The word “homestead” is a very American way to say a smallholding, and one with an unfortunate history. A history that is still dog whistled into the current usage of the term. On that basis, and because I firmly believe that language matters and semantic baggage exists whether you personally mean it to or not, I refuse to use the term homesteading to refer to the complex of techniques, approaches, and desired ends that go into small-scale non-commercial mixed crop production on a smallholding scale. There are a plethora of perfectly adequate terms for exactly what t is that most who think of themselves as “homesteaders” do that don’t connote settler-colonial attitudes and positions. And let’s be honest, there are plenty of “modern homesteaders” who are 100% okay with all of the negative reactionary baggage in the term, who celebrate it even, and I simply want to make sure that I am as distanced (semantically as well as physically) from them.

Alternative Terminology

Before I lay out the reasoning behind why I won’t use the term, I’d like to offer up some alternatives for people to consider using. Obviously, unless you are in the region I am in, you would just confuse people if you referred to your smallholding as a casería, but the definition in Asturian law for what constitutes a casería provides us with a good working outline of what we need to refer to when we use a term to describe our holdings:

Smallholding

I prefer the term Smallholding to Farmstead simply because while the definitions are mostly the same, a farmstead tends towards the larger, more commercial end of the spectrum, and a smallholding is sort of halfway between a cottage garden and a farmstead. Also, in pretty much the entirety of the English speaking world outside the USA, smallholding is the default term for what almost everyone in the US calls a “homestead”, but shorn of the ideological baggage that term carries with it, simply by dint of not being a product of a settler-colonial legal framework. For those of us whose family farming ideals do not involve commercial scale production, this is the perfect term to use, and the one that I use when communicating in English.

Farmstead

As noted above, when a smallholding becomes a commercial operation, it is more correctly called a farmstead, or simply a farm, with farmstead referring to the same things that casería refer to in Asturias. For some, this is the end goal of their smallholding endeavors - an operating commercial family farm.

Political History

A Homestead in the United States was originally ‘‘land claimed by a settler or squatter, especially under the Homestead Act’Homestead, noun, [3] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition. . For those that might not know their own history, the Homestead Acts were a series of laws by which the United States government enclosed land belonging to native tribes (and often ceded in perpetuity to them via treaty), and sold it to white settler colonialists for payments small enough to be affordable by whites but not by free blacks. The agreement tacit in the Acts were that the US Army would not necessarily clear the land of native inhabitants, but would officially look the other way while settler militias did so. Wilm, Julius (2020). ““The Indians Must Yield”: Antebellum Free Land, The Homestead Act, and the Displacement of Native Peoples”. German Historical Institute. 67

Homestead Acts

And for those who claim that it’s all ancient history and shouldn’t be taken into account in modern usage of the word, let me remind you that the last of the homestead acts, the Small Tracts Act, was still giving away BLM “owned” native land in 1938. It followed the Stock-Raising Act of 1916, the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, the Forest Homestead act of 1906, the Kinkaid Amendment of 1904, the Indian Homestead Act of 1875A particularly callous act which promised to grant (tribal) land to any reservation dwelling native who relinquished tribal identity and voting rights, but almost never resulted in the land being granted, even though tribal rights had been relinquished. , the Timber Culture Act of 1873, the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 The infamous “40 Acres and a Mule” act which pretended to extend the 1862 Homestead Act to freed slaves in the South by granting them 40 acres of scrubland if they heard about the act, had money to file a claim, buy equipment, clear forest or drain swamp, and survive without support for the 5 years necessary to get title. Less than 40,000 acres of the 46 million acres set aside were ever actually granted. , and the Homestead Act of 1862, which is the only one most “homesteaders” today know of.

Manifest Destiny

All of these Acts come out of the concept of Manifest Destiny - the basic premise of which is that white people were chosen by god to take all the land on the North American continent and eliminate anyone who might be living there. It continues throughout American history in various guises including the Pax Americana of an empire “Ten Thousand Miles From Tip to Tip” (from Puerto Rico to the Philippines), the America’s Backyard of the Monroe Doctrine and the installation of unelected dictator puppets in Latin America on down to the modern Regime Change politics of America overseas (see Iran, Syria, Indonesia, Lebanon, Brazil, Panama, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, Palestine).

And as a final historical anecdote, let’s not forget that homesteading in America was directly responsible for the enormous environmental and social catastrophe that was the Dust Bowl.

Philosophical Sophistry

More importantly, the American view of the concept of freedom is tied ineluctably to European notions of private property. Legally, this association goes back primarily to the power of the male head of household in ancient Rome, who could do as he pleased and dispose of at will with all his chattel and possessions, up to and including his children. This concept of freedom is always defined as something (potentially) exercised at the cost of others. This is the freedom to impose hierarchy over others without others imposing a hierarchy over you.

Freedom From Other People

This emphasis on negative, private-property based freedom creates (at least as far back as the Romans) a legal obsession with the self-sufficiency of individual households. Thus, true freedom in the Roman / European / American sense means radical autonomy or autarky. Not for them the autonomy of the will and the individual standing to be an active participant in civic and social life, but the object and aim of being in no way dependent on other human beings (except of course those you directly control like children or slaves). For a masterful treatise on the limited European (and thus American) view of freedom see Graeber, David, and D. Wengrow. “Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress.” The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2023.

Interestingly, this strain of thought comes not from the corners you might presume it would - from the “war of all against all” in the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes or the theological-propertarian hierarchism of John Locke (and later Lockeans such as Robert Nozick). No, it comes from the absolutely insane mind of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Also called the Second Discourse, it was written as an entry in a competition organized by the Academy of Dijon in 1754. He had won first prize in a previous competition (in 1750) with his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (the First Discourse), a victory which had helped to make him famous. The Second Discourse did not fare so well in the contest. In his 1754 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men, he argues that humanity has gone through several distinct phases of “development”:

1. In the primordial “state of nature” humans were essentially good, and avoided all contact with each other. This lack of contact, this solitariness, is the only true definition of freedom to Rousseau
2. Next, language was invented and this engendered ongoing association between individuals. This is the beginning of breakdown in freedom.
3. The last stage, was the invention of agriculture and metallurgy, which according to him, led directly to civil society.

This conceptual framework, that both personal and societal progress leads to moral decay, was then, and remains today, the arch-conservative position. A hilarious result from the man many consider to be the “father of the left”, but has more to do with the general inability in European intellectuals of his time to imagine that other worlds could be brought into being.

Rugged Individualism

This is where modern homesteading in the American sense comes in. It is 100% based on a rugged individualist reading of this household self-sufficiency model of legal thought. Contrary to the assumptions of the coiner of that phrase, Herbert Hoover, American rugged individualism was indeed a laizze-faire “devil-take-the-hindmost” philosophy for the wealthy.Hoover, Herbert. “Principles and Ideals of the United States Government.” 22 October, 1928, Madison Square Garden, Campaign Speech The individualism Hoover praised in 1928 has certainly in the last century (if it was not already) become exactly the selfish, isolating self-absorption that Alexis de Tocqueville laid at the feet of French individualisme in his 1840 Democracy in America. Both Hoover (and later adherents to his creed of individualism) miss de Tocqueville’s recurrent statement that this type of egoism is “a vice as old as the world” (p. 585) and is “to societies what rust is to metal” (p. 316).For a thorough treatment of the subject, see Jon Elseter’s Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist , pp. 47 - 58

I find myself much more inclined to agree with Emma Goldman, when she says that

And modern homesteading is wrapped up in a fantasy of reproducing that individualism of the master - one strong enough to hold off the whole governmental apparatus with his rifle while his subjects bring in the potato crop.