this rural community rooted in the land and built upon deep interpersonal and interfamily connections had stayed very much the same. This man had been a reliable member of that community, particularly to the elderly people who lived near him, for decades. He had diligently helped out the man who bought the house from my grandmother, and as that man’s sons were selling the home again he was helping them prepare it for sale. Whenever I return home I encounter people who remain in that place, rooted, content, and valued for their contributions to the people around them.

I cannot think of many more pertinent or better examples of tribal relationships, even if the people involved in them wouldn’t characterize them as such.

Yet these communities are precisely the sorts of places that are shrinking and they face enormous economic pressures that endanger them more each passing year. When I grew up in this place there were a dozen small family dairy farms between the highway and our house; there are now two, the others having converted to cereal crops or beef cattle because the small-scale and high-quality family dairy farm has been nearly driven to extinction by corporate factory farms. The result has been marked urbanization as people leave lands and small farming villages their people have inhabited since they arrived from Europe in many cases; a consequence has been the destruction of interdependent relationships that span generations and would be much more recognizable to pre-conversion tribal peoples than would be the modern phenomenon of moving away from home and across states as a norm. This shift has also created a different paradigm for many people who grew up in such places.

Growing up in a rural community one often feels that it is a foregone conclusion that people from small rural communities are divided into a couple of groups: those who aren’t successful and “never move away from home,” and those who are successful and “leave home and never come back.” A strong connection to roots – to place and people – is seen as an impediment if it results in a failure to leave home. The pursuit of greater financial opportunity is taken for granted as inherently worth sacrificing the interdependence with people and land that is virtually automatic in these communities. Certainly at times doing so is necessary for survival, but this position as a baseline is antithetical to a worldview in which people are rooted to place, people, and purpose. It is a colonized reconfiguration of what humans have, for most of our existence, felt matters in life and would very likely be alien to most pre-conversion populations. There are consequences for this shift in perspective and amongst them are the elder care crisis; agricultural market shifts that prioritize quarterly earnings for large corporate ag companies ahead of quality and local food autonomy; and what we are most interested in here: yet another example of the overculture’s effort to reduce autonomy, sufficiency, and therefore dependence on large corporations.

The recent piece noted at the beginning of this article described colonization as having affected immigrants from Europe by forcing many of them here against their will and causing alienation from the land and from local community sufficiency. That process also led to an overculture that encourages the erosion of rural communities through the unraveling of networks of relational interdependence generations in the making. Whether one lives in a large metropolitan area or a far-flung rural agricultural or wilderness community, it is important to be cognizant of the fact that rebuilding tribal connections requires a level of human interdependence that must be intentionally created and will not simply waft into our efforts from the culture around us.