It’s a minor footnote, but the article specifically says that the Homestead Acts were for white people, twice, which didn’t sound right and made me curious enough to look it up. The 1862 Homestead Act, passed during the Civil War, made anyone 21 and older eligible, including freed slaves after the Fourteenth Amendment. Here’s an article about African American homesteaders:
I really enjoyed reading this article. But ... as the owner of a sprinter van, this sentence leaped out at me:
>Frances McDormand plays the fictional nomad Fern, whom the story follows over the course of about a year of wandering around the American West in a sprinter van sometime after the death of her husband.
Fern does not drive a Sprinter.
Call me picky. Call me a pedantic asshole. It's OK.
> The Metropolitan Police reported on this vehicle in 1972 via a Scotland Yard spokesman that "Ford Transits are used in 95 per cent of bank raids. With the performance of a car, and space for 1.75 tonnes of loot, the Transit is proving to be the perfect getaway vehicle", describing it as "Britain's most wanted van".[1]
an informative read, with personal connection, spanning a large economic and societal time, contrasting a recent Oscar winning movie to myths of the Pioneers and conservative politics. Thank you for posting
Seconded. I liked that there's no romanticizing or villifying of the nomadic lifestyle, just tells it as is - it's compromises, lack of options, need to feel free, allure of the nature and everything in between.
Good info on the homestead act and its actual effects too.
The only benefit of not having money is that it makes all other horrible life conditions and outcomes seem somewhat less horrible comparatively. It dulls the pain and stress receptors.
no idea why you're being downvoted. not having money is not only shit because it robs you of all agency, but it's also the most expensive form of existence. Being forced to spend $10 on something later because you can't afford spending $5 on it _today_ is a classic example but it comes in other shapes too such as having to say YES to anything -even it's dangerous or a scam- because it's still better than "no options", or being judged (by usually those who have more) for being "picky".
> The only benefit of not having money is that it makes all other horrible life conditions and outcomes seem somewhat less horrible comparatively. It dulls the pain and stress receptors.
^^ so what they're saying is that if you're being diagnosed with a terminal disease you might be so far into depression and suicidal ideation[1] that it literally doesn't matter any more because you have no power (money) to solve it. Think about your own privilege that causes you to not comprehend what is being said before you downvote something you can't empathize with.
It does make you perceive life as less precious because the constant struggle creates a negative association with everything. Suicidal ideation seems to be a natural progression for long-term poverty.
The observation about falling for scams is spot-on. Nowadays you don't even have to be very poor to find yourself in this situation. Opportunities are so rare that you cannot pass up any opportunity at all, if there is even 10% chance that it's not a scam, then it could be the best opportunity of your life... I'm not even talking about lottery, getting a decent paid job can feel like a lottery when you don't have any money.
This is quite poignant. It reminds me of my own time in middle school, which also happened during the recession of the early 90s, when the endless optimism and expansionism of the 80s, with the Berlin Wall coming down and boundless real estate gains and an expanding economy, finally came to an end. There was the oil price shock, the fall of the Soviet Union, and of course my most notable memory of being briefly trapped in a house while helping my dad on a contract job doing a second floor addition by the expanding wave of the LA Riots. 63 people killed and the National Guard marching through Los Angeles.
And I didn't know it until I read Into the Wild a few years later when I went to college, but 1992 was the same year Chris McCandless died, with great debates in all outdoor communities on whether he was an idiot or a hero. He stayed for a while in Slab City out in the Imperial Valley, with many residents living permanently in RVs. That place is amazingly still there, maybe an even better expression of whatever is left of the myth of the American frontier, public land owned by the State of California, donated by the Marine Corps, with people allowed to just live there as long as they want, with no real addresses or government-provided services and sometimes not even real legal identities.
