The “re” in reVillaging isn’t really a return. It can’t be. It is a restoration, a restory-ing: a slow, fumbling, necessary practice of remembering how to human together — in place, with purpose, within limits. Even when we cannot return to a specific land, we can still become placed, learning to be of a place without claiming it, allowing places, over time, to claim us. reVillaging begins in ordinary neighborhoods, through shared labor and care, as an imperfect, relational way of binding lives across difference in a world shaped by rupture.
This is part 4 of a 4-part essay on reVillaging. Read part 1-3 here.
Contributor bio
Founding Weaver of otherWise, Nicole is a complexity thinker, relation-shifter, and paradigm midwife committed to cultivating nourishment, enoughness, and mutual learning. She tends the rhythms and realities of otherWise with grounded discernment and deep devotion.
Imagine the earth as a snow globe, shaken so violently that nearly everything has come loose. Beings, lineages, lifeways – suspended, tossed, rearranged. Cultures cleaved from the contexts of their creation. Languages that lack the descriptive capacity to cover current (or, in the case of English, all) contexts. As the push and pull of migrations multiply, double back, branch, and compound, lives get lived in patterns that would have been somewhere between improbable and impossible just a few generations ago.
We need not bother debating whether these movements are uniformly bad or good; they simply are (and are probably some of both). Yet, within a global economy that brings bodies, beings, and substances to wherever they can be made most profitable, these shifts also cannot be understood as natural or neutral. Imperial imaginaries paired with exosomatic energy and transportation technologies propelled so much movement with so little regard for the consequences of rapid recontextualization. The impact isn’t just one of jostling and displacement. There is real hurt, real fear, too. Our lives unfold in the wake of so much wounding – of each other, of the Earth’s body.
We have to learn how to stop causing harm through our daily lives, even and especially as we live within these wounds. Healing is always partial, never fully restorative, and often happens alongside new onslaughts. But the process proves we are capable of imperfect change. And so, if we can learn to love what has been compromised – if we can honor the broken, the displaced, the impure – we might preserve the possibility of living in ways that hurt less.
Contemporary philosopher Alexis Shotwell argues against purism of all kinds because she views it as:
“one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair. This world deserves better.”
Aspiring villagers would be wise to keep perfectionism or purity politics out of their dreamings and doings. There simply aren’t pure places, perfect people here – if ever there were. But there might be complementary kinds of wear, breaks that pair well, and contaminations that create new forms.
In the ongoing aftermath of a centuries-long shake-up, an upheaval that has become, in many ways, a shake-down (a systemic extraction of labor, land, and life masked as progress), “returning to the land” is rarely as simple as it sounds. The land may be stolen, fenced, paved, or poisoned. The memory of the land may be faint, fractured, or severed. And for many, returning to ancestral land is neither safe nor legally possible. It might not even be desired. That place might now be occupied or soon sit beneath the salty waters of rising seas.
What can be returned to is not a specific place but a way of being: to live as those who begin in belonging and who be-long to each other.
“Rather, indigeneity indicates the possibility that one has cultural validation and lived experience of entanglement and many more ways of relating, a much nearer memory of reciprocity, access to currently non-dominant ways of knowing and being, or acculturation within longer-storied cosmo-visions.”
Aspiring villagers would be wise to keep perfectionism or purity politics out of their dreamings and doings. There simply aren’t pure places, perfect people here – if ever there were. But there might be complementary kinds of wear, breaks that pair well, and contaminations that create new forms.
In the ongoing aftermath of a centuries-long shake-up, an upheaval that has become, in many ways, a shake-down (a systemic extraction of labor, land, and life masked as progress), “returning to the land” is rarely as simple as it sounds. The land may be stolen, fenced, paved, or poisoned. The memory of the land may be faint, fractured, or severed. And for many, returning to ancestral land is neither safe nor legally possible. It might not even be desired. That place might now be occupied or soon sit beneath the salty waters of rising seas.
What can be returned to is not a specific place but a way of being: to live as those who begin in belonging and who be-long to each other.
Be-longing, then, won’t be attained via purity or property.
It is not a matter of who belongs where or what belongs to whom.
Be-longing – the deep desire to exist so that others may exist beyond the curving horizon – is an ethic of presence. A perennial practice of relational reverence. Care that exceeds inheritance by honoring the overlapping cycles and sweeps of time.
Be-longing might be a way of returning rearranged. And learning to dwell in that rearrangement with integrity.
Not all villagers were born to the places they will tend. Many arrive through rupture – by displacement, not descent. The village, as we imagine and enact it now, must make room for those who come not from a lineage of belonging to a particular place, but who carry or are learning into a lineage of longing, refusal, and survival.
Far too many Indigenous peoples – a vibrantly varied category often held together via rootedness and relationality – have been murdered upon or removed from ancestral grounds. And yet, many continue to hold and enact cosmologies that remember the land as kin, not property. These living and ever-evolving traditions, while targeted for erasure, persist without resorting to domination; they are carried forward through care and commitment. Importantly, these cultures and peoples rarely demand superiority. They entreat the rest of us to remember that there are many ways to live in right relation – and that there are some very popular, very terminal ways not to.
