The Dangers of Pretending To Be A Character In The Little House on the Prairie
Laura Ingalls Wilder was WRONG!
If you go on TikTok right now and search “homesteading,” “cottage core,” “living off the land,” or other things in that realm, you will get a lot of videos of mostly white 20-30-somethings wearing lots of linen and bragging about how they don’t go to grocery stores or put harmful chemicals into their bodies. There will be lots of homemade bread, sourdough starters, pickled vegetables, canning jars, and talk about “abundance.” The videos will be heavily sunlit, feature lots of dark green paint, fresh wood furniture, and a shocking lack of dirt. Everyone looks happy, clean, and there is a constant refrain of “starting a new life,” “happier/healthier than ever,” and other similar phrases.
Click on some of these accounts and there will be people talking about natural cures, herbal remedies, and the “problems” of “Western” medicine. Pay any attention at all and you’ll realize that almost all of these posts feature a straight white couple, with the woman mostly creating content around cooking and cleaning. If the man is in the videos he’s either building various things around the house, growing crops, or sometimes like fixing a tool. Oftentimes the video will refer to the man is referred to as “a breadwinner.” It’s generally left undefined or very vague where this dude actually makes their money from. The videos generally lead you to believe that the couple lives completely off their land, making money from selling whatever their homestead produces. If they have kids, the kids will be like helping around the house, doing gender-specific tasks. Boys play with hammers, girls play in the kitchen type of thing.
If you dig just a little deeper into this world, not even a dig, a scratch, you’ll start seeing conservative politics, anti-trans rhetoric, angry screeds about public schools, and rants about the dangers of vaccinations. This is the real heart of the homesteading movement. The rest is just aesthetic trappings.
For those not interested in a breakdown of TikToks, homesteading exists outside of that realm as well, though that particular app has certainly helped spread its message. Homesteading, as it is popularly conceived, is a conservative ethos/movement that promotes the idea of “living off the land.” That is, a man and a woman with some number of kids, owning a plot of land, and use that land to grow crops, raise animals, and whatever else they need to survive. Self-sufficiency is the goal. This movement promotes “natural” cures, and promises an abundant easy life, free of government, and liberal interference. It’s a load of malarky.
The clearest historical referent – “historical referent?!?” Who am I, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.? – for this is of course the Homestead Act of 1862, and the subsequent move west by many white settlers during the 1800s. The Homestead Act, for those of you who forgot their freshman year US history class, was an act of Congress, that gave American families 160 acres of land basically for free, as long as they lived on that land for five years and made improvements to it. Of course, as Congress and those who took the opportunity ignored, that land wasn’t theirs to give or receive. In the name of “progress,” the Homestead Act removed forcibly killed and removed Native peoples all across the Midwest from where they had lived, hunted, and farmed for generations. Some truly heinous shit. Of course, you’ll never hear any of these Homesteaders talk about that.
“Homesteading” has more recent progenitors as well. The hippie movement of the 70s, the anti-vax shenanigans of the pre- and post-pandemic era, and “sovereign citizen” ideas. There is also just a full-on aesthetic theft from like Little House on the Prairie. You can also see the influence of modern white nationalist ideas – though most of these TikTokers would pretty quickly deny that. But just look at some of the white power compounds in Idaho, and you’ll see why others have made those connections. In short, what most of these cottagecore or homesteading people are peddling – and they are certainly selling something, even if it’s not a physical good – is a return to an imagined past. The idea that things used to be better when people lived off the bounties of the land, gave their extra radishes to their neighbors, raised their girls to be women, and their boys to be men.
Say it with me, “It’s a bunch of bullshit.”
That past never existed. Even disregarding all the racist and colonialist stuff that like 1860s Homesteaders did, their lives sucked. They lived in houses made of sod and barely scraped a living if they made a living at all. Most homesteads were abandoned within a few years of getting the deed. Even if they did manage to get a farm going, they often lived miles from anyone else and were wildly lonely. It was just not a great way to live. The people who got rich from the Homestead Act were New York financier types who founded huge bonanza farms by buying up poor homesteaders’ land and applying new industrial farming techniques to it. Sidenote: those farming techniques would eventually cause the Dust Bowl.
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It's not that most of these people making these TikToks don’t realize the lies they’re selling. Every once in a while, it will come out that one of these people making these videos comes from a super wealthy family, or that the husband’s job is like venture capitalist or whatever. This is of course, how they can afford all their land, equipment, and time in the first place and still have the time to keep it so clean. The big reveal is usually that their stove or whatever costs like $40,000 and had to be shipped over from Italy.
Of course, the tricky thing about all of this is that some of the skills that they talk about in these videos are useful. Growing some vegetables, learning how to preserve, or picking up sewing are good things to know. Important skills to have. It cuts down on your waste, lets you learn more about your world, and oftentimes is just a nice thing to be able to do. To do all that though, you don’t need to become a conservative or rely on some made-up American past. The present has plenty of problems, but the solution isn’t trying to recreate some fully fictional past, but making a better future. That’s what cottagecore gets wrong.
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