haha.
Yeah, I agree with you. I generally use the word family.
But even in a family, not everyone supports you and you can’t count on everyone and there may be people you don’t like even. I think the same is true for tribes. or bands even. I don’t need to get along with everyone in my family, just enough to feel supported.
That’s one of the reasons why I don’t like the word tribe, because I think most people assume that you have to agree with everyone and get along with everyone, or that you have to work with everyone who agrees with you. For example, there are lots of people in Portland who more or less want to rewild. But I think a lot of those people are assholes. Just because we are a rare breed, us-who-rewild, I assumed that I had to work with them. This always ended badly. Now-a-days I just work with people I work well with. Every time I started a “tribal business” it failed. As soon as we stopped seeing the businesses as tribes, but ships in a harbor, things started clicking. For example, a few ships in my harbor of Portland rewilding are TrackersNW and Mythmedia. TrackersNW is not my ship, but I can sail it once and a while to make some money. TonyD mostly takes care of the ship and takes it out on his own missions from time to time. I caretake the mythmedia ship, which I rarely take out but others have. What I have is a core group of friends who I love and who support each other, though sometimes we can’t work together on particular projects, we support each other. Sometimes we sail together, sometimes we let each other sail our ships, sometimes we go to another friend of ours ship who has nothing to do with anyone else.
The problem I think lies in defining the tribe. Where does the tribe start and where does it end? Like families, where do they start and end? Your cousin has a set of cousins who are not related to you at all. While your cousins are part of your blood family, your cousins cousins are not. Even a family you can’t readily define because each individual has a different relationship with everyone in the family and beyond.
A hunting band on the other hand, you can define. A crew on a ship, you can define. A team you can define. Because they are a core of people temporarily taking on a job. Everyone has a role in some sense or another to accomplish something.
Team, band and crew all have that temporary feeling that says, “if it doesn’t work, walk away.” Whereas the words “Tribe and Family” carry a kind of wieght that says, “Sorry, your stuck with us forever.”
A pitfall I have made (along with many other friends of mine) was to pick a handful of people and think of them as my “tribe.” That I couldn’t work with anyone on anything outside of the tribe, etc. But where do you limit the growth of it? What if I want to bring my whole family into the tribe? What if everyone wants to bring their whole family? Where does the line end and begin?
I don’t know. I don’t think you can draw a line around a family or a tribe or in cold, hard mechanical terms; a socio-economic network.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I spent years forming and failing at creating tribes until one day I gave up and realