Staking Their Claim: Urban Homesteaders draw the (intellectual) property lines

Ruby Blume, co-author of Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living  was sent a cease-and-desist letter claiming that the term "urban homesteading" was a registered trademark of the Dervaes Institute in Pasadena.

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Ask anyone who's ever raised a barn or bee'd a quilt: farming is about community, wherever it can be found. For the isolated homesteaders who spread out across the American West, community often meant traveling long distances during the spring planting or the fall butcher and harvest. Groups of men would traverse the prairie between often-sparse settlements (the Land Ordinance of 1785 implemented a standard survey wherein the minimum parcel was one square mile or 640 acres; by 1800 the number was halved to 320 -– still unweildy, but a good bargain for the $1.25, payable in four installments) to reach out to their neighbors and lend a helping hand.

For the most part, today's homesteaders must counter a different type of isolation – asphalt not grass and sky – which is why, for years, the Internet has been the second home to a steadily growing network of urban farmers who till their carrots and tap away on their keyboards about the experience.  

Sharing knowledge is a crucial element of the homesteading experience, to keep trial-and-error from becoming trial-and-travail. So it's understandable that pastoralists the blogosphere over erupted in rage and hurt this February when the Dervaes Institute – a long-time and, for some, much loved Internet presence and self-proclaimed authority on the subject of urban farming – sent not-quite-cease-and-desist letters to sixteen other institutions and small businesses. The letters forbade their recipients, all of whom were becoming established voices in the homesteading community, from using the term “urban homesteading” without designating it as the Dervaes’ intellectual property.

The Dervaes – Jules and his three grown children – have farmed their family-operated organic plot in Pasadena for more than twenty years, and have documented their journey online (formerly at www.PathtoFreedom.com, now at www.UrbanHomestead.org) since 2001. The institute’s first attempt to trademark “urban homesteading,” was denied in 2008, but thanks to an epic two-year struggle with the US Patent and Trademark Office – easily tracked on the PTO’s website – their masthead now boasts a big, round “®.”

But that may soon change. As of today, when San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation posted notice of a petition filed to fight the Dervaes’ bogus claim, all signs point to two years wasted.

In an email this morning, Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the EFF, wrote that the filing is the crucial first step necessary to (as one group of Facebook users demands) “Take Back Urban Home-Steading(s).” Why the awkward spelling? Because right now, those Facebookers can’t say “Urban Homesteading” either.

In addition to targeting fellow urban homesteading organizations like the Denver Urban Homesteading agricultural center and the Institute of Urban Homesteading founded by Oakland local Ruby Blume, the Dervaes sent DMCA complaints – which, incidentally, apply to copyrights, not trademarks – to Google and Facebook demanding they block pages that use the term. A number of pages have been disabled, but new ones urging community members to “Dump the Dervaes” quickly filled the void.

One of the Facebook pages taken down was Blume's. She was using the social networking site to publicize a new book, co-authored with Rachel Kaplan, called Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living. In a phone interview this morning, Blume said that she neither learned from, nor knew of, the Dervaes Institute until shortly before receiving two separate letters from the Dervaes – an informal notice directed toward her Oakland homesteading school and a formal cease and desist sent to the publisher of her upcoming book.

The crash-course version of trademark law hinges on whether the terms in question are “generic” and “merely descriptive,” or whether they have become – as the Dervaes claimed to the PTO – distinctive of the company’s goods and services. With the dubious claim of “substantially exclusive use” of the terms, the Dervaes managed to squeeze into the supplemental trademark registry for educational purposes – a status that does not confer many rights, according to an EFF spokesperson  . . . and certainly not the right to prohibit Blume and others from using the term in a general sense.

“I learned about urban homesteading from a vital urban homesteading community in the Bay Area,” she said. “The Dervaes Institute wasn’t on my radar at all.”

But now the Dervaes are on everyone’s radar, and they seem to have overdosed on the attention they so desired to secure; I tried to get in touch for a comment, and was apparently not the first – I met with an artistically composed review from an answering machine chock full of reporters' messages, accompanied, at pointed interludes, by the machine’s mechanical “message erased” notification. Thou

gh attempts to protect what they see as their own intellectual property may have backfired personally, the Dervaes debacle actually brought the urban homesteading community much closer together, in Blume’s opinion. She sees it as a rallying point in a movement that is centered on pride and sharing – the reason why so many people from disparate places came together so quickly on the issue.

“When April Krieger started the Take Back Urban Home-Steading(s) page,” Blume said, “over 1,000 joined in the first day.”

What Blume describes as a micro-revolution merely reinforces the values of self-reliance and community support that urban homesteading teaches.

“They’ve really put urban homesteading on the national map,” Blume said. And along with it – judging by the popularity of the newly re-christened Facebook page – Blume and Kaplan’s upcoming book. 

Though the Electronic Frontier Foundation has formally filed its petition on behalf of a different set of authors, Kelly Coyne and Eric Knutzen, as well as the publisher of that duo's 2008 work The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the City, Blume and Kaplan are likewise at the center of the controversy. Even making it out of the publishing house, their forthcoming book made it onto Wikipedia’s brand-new urban homesteading page.

But for Blume, Kaplan, and all the others who rallied around the Dervaes trademark dispute, publicity was the last thing on their minds.

“Being urban homesteaders is very much about our humanity,” Blume explained. “It’s our birthright to grow and preserve food.  We’ve been doing it for millennia. The possibility that it might be taken away is just so against the feeling of the movement. Sharing resources and ideas, that’s what it’s all about.”

Kaplan agrees.  In addition to co-authoring the book, the Petaluma resident has worked with community reliance organization Daily Acts to shape the Homegrown Guild, a group committed to dispersing knowledge and hands-on assistance among its hundreds of members.

“We share information like we share bounty,” Kaplan said. “Our job is to keep inspire one another to keep raising the bar.”

The co-authors, who met over 20 years ago as members of San Francisco’s Mission art scene, wove a broad yet intricate guide, with Blume providing the artwork and photographs as well as some of the more nitty-gritty how-to’s, and Kaplan producing the bulk of the writing, or what Blume describes as the “why-to.”

Nearly every aspect of their collaboration was fortuitous. Blume had been approached by several publishers to produce a book – something she realized she “didn’t really want to do” at the expense of her teaching. At the same time, Kaplan, knowing nothing about the potential book deal, looked up Blume with her own ideas about writing a book.

The pieces fell into place, and a partnership was born. At its heart, Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living is about cooperation – perhaps the Dervaes should pick up a copy.

Pick up a copy yourself at the following Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living book launches:

Ecology Center

April 14, 7 p.m.

2530 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley

www.ecologycenter.org

Modern Times Bookstore

April 27, 7 p.m.

888 Valencia, SF

www.mtbs.com

The Path of the Urban Indian

On tramping through the woods as a kid, reconciliation, and the new urban frontier . . .

To explain where the name “Urban Indian” came from — and why, as a white, Jewish girl lacking a speck of Indian blood, I feel the right to claim it — we'll have to start with a childhood rooted in the not-so-vast wilderness of suburban Cleveland, Ohio.  Growing up, my family’s primary signs of affiliation with the Tribe were parsimony, unmanageable curly hair, and a love of things fried in the name of religion.  So though I was given a Hebrew name —Shoshanna, which means lily — it was not to honor a dear departed relative (as per Jewish tradition) or because anyone had visions of a delicate retiring beauty, tinged with a pale blush.  Which is good, because I turned out to be more often brash, bruised, and unlikely to be tinged with anything but dirt.

No, my mom named me Shoshanna because she thought it sounded like the Shoshone people of the Western United States — the tribe from which Sacajawea, the celebrated interpreter for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was captured as a youth.

In my own youth, I was quite happy to live up to the romantic image of what I thought my name connoted: I tramped through the woods, caught tadpoles, built houses from sticks, and coerced my young playground-mates to grind up rocks of different colors, mix them with water, and paint their faces.  I was astounded to meet my literary double in Sharon Creech’s Newberry Award-winning book Walk Two Moons — the main character Salamenca is so-named because her mother mistook it for the name of her great-grandmother’s tribe — the Seneca.

I shared with Sal a well-meaning if misguided vision of what emulating my namesakes might entail: treading lightly upon the earth, living frugally off the fruits of the forest, and perhaps even casually passing the time of day with wild beasts both fearsome and cuddly — in their own language, of course.

All of this is surely to the consternation of plenty of real American Indians, and the scholars, Indian and not, who strive to understand and preserve their history. But then, it is also much in keeping with a long tradition of pasty and bewildered Europeans on this continent — one that we struggle, even today, to address and remediate.

Take the word “Indian” itself.

It was used, generally unchallenged, well into the 20th century (the American Indian Movement was self-christened in 1968) despite the fact that the term was long understood to be a misnomer. At the time when Columbus bumped haplessly into the Antilles, he’d been looking for the "India" he knew to be the provenance of valuable spices; the name was often applied to the entirety of South and East Asia, and on some maps of the time, it referred to basically anything that wasn’t Europe.  Needless to say, the “Indians” were so-called upon the mistaken belief that Columbus had hit his intended mark, and the name stuck.

After the civil rights movements, “Native American” became the preferred term because many felt that “Indian,” in addition to being the result of serious geographical discombobulation, had accrued an unshakeable set of pejorative undertones.

But then, “native” has a storied and troublesome past of its own, raising plenty more objections, which have spawned a plethora of additional phrases, each accepted by some and deplored by others to the point where we’re tongue-tied with the task of distangling our language from the social histories it preserves and, indeed, generates. In such a context, using the term Indian to describe my own urban wanderings may seem frivolous at best. But stay with me.

The battle over terminology is a valid one.  Our language patterns fossilize old power structures, but also create a template for the construction of new ones — often with far-reaching, if not immediately obvious, effects.  

In this country, one of the most enduring examples of this phenomenon has been described by geographer William Denevan as the Pristine Myth. It is the idea that the pre-Columbian Americas were "natural" — empty and untouched, save for a mere smattering of natives who stirred nary a leaf, living in a prelapsarian paradise free from the ills of modern mankind — wait, that sounds a little familiar.

So what exactly is the problem with the romantic, if naive, bent of this fantasy that so stirred me as a child?

One problem with this idealized vision is that it is simply wrong. Denevan and others have fully discredited the notion, showing how the landscape European explorers first marveled at was, in fact, extensively shaped by human populations — in numbers far exceeding what scholars would generally acknowledge for the next several centuries.

But the Pristine Myth goes beyond a merely whimsical re-rendering, supporting a number of crucial biases: the view that the land was unused and there for the taking, and the suggestion that the decimation of Indian populations following European settlement was less extreme than it actually was. It fails to acknowledge the very real needs and desires of native populations who, historical accounts have shown, traditionally warred with other tribes, stole from each other, hunted some animal populations so unsustainably that they at times risked starving themselves, and made eager use of technologies from Europeans (like guns, metal, and horses) that made their lives more convenient, even at the expense of the natural world. 

The false dichotomy between greedy, disruptive white man and the noble savage creates a difficult paradox for indigenous people today, whose political will may run counter to our deep-seated romantic notions.  Furthermore, this sort of schism between reality and fantasy makes it difficult, despite even the best intentions, to remediate troubled pasts, by falsely invoking some identifiable point from which we can measure the damages, and some irreproachable ideal to which we can return.

When John Muir famously effused on the beauty of the Yosemite Valley, the “natural” churches that so moved him were grassy meadows that had been maintained by very real, very extreme human intervention. Over time, environmental advocates seeking to uphold Muir’s dedication to preserving the immaculate landscape found themselves with quite a dilemma: their ardent protection of the lands had, in fact, begun to destroy the very scenes which drove Muir to such heights of religious ecstasy. Without the periodic burning practiced by native tribes, the grasslands had succumbed to the natural cycle of forestation, and trees were creeping in and squishing out those lovely sun-filled meadows. Now the movement was in a pickle. Restore the land, yes, but restore it to what? Muir’s vision? A truly wild state? What type of intervention was preservation, and what was degradation?

Humans and landscapes have complex, intertwined pasts, just like humans and other humans. Though understanding these pasts can be key to healing them, there may be times when finding footing amid forever-shifting historical accounts is less important than taking stock of where we are now and figuring out how to go from there — even if it means approaching bigger questions of truth and justice by addressing more granular, even prosaic, matters first: are we enabling a diversity of species to thrive? Preserving cultural autonomy and promoting economic prosperity for those who need it most? Are we holding extinction at bay? Advocating for clean air and water?  Leaving something breathtaking for our children to see? 

One way forward may be to borrow from the emerging study of political ecology, which seeks to understand the complex interplay between socio-economic structures and the natural and cultural landscapes in which they are set. One of the field's leading voices, Paul Robbins, has introduced the concept of the Hatchet and the Seed: a methodology that emphasizes not only exposing and pruning away — deconstructing — the myths the prop up many of today’s undesirable social and environmental realities, but also using our knowledge to plant new and better realities.

Political ecology can be a practical means to explore the legacies of, and make amends for, the complex histories between postcolonial cultures and the populations they have marginalized in the quest for land and resources. But it is a field that aims for a moving target — a productive, sustainable relationship with nature, and with each other, is best described as a dynamic equilibrium, a balancing act that requires constant reevaluation, innovation, and compromise.

This is not to negate the very real need for serious inquiry and reparation in this country — many have called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled after the one that followed the dismantling of Apartheid South Africa, and I don’t think it would be a bad idea. But we must also recognize that talking about the past — reconstructing our notions of what happened or refining the terminology we use today — will not alone move us forward.

In Twelve Step programs, there is the concept of living amends. Some things you just can’t apologize for, and you can’t truly take back. Instead, you must simply change how you live, do better as you go along. And — this is where I’m sure to get myself into trouble — I say, if holding onto our romantic notions, just bit, helps us do that, then why not?

Increasingly, experts in fields ranging from architecture to zoology are making the case that cities hold the key to a more just and sustainable future. While they have always created efficiencies in housing, transportation, and energy consumption, it is the relative novelties of electricity and, oh, say, sewage treatment that have made them infinitely more livable than they were even a short hundred years ago.

Meanwhile, those aspects of life affecting population and environment on a global scale that have always fallen under rural purview — agriculture, for instance — are increasingly manipulatable by city-dwellers, either indirectly through choice in the marketplace, or directly through bourgeoning interest in urban foraging, home cooking, preserving, community-supported agriculture, and the thriving urban homesteading movement.

We needn’t each of us own a hundred acres in the woods — indeed, this would be the biggest ecological and political disaster of all — to honor the values we ascribe, accurately or inaccurately, to the first people of this land. “Real” or not, those values, applied today, can help overcome the obstacles of land and resources that have germinated over time into stories of oppression and destruction.

Frederick Jackson Turner famously expounded on the importance of the frontier in defining the American spirit of gumption and pluck. He delivered his thesis at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (officially, the World’s Columbian Exposition, held to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America), at what he saw as the end of an era. In the 1890 Census, just three years earlier, the US government had declared that there was no longer a discernable line between civilization and the savage, untamed wilderness — the frontier was dead.

Since then, many things have been dubbed “the new frontier,” not the least significant among them urban America itself. The retreat from this country’s urban centers in the second half of the twentieth century did, undeniably, leave untamed jungles of despair in many places. In this context, the term “urban frontier” has been used for many purposes. Some have been brash and mercenary, resulting in the wholesale re-development of city districts where another solution may have sufficed. But many have been less dubious, and even valiant: sensitive, fine-grained approaches to urban renewal, incentives drawing energy back to the urban core, and the many not-insignificant grassroots efforts to create urban culture and prosperity at street level.

Amid this new wave of exploration, we might do well to think of ourselves not just as Urban Settlers, but also as Urban Indians. Cities are ecosystems, webs as tenuous as any forest or meadow, and change — plucking any string — can have dramatic results, both good and bad. It is crucial that we understand issues like gentrification, attendant to this new wave of Manifest Destiny, and recognize the impacts upon all city dwellers — after all, urban landscapes, even those ravaged by disinvestment and disenfranchisement, are no more “empty” than were the forests and plains of the frontier. “Urban Indian” is my nod to the past, a reminder to stay humble, move slowly, tiptoe where necessary, through landscapes that each have a unique ecology, a matchless balance of triumphs and challenges.

And, problematic as the term may be for some, I think there is something deeply evocative about it. “Urban Indian” calls upon us all to live — among skyscrapers or suburban lawns — more like we imagine Indians of the past living among the trees: with creativity and parsimony, attention to our surroundings, a sense of pride and self-reliance, abundance wrought by using what is available and wasting little, and above all, joy in simple things and in each other.

As for why this blog isn’t called “Urban Native American”? I’ll let Sharon Creech answer that one through Sal’s mother, the character who shares so much in common with my own mom: “My great-grandmother was a Seneca Indian, and I’m proud of it. She wasn’t a Seneca Native American. Indian sounds much more brave and elegant.”