From the Homestead Act to YouTube: Settler Colonial Continuities of the Homesteading Movement

Contemplating the joy of caring for goats after a YouTube video recommendation, I was led down a rabbit hole of “how to homestead” videos that ranged widely from purchasing chickens to renting land for grazing. Homesteading, however, is not limited to YouTube videos, but is something of a growing movement. An article from The Atlantic titled “The Strange Allure of Pioneer Living” describes that homesteading attracts a surprisingly wide swath of people, and suggests that one common denominator of why this lifestyle “resonates among progressives and Tea Partiers alike” is a shared “mistrust in the Man.”¹ Yet in watching these videos, one quickly notices some commonalities between the channels: the makers of the videos were all white, mostly male, and often have inherited the land that became their homestead. The viewer can easily see how historical power structures deeply influence who can homestead today. Most aspects of homesteading in its current form, like private land ownership and settler colonialism, would clearly seem incompatible with social ecology. But at the same time, aspects of the movement’s critique of existing society potentially overlap with that of social ecology. This short essay examines the historical origins of homesteading in settler colonialism and the political ideas of Thomas Jefferson,  how these power structures manifest themselves in the movement today, and how communalists might engage with this movement today.  

Historical Background

Homesteading is the act of subsistence farming and small production of home goods by settlers. The British settler outposts that eventually became the U.S. were founded, among other motivations, on European desire for land. Given this settler colonial legacy it is no surprise that the contemporary homesteading demographic is primarily white and from land-owning families.² Abraham Lincoln signed the first of the Homestead Acts in 1862, which in theory allowed for almost anyone to get 160 acres of land in the West. After applying, maintaining the land for five years, and then securing the deed, the homesteader owned the land. It was a good deal for white European settlers who desired their own land, and was also open to freed slaves. The act was contentiously tied to earlier debates around the westward expansion of slavery, with Republicans and northerners demanding “free soil” allotted to individual farmers and Southern Democrats seeking to expand the slave plantation economy. The law made no mention of racial exclusion, but due to post-Civil War structural issues like the promise of forty acres and mule, the fact that many Black Americans already had land, and the impact of competing racist laws, relatively few Black Americans received homesteading land.³ The state of Oregon, for example, simply banned Black Americans from permanently living there in Around 1.6 million white Americans and white immigrants were able to become landowners through the Homesteading Act, versus around 4 to 5,000 African Americans.⁴ These discrepancies had and continue to have material consequences. As of 2000, there were around 46 million adult descendants of the original Homestead recipients, around a quarter of the US adult population.⁵ Lincoln was not the first politician to strive to create a nation based on a landed populace. The landed yeoman farmer, self-sufficient and selling their surplus product on the side, was already the political subject idealized by Thomas Jefferson and many Americans, who envisioned a Republic of small-scale (white) farmers and craftsmen.⁶ The purported independence prized by Jefferson and others was based on self-sufficiency rooted in private property made productive via individual labor.

The obvious contradiction was that this process was based on what amounted to a massive state welfare program that was in practice largely limited to white settlers and predicated on the dispossession of Native peoples. This trend continues today, with many state governments offering tax exemptions for registered homesteads, just as the Federal government distributed essentially free land to white Europeans during the Homestead Act. Far from the U.S. mythology of rugged individualism, the current manifestation of settler colonialism relies on extensive state subsidies, typically in the form of tax breaks. Without these subsidies, the current homesteading trend would likely face far more difficulties, just as European settlers would have never had the capacity individually to gain ownership of 160 acres of land in the late 19^th century absent state assistance.  

While these videos can be entertaining and at times provide useful information, they also inadvertently showcase a way of life rooted in North American settler colonialism. Today, however, the violence that enabled it is far less visible. This property regime is the result of the genocide and slavery that created the wealth of North America. These videos are primarily aimed at white families who can afford to buy land on which to live “independently.” Although this desire is understandable, opting out through a lifestyle choice restricted to those with racial and class privileges fails to address the underlying social problems. The homesteader fantasy of living outside of the capitalist system is in fact impossible; it rests on the benefits of Indigenous land dispossession, racist implementation of land policies, and ongoing state subsidies to homesteaders. This contradiction makes it a movement that depends on capitalism without challenging or even acknowledging its existence. 

The idea that homesteading can solve social issues is also false in the inverse. If all homesteaders and small farmers sold their land and moved within city limits, the underlying power structures would remain intact. I don’t think white homesteaders should give up the life that gives them meaning and purpose. Instead, we should focus on how to change power structures to offer more people regardless of demographic background a chance to find a life that is similarly fulfilling. This current trend of homesteading is, in my opinion, more of a reflection and result of historical violence than its root. These homesteaders unintentionally and inadvertly express a desire to escape from a capitalist life and make no explicit reference to white identity. 

After watching homesteading videos on YouTube, the algorithm soon started to suggest conservative-coded videos. And while, as the radical history of the Populist Party demonstrates, rural life does not inherently equal right-wing, this linkage between the worldview of the political right and homesteading is not surprising. Critique of modern industrial life, an emphasis on sustainability, and a desire for a closer connection to nature are themselves not inherently left-wing ideas. Although never explicitly stated, these videos frequently imply an equivalence between rural and conservative and articulate a desire to escape the (progressive, diverse, cosmopolitan) cities.

