A Write on the Forces of Immigration
Under the Spiritual Moon of December
This full moon WRITE happened fast and dirty with the timer set to 25 minutes. After I answered the 4 questions and did some light editing and got it all set up to post. It is the things after the first 25 minutes that takes the majority of the time to get this out to you:
As I understand it when my great great great grandparents were leaving Norway and Sweden, their countries were running out of arable land. All the land was being farmed and the American government was advertising a fortune here for the taking if you had the tenacity to make the arduous journey and once you did, break through the prairie roots for access to the black soil beneath.
Actually, they weren’t that aware about the difficulties of life in the new world, they just jumped at the promise of cheap and free land with the Homestead Act.1 The American Government had its own ideas of how the west would be won and set up a land rush in order to push the Dakota and any other native tribes out.
My ancestors came from a formal economy, where industrialization had led to a population growth and a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor. The reports they got from frontier life tended to gloss over the difficulty. It wasn’t until they got here that they realized there was an “Indian Problem” i.e. the land they sought to settle with immigrants from Europe was already someone’s home. Those of my people who came during the mid 1800s arrived to a government not fulfilling the commitments of its treaties.
The economy of this new land was informal to say the least. Until they arrived the land had never been divided into parcels and claimed as property. Before that, the use of it was shared, along with its resources, not only within tribes, but between different tribes, and even with these European settlers. Europeans brought their ideas of treaties and boundaries and territories and jurisdictions, and the economic livelihood of hunting and gathering became a “problem."
Is there a judgment inherent within agrarian societies that the land should be used for all its worth? My ancestors arrived with the intention to take what they could get rather than as guests coming to learn the ways of the people who were already there. And if I know anything of my heritage it is that there is a certain earnestness in the creation of formal economies that runs in my ancestral lineage.
*timer goes off*
Here are a few things that I meant to bring into the WRITE but didn’t get to: I remembered that it was in The Overstory that I learned Swedish immigrants lumbered Minnesota, taking almost every last white pine they could find. I wanted to write more about what it means that they came from a formal economy, from a land where government supports and regulations and arrived to a land where regulations were few and far between. The west was wild and the government’s attention was on its war with itself. And I wanted to connect this back to the present day, where the president goes on a tirade against more recent immigrants than my ancestors, who have done a bit of the opposite, coming from an informal economy and into a formal one. There has certainly been some problems and culture shock between Minnesota Culture and Somali Culture, but there has also been a whole lot of success and mutual care and appreciation. Please read this article that was written during the Feeding Our Future trials, as a result of the covid-era fraud in Minnesota that was centered in Somali businesses. The article was written by a Somali Minnesotan, Kayseh Magan, who worked in Attorney General Ellison’s office as an investigator about how the fraud happened within the community. I really appreciated the perspective. This is something we will have been grappling with as a state for awhile and will continue to grapple with. Our state is proof that oversight really matters and it is ironic that our current president who does not value oversight is bringing attention to it. This article, also by Kayseh Magan, points to the right wing propaganda machine that appears to have brought this issue to Trump and how false claims are circling again.
How or what do I feel now? Surprised a bit about what came up, but satisfied with it as a beginning.
What themes came up? Informal vs formal economy. Immigrants now and then. Corruption and greed. And the things that drive population movement and migration. Things that are influencing the shifting of time.
What will I take forward into future WRITES? All these forces are working together to pit people against each other, global migrations and shifts of perception and wanting a better life. And wanting a return to an older and simpler life. And more on that earnestness. And gratitude for what we got right here and right now.
In Cadillac Dessert, the author, Marc Reisner, writes about the extent of the delusional thinking these settlers had towards the land and how god wanted them to control it.