Rural Collectives in Alaska and Beyond

During the 1960s through the 1980s, thousands of communal experiment dotted the American and Western European landscapes. Many of these communal experiments were quite radical in nature, challenging capitalist materialist values, patriarchy, confines of gender, agribusiness farming practices, notions of sexuality, even contemporary religious practices. Others were quite conventional, expanding traditional ideas about farming, spirituality, family and community life into a communal environment, but otherwise not challenging the existing status quo.

Although there were several rural collectives in Alaska, few survived for very long past their initial founding. And there were some astounding defeats. Elsewhere in rural America, several communal experiments thrive to this very day. In this section, students will curate online resources about rural communal and/or collective experiments, and share them.

The photo above is one of the structures from the Matanuska Colony, a 1930s Depression-era communal experiment funded by the US government. The barns, fields, other outbuildings, some of the families, and other elements of the Colony are visible today in this area just north of Anchorage.

The photo below is of Tamarack Knoll Community, founded a decade ago and still thriving in a rural area near Fairbanks. The Tamarack Knoll Community is an interesting example of modified form of intentional community, where individuals and individual groups can set up their own households in privately-owned dwellings on communally-owned land, while sharing at least a few evening meals and chores as a community. More and more, cooperative living groups are experimenting with alternative forms of decision-making, financial arrangements, and other matters of day-to-day life as a group.

Matters of gender, sexuality, race--and the organization of power around these matters--emerged early in the cooperative experiments of the 1960s-1980s. A key example of these types of communes are documented in the womyn's land movement, aka the lesbian land movement. Lesbian land collectives were my dissertation topic a decade ago. At one time, there were 200 lesbian land-based collectives in the US, but now there are probably fewer than a dozen that are truly cooperative and communal in their organization. The lesbian land movement founded a quarterly magazine that continues to publish, and now hosts blogs and other online resources for womyn (and, increasingly, others) who wish to share a life on land with others like themselves. The photo above shows women at an Oregon land trust at a board meeting.