The author mentions various denials in his review, ironically, in my view, missing the pivotal case of denial that forms the conceptual warhead of the piece. Look at Fern. Why Fern? Why her, as the key nomad, rather than anyone else? The author's explanation is trite and contradicts points he highlights earlier in the piece:
>Fern, like the protagonists of many frontier stories, is called to represent nothing short of the national project itself — its triumph and, in the case of this film, its decline. These narratives have always been de-politicized, their origins in genocide rubbed clean, their most reactionary elements tucked away. We are asked to empathize with the pioneer as a universal American subject in a way we are not asked to empathize with stories about more banal forms of poverty, or homelessness, or the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land. Frontier stories are like the public lands the film relishes — pretty, but rooted in a violence that their prettiness only obscures.
but see:
>Nomadland is the highest-profile cultural engagement with the nomad phenomenon to date
and
>Chloé Zhao, a Beijing-born director whose previous film was about a struggling Lakota rodeo star, is fond of making films from a far outsider’s perspective.
The suggestion that the film is yet-another misbegotten paean to the American Dream falls flat in light of its creator and its context. Nor does the bleak outlook of the protagonist seem emblematic of the ideology of capitalism. But alluding to the horrors of the past is a lot easier than original thinking.
Fern is a consciously chosen protagonist. Her motivation for nomadism is not an inessential part of the narrative. It is revealed in her reaction to her in-laws' trivializing and romanticizing her situation. But it is also revealed in her refusal to settle down.
If you never find a new home, it can't replace your old one. As long as Fern still lives in the van, home will always be in Empire, Nevada. That's the infrasonic melancholy resonating through every scene.
Fern, the metonymic American, is in denial that Empire is gone. End scene.
> After some months spent living in a shack in town, the Ingalls family claimed a plot of land through the Homestead Act, one of the country’s earliest large-scale social welfare programs, which promised free land to white settlers willing to cultivate it. After five years, if a family could “prove up,” showing they had built a profitable farm, they could keep it.
Centuries ago, home ownership was readily obtainable for anyone willing to endure the hardship of settling “the new world”. Case in point, the early Australian settlers essentially paid nothing for enormous swathes of farm land [1]:
> From about 1815 Sydney began to grow rapidly as free settlers arrived from Britain and Ireland and new lands were opened up for farming. Despite the long and arduous sea voyage, settlers were attracted by the prospect of making a new life on virtually free land. Many settlers occupied land without authority; they were known as squatters and became the basis of a powerful landowning class.
In light of today’s hot housing market, and the increasingly burdensome restrictions on immigration, it’s difficult to fathom how easy it used to be to change your lot in life with just some gumption.
At some point in antiquity, it was feasible for human adults to settle “unsettled” land. It is a boring and simple fact that this is no longer possible. TFA used an example from the 1800s, so I stuck with that era. This is getting off topic.
There's hell lot of virtually free land in the world today. A lot of it is very habitable and has decent climate, or has moderate issues easily solvable with today's technology (say air conditioning for hot and humid climates). It never went away. It's just that money one can make from just a piece of land is not enough anymore: these people in the XIX century went after some arable land for family farms, but it just doesn't work today: food is too cheap to make a living growing it on a small scale. Agricultural era is gone. Industrial and post-industrial society requires people to live in cities and there is no free land in cities as living in them is a competition by definition.
Free land never went away. Demand for it did.
Just equally, there is plenty of virtually free or very cheap homes in the U.S., many of them are in good condition (or at least, plots of land to build oneself, do get dirt cheap). It's just this happens in places with no jobs - but people in XIX century were not looking for jobs.
That's also the reason why free and open-for-all immigration was banned in 1930s: that was a turning point when people stopped coming for "20 acres and a mule" (while these were still plentiful), but wanted industrial jobs, and thus homes in the cities, and these were a scarce resource.
there are places where an individual can hide and gradually go insane alone. But I don't know where today one could go and bring their whole family/tribe/clan and settle down.
No matter how dry or hostile the area, the moment you're moving from surviving to thriving (which you often will if you're in a pack) the locals or the government will find ways to remove you. And it would be even worse if you don't hold a passport from that country.
Humans are pack animals so the "no more demand" argument perhaps isn't too strong.
