I've never felt like I was "from" a place, or connected to a physical/geographical location the way so many other people seem to be. Even my parents, and most of my family have a relationship with the place they were born, the place they grew-up which somehow connects them to it but for me it just seems like a random coincidence.
A city, a state, a country, none of this has any personal meaning to me. I'd like to say that it's because I was in many ways alienated from the place I grew-up, but I don't think it's as simple as that. The things that alienated me have either subsided or are things I've since overcome but I still don't feel connected to that place the in a way that feels like what others talk about when they speak of their home, their roots or where they belong.
Over the years I've heard and read a lot of stories about the importance of this type of connection, staying connected to a place or reconnecting with it when that connection is lost. This is particularly strong in the stories and literature I read about Native American culture. I've recently been learning more about this from both media and native folks I've met online and it's because of this that I've been spending more time trying to understand why this seems to be missing from me.
What I've come to realize is that for me this might not be a physical space, but perhaps a virtual one. While I deeply connect to nature and the outdoors when I think about the times I've felt like part of something those times were spent in non-physical spaces. While I know that I need natural, physical contact to survive and thrive, I'm starting to believe that the place I'm "from" might exist in another space: cyberspace.
This might also explain the visceral, even violent reaction I have to people threatening that space, be that by carving it up and laying claim to it, constraining access to it or poisoning it with bad code and disinformation. These threats harm not only cyberspace but it's inhabitants, both the people who are from there and those who are "just visiting".
There is a movement in indigenous cultures known as Land Back. I first became familiar with this reading about Native Americans in the United States and witnessed the graffiti while traveling in the western U.S.. I've been reminded of it while watching Reservation Dogs, and during a most recent re-watch of the series it hit me that there are similarities between the motivations and actions of the Land Back movement and those of myself and my peers to pry back the Internet and cyberspace from those who see it as nothing more than a way to make money and control people.
To be crystal clear: I'm not trying to equate the nightmare of colonization, torture and genocide that was inflicted upon the Native Americans by the United States government and its people to the commercialization of the Internet. What I'm acknowledging is similarities between the impact both have on a people and a place, and how strategies for making things right might be shared between the two movements even if their human impact differs by many orders of magnitude.
Could the idea, philosophy and strategies of Land Back be applied to the experiences and threats to the open and free Internet, or perhaps any non-physical, virtual space? As someone who is increasingly identifying as being "from" there, I want to explore the possibility.