The most dangerous possibilities for homesteading as a right-wing practice can be seen in white nationalist initiatives like the Northwest Territorial Imperative (NTI). Supported by neo-Nazi organizations like White Aryan Resistance and Wotansvolk, the goal of the NTI is to attract white settlers to the Pacific Northwest to create a white homeland ethnostate. This, however, differs dramatically from the underlying ideological framework of the mainstream homesteading movement, even in its more conservative forms. The NTI is a separatist movement, seeking to break away from the United States, and many neo-Nazis reject the American political project as corrupted by Free Masonry. While most homesteaders are white, whiteness is made explicitly foundational to the NTI, as a minimal condition for being part of “the movement”. Conscious politicization of white identity is in no way implied by the creators of homesteading YouTube videos. Meaningful day to day activities and time with their family seemed like the biggest attraction to homesteading. But herein lies one of the greatest challenges facing anti-racist interventions: getting people who don’t consciously think about race to realize that the present is nevertheless thoroughly shaped by it.

At first glance, homesteading would appear to be wholly incompatible with Communalism. Communalism rejects the goals of autarky and individual land ownership, stressing instead interdependence and collective land use according to community need. Rather than autarkic families living in perceived isolation, it imagines citizens living in confederated municipalities and embraces a “unity-in-diversity” ethic of social cosmopolitanism. Yet despite these limits of the homesteading movement, some of the motivations fueling it reflect a nascent critique of contemporary society that is potentially open to a Communalist intervention and reinterpretation. Many homesteaders “opt out” because they are disillusioned with the current system, but, absent a viable communal alternative, are led down a path that depends on maintaining the very system they seek to exit. One can therefore find various points of resonance. Would-be homesteaders could also grow non-GMO food, raise livestock in a non-industrial setting, and escape the tedium of most office work if they lived in a Communalist society. Some homesteader practices closely follow the principles of permaculture. Many homesteaders create organic gardens and food forests that require minimal resources, with plants chosen to suit the local environment. The non-consumed parts are usually fed to livestock to reduce feed costs. Use of livestock can in turn restore land and rebuild soil.⁷ The emphasis on soil regeneration is compatible with social ecology, divorced from the framework of private land ownership rooted in colonialism. 

Shifting from the principle of private ownership to usufruct, where access is based on use, could enable many different demographics – not just white affluent people – the ability to control their surroundings. A shift to a city-based, radically democratic government rather than a nation-state could in turn enfranchise those who are not included in the US nation-state. Based on the videos, the modern homesteaders love animals and want to grow healthy food for their families. Many already give away their extra produce. Homesteads could potentially shift production from individual families to the community, responding to the needs of the municipality as decided democratically. Once the production of food is municipalized, it can be freed from the capitalist dictates of corporate processing, genetic modification, and ecologically ruinous production. Removing processed foods as a staple of the current US diet would lead to better health and longer lives for people. The communal ownership of food production would be able to put the nourishment of citizens over the profit interests of capital. Using the land for the betterment of the community rather than private ownership would be an important step towards decolonizing the territories in which we live. 

One can imagine an alternate homesteader movement where these videos offer a better future for all, rather than just affluent whites. By embedding elements of its critique and reconstructive vision in a more emancipatory social vision, Communalism could offer a systemic alternative to the movement’s nostalgia for the good old days. Instead of perpetuating the escapist logic of the frontier, homesteaders could dedicate their land to feeding the wider community, using their relative independence to build a dual power that politically confronts the system and highlights the shortcomings of life under capitalism.

But this transition will not be easy. These videos offer an enticing escape hatch for those who benefit from class and racial privilege. It is essential that people not forget the crimes that make their homesteads possible. To prevent direct democracy from benefiting only white people, Communalism must empower all people to have a say in political decisions, made at the local level rather than via the nation-state. To ensure that land use rights are no longer synonymous with whiteness, this direct democracy must be synonymous with self-determination, where indigenous people and people of color control the land they reside on in contradistinction to the reproduction of racist land ownership patterns. “Living off the land” in a way compatible with libertarian municipalism would therefore require a complete restructuring of the conception of land ownership and an upending of the settler colonial structures that enabled homesteading in the first place. 

1. Bianka Bosker, “The Strange Allure of Pioneer Living”, The Atlantic (November 2018). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/shaye-elliott-homesteading/570796/.
2. J.Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern (Morningstar Press, 1989), 5.
3. Only 3,500 received Homesteading plots, with about 70% lived in colonies, another 30 as individuals. These people were often part of the broader “Exoduster” movement escaping racist terror in the South.  https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-homesteaders-in-the-great-plains.htm
4. Keri Leigh Merritt, “Land and the Roots of African American Poverty”, AEON (March 2016). https://aeon.co/ideas/land-and-the-roots-of-african-american-poverty.
5. ibid.
6. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), 273.
7. Savory Institute, “Properly managed livestock regenerate soil and grasslands”, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX2FasKU24Q.