When I lived in France in July/August the pigs regularly picked up Roma[1] traveling through from Spain. They usually got by washing windows at traffic lights. They drove them 20-30 km away into a forest where they set them free and let them walk home. I walked my dogs in the Parc de la Valmasque where they were frequently set lose among other places (even further away). Many times I watched it unfold in my parked car and the pigs abusing some person with a baton or simply shouting and threatening them. When the pigs were gone I offered them a drive back to Cannes or Nice. Sometimes kids with age 10 or 12 literally alone not knowing where tf they were or how they can get back (and then having to trust as stranger to offer a ride in their car to drive them back).
It's not that "there simply is no demand for it". But we no longer see it when the system commits these crimes[2]. It's expected normal behavior the moment you monopolize violence by giving it to one group over another.
It has nothing to do with a price of land. Surely you must be a citizen and abide by the laws (and yes, i am certain that not having a particular place of residence must be a crime, and it is in many countries).
It's about price of land. It's easy to buy cheap land, just not in places where anyone wants or can afford living in.
Don’t cherry pick your favorite bits of the past. America used genocide and racial persecution to create living space. Remember when the Germans tried that using lebensraum as justification? We could have it again too if you just decide to go wipe out a less advanced race somewhere in the world and give their land to your people. It solves both your homeless problem and your need to squat on national resources at the same time.
But if you want people to be able to settle on truly unsettled land, I hear Mars is opening up soon.
These days anywhere desireable to live, and likely all known available farm land, is already owned by someone or some company.
Vagabonding isn’t what it used to be, insofar as there is seemingly not even the remotest chance in modernity of backdooring your way into zero cost homesteading. Societal advancement has come at the cost of those opportunities which have more or less vanished.
We’ve never homesteaded truly unoccupied land by some definitions of “unoccupied”. Depending on how far back we want to take the social justice, even Neanderthals drove out earlier pre-humans from their rightful homes, however sporadically inhabited and/or poorly defended they might’ve been.
Regardless, I think it’s a horrible critique of the miserably dystopic political climate we’re in today that such plain statements about factual reality can’t even be made without someone feeling it necessary to call attention to a more recent historical example of the powerful driving out the powerless — a dynamic which has been with humans and every other creature on this planet since time immemorial.
Nomadism in antiquity had at least some chance of resulting in zero cost homesteading for those brave people willing to endanger their own lives to engage in it. It was more a reflection on the hidden plight of modernity — not being able to afford a home, despite our forefathers being able to just homestead at zero up front cost mere centuries ago — than a projection of jealousy or some other contrivance.
The comment was not factually correct since it asserted the land was unowned. It also asserted that the homesteading was zero cost. In factual reality, the land was already owned and the homesteading of that land was paid for by genocide.
There is a long history of invaders getting stuff for "zero cost", it still happens today in parts of the world more ruled by violence and law. Is this what you are nostalgic for?
Edit: Also, homesteading went on up to about 40 years ago.
What Neanderthals did to Homo Erectus, and what early indigenous Homo Sapien tribes did to Neanderthals; later indigenous tribes did to earlier indigenous tribes; and so on and so forth.
At no point was the land homesteaded — by indigenous tribes or otherwise — ever fully unoccupied prior, by some definition of “unoccupied”. Intelligent lifeforms had to be driven from their rightful homes by “invaders”, categorically.
Nomads in antiquity — oweing to the lack of societal advancement — could settle air quotes “unoccupied” land. This is no longer possible in the modern, advanced world where every square inch of earth is claimed by a reasonably well-organized group of (highly violent) people, at minimum. Which means nomadism in today’s world isn’t what it once was. Nomadism in antiquity might even be viewed as outright nation building; after all, every nation has to start somewhere. But nomadism in modernity — and I say this as someone with a reasonable level of experience backpacking in various countries — is really just glorified homelessness, and I think that’s a point worth making.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-homesteaders-i...
Though of course the results were far from equal. Apparently it was much abused.