That said, indigeneity should not be homogenized, idealized, or synonomized with purity. It need not get cast as a static or superior identity category. Rather, indigeneity indicates the possibility that one has cultural validation and lived experience of entanglement and many more ways of relating, a much nearer memory of reciprocity, access to currently non-dominant ways of knowing and being, or acculturation within longer-storied cosmo-visions. It also often accompanies experiences of historical and ongoing trauma, which means that indigenous people walk many different routes through genocide and in pursuit of continuance. In the village, Indigenous elders may share or protect medicines and wisdoms. Indigenous youth may revive languages on the brink of loss, evolve those vocabularies, and use them to enrich others.
Similarly, diaspora does not necessarily (or only) mean disconnection. It means carrying fragments of places and their cultures inside the body, wounds and wisdoms from other soils and settings. In the village, diasporic villagers may plant seeds from ancestral ecosystems beside native perennials. They may bring rhythms that refuse colonial time, rituals that ask the gods and spirits of other places to introduce them to the spirits where they are. Whether their relocations were pushed, pulled, or forced, whether they happened generations ago or within living memory, migrants bring lineal and lived experiences of adaptation without assimilation.
At the same time, neither settler status nor assimilated inheritance need be regarded as an intergenerational sentence. Privileges and punishments for past wrongs can be commuted in community. The descendants of settlers may pursue return through the release of resources, acts of systemic sedition, rebalancing, and repair. Instead of policing the sanctioned boundaries of either the state or of a so-called normal life, settlers and more recently assimilated people may be well positioned to reverse enclosures of land, resist alienation of labor, and destabilize supremacies. And in so doing, they may open space for their ancestors to come near and offer their perspectives. Their accountable presence might help healing happen. And the experiences of fugitives from privilege might be just what’s needed to uncover the unsanctioned sacred.
A village cannot be a purity project because the land does not express or sustain purity. Land and life form through endless combining.
A wide and wild diversity of threads and weavers cannot weaken or spoil the fabric of village life. The variety is what makes the fabric strong and supple, what allows it to stretch. A village that can extend sanctuary without erasure, that can survive together without demanding sameness, seem likely to be a village with better than even odds of resisting or diverging from the recent histories of extraction and enclosure. Of returning.
“reVillaging is an invitation to reimagine how we meet our needs together, as humans and as multi-species kin within living places. It’s a call to slowly reassemble the forgotten know-how of village life – those practical, relational, and metabolic skills that help communities endure and adapt, even when the world around them is unraveling.”
The “re” in reVillaging isn’t really a return. It can’t be. But it might be a restoration, a restory-ing. A slow, fumbling, necessary, wondrous, annoying, rewarding, and sometimes painful process of remembering how to human together – in place, with purpose, within limits. It is a recovery of capacities long exiled by modernity
and made invisible by systems that depend on our disconnection.
Even if we cannot always return to a specific place, we can still become placed. Placedness is not the same as rootedness – it is compatible with but does not require lineage, permanence, or a singular origin. It is a lived practice of attuning to the life around us, of finding ways to be of a place without claiming it – of allowing a place (or several), over time, to claim the person. Placedness allows for light landings and layered arrivals. It invites us to dwell – not as owners, not even as natives, but as careful participants in the more-than-human weavings that sustain a place.
Dougald Hine advises us to “look for the dropped threads, the moments earlier in the story that have something to tell us.” ReVillaging involves picking up some of those threads again: to savor the smell of fresh earth after a rain, to feel the rhythm of a scythe’s sweep in your ligaments, to chase the satisfaction of mending a shared fence or to sit with an ailing child who is not your own progeny.
reVillaging is an invitation to reimagine how we meet our needs together, as humans and as multi-species kin within living places. It’s a call to slowly reassemble the forgotten know-how of village life – those practical, relational, and metabolic skills that help communities endure and adapt, even when the world around them is unraveling. It can begin in the most ordinary places; in the neighborhood where you already live, with the people you didn’t choose but might learn to cherish. It is not utopian. It is messy, mundane, material. It is about slowly plaiting a cord strong enough to bind lives across difference. It is a way of being-in-relation that must be practiced, again and again. reVillaging invites us to share labor and risk, to co-create culture and infrastructure, to endure and even be energized by tension, to attune to seasons, to metabolize conflict, to show up instead of opting out. To need and be needed.
This will not be easy because we are not practiced at it. Most of us come from lineages interrupted by displacement, isolation, extraction, and forced assimilation into dominant systems. Even when our bodies remember what was once possible, our minds flinch. Our habits resist. We crave comfort, convenience, privacy, and control. We feel entitled to autonomy. We are acculturated to expect escape routes. And yet, something deeper in us – maybe ancestral – knows that life was never meant to be lived this way.