B@ck-to-the-L@nd: Analyzing Rural Anarchist Practice in Relation to Anarchist Theories of Community-Building Through a Case Study of the Dragonfly and Black Fly Land Collectives Joanna Maria Adamiak A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Environmental Studies York University Toronto, Ontario August 2018 © Joanna Maria Adamiak, 2018 ii Abstract This dissertation problematizes the idea of the rural as a backwards and reactionary place and addresses the theoretical and practical contributions of anarchism to reconsidering the rural as a site of revolutionary community-building and an alternative to capitalism and state formations. I argue that anarchist theories offer a sophisticated vision of rural space because they think more concretely about the rural as an inhabited or inhabitable place informing more radical understanding of alternative community and political structures. I explore the history of intentional communities in North America and Ontario, specifically, to demonstrate the persistence of community-building experiments in rural settings and to document their alternative history. Using an empirical case study of two anarchist intentional communities located in Hastings County, Ontario, this dissertation examines how specific experiments of alternative community-building have operated in practice in relation to their anarchist principles. I situate the two collectives in the colonial history and the history of alternative communities in the area. The goals of creating anti-capitalist and decolonized communities are confronted with the geographic and political realities of land ownership. Some themes that emerged in this dissertation are private property relationships, settler relations, and ecological stewardship. While participants demonstrate a desire to move beyond private property relationships, they continue to see their responsibilities to Indigenous peoples and the environment in property terms. The anarchist ethical commitment to self-reflection opens up the importance of continually working to unlearn property and colonial relationships. iii Dedication In loving memory of Babcia Czesława Adamiak (1933-2017), who taught me rural ethics through her loving, dynamic practice. iv Acknowledgements As I began to write these acknowledgments in the summer of 2013 my Babcia Adamiak (grandmother) was preparing lunch (though it is really dinner but served during lunch time in the Canadian context) in her summer kitchen in the room beside me. It was fitting to begin to write my acknowledgements there, where my desire for rootedness is strongest and where my Babcia, the person with whom I first developed friendship as a chosen relationship, lived. It is also the place where I learned to love the countryside. My grandmother moved to that house, on a ten- hectare farm in Ignasin, in the southeastern corner of Poland (in the Lubelskie region), in 1950, at the age of sixteen. My Babcia is the first person I want to thank for this dissertation project, though I will not have the opportunity to share (in translated form) my written thanks with her but tried in my way to thank her through our relationship over the years. Babcia was my earliest example of rural life and she troubled my own romantic notions of the rural while simultaneously feeding into them. Further on in my life, I dreamt of leaving my urban Canadian life to live with her on this piece of land beside the forest until I myself grew to be her age. I continued to dream of this, despite doing nothing to make it happen and despite her ailing health forcing her to leave this piece of land to live with my Aunt in a town nearby a year before her death in August 2017. This might be caused by my diasporic intimacy, that Boym describes as being “suspicious of a single home:” Diasporic intimacy can be approached only through indirection and intimation, through stories and secrets. It is spoken of in a foreign language that reveals the inadequacies of translation. Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection - no less deep, yet aware of its transience. In contrast to the utopian images of intimacy as transparency, authenticity, and ultimate belonging, diasporic intimacy is dystopic by definition; it is rooted in the suspicion of a single home.1 Living on the farm with my grandmother would require a rooting to which I was not prepared to commit. Decades after developing a close relationship with my Babcia, my emotional and historical interest in rural life became informed academically when I met Catriona Sandilands as I entered the doctoral program in 2007. Cate is the kind of supervisor about which every PhD student dreams. Cate is challenging and supportive, writes encouraging and challenging emails, reads less-than-finished work. When a letter needs to be written for a job, library access, or to a Crown Attorney to get her student out of house arrest for a few hours per week, Cate writes on point and perfectly poetic professional letters. She shows up on picket lines with dietary-restriction appropriate cookies (homemade, of course) and sits in court rooms, if needed. Cate told me in a first meeting, that I could take a year off to farm if I wanted to and then return to the doctorate. I took a few years off, never officially, and never to farm. However, Cate celebrated, accepted, or understood each delay. Cate was committed to seeing me finish this work even when I doubted myself that it could be finished. I can say with all certainty that this project would not have been completed if Cate had not been my supervisor. Cate’s love for the rural and her excitement about 1 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia. (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 251. v the community with which I was engaging helped remind me of my own excitement about the project when I could not recall why I had chosen it. I am grateful for her. My deepest gratitude is to Cate. Her continued faith in me and my project carried me through the most incapacitating moments of self-doubt; she believed in me when I did not believe in myself. I am in debt to Cate in a way that I am not sure I will ever have the opportunity to repay. I had the privilege of working with a committee that was very supportive and engaged; it brought such important and different academic experiences to my work. I worked with Gerda Wekerle on the Course work, comprehensive examination, and proposal phases of my doctorate and benefited from her knowledge of communes and rural life. She welcomed me into her home, made supportive comments on drafts of the chapters of the dissertation, and supported my writing with generosity, humour, and creativity. J.J. McMurtry was my anarchist cheerleader and advocate for a dissertation whose central focus was anarchism. His help in my initial stages of the program, useful feedback, and reminder that academics can be anarchists, but more importantly, that anarchists can be academics kept me in the program when I was not certain that it was the place for me. The three committee members were very supportive and engaged throughout the decade that I have been working on this project and I appreciate their willingness to work with me. I started this degree with a lot of rage and anger about the world. I was committed to burning it down and criticizing anything that was not a project for the total overthrow of society. I wrote dogmatic papers about the fact that anarchism is the only philosophy that doesn’t prescribe and I shared in that vision with a lot of like-minded people. I had the misfortune and the great honour of spending a few years of my life fighting incarceration after being involved in organizing a mass mobilization against the G20 meetings in Toronto in June 2010. The year preceding that summer was one of the most beautiful community experiences of which I have been a part. I met people who shared the visions of the books I was reading and the theories I was trying to make sense of in my doctoral work. I put my doctorate aside to dedicate my life to the best anti-G20 party we could throw…I believe that this sense of community, however brief and however violently broken by arrests and state sanctions, has sat in my heart and fed my desire to complete this project in some way. I finish this doctorate with many more wrinkles and with rage and anger that has been softened by time and fear of the state. I am much less committed to a dogma and far less idealistic. I long for the fiery person I was when I started. I have a deep commitment to working to create community and a society that does not reward privilege but I have been much more cautious about how that is accomplished. I hope the fire returns. I have had many wonderful friends in my life and all of them contributed to the completion of this dissertation. Fellow PhD students, who became close friends, support me emotionally and intellectually throughout this process. Hilton Bertalan, Megan Hillman, Irina Cerič, Heather Hax, Matthew Hayter, Jennifer Cypher, Bruce Erickson, Lauren Corman, Tom Malleson, Griffin Epstein, Jen Preston, Deirdre Wilcock -are my hope for the academy – that it can still be saved and that new generations of smart, radical, awesome students will learn from them and want to find different ways of engaging in society and changing it for the better. Irina Cerić supported me with brains and laughs. She edited my work, was my companion in getting ready for the defence, and reminded me to breath and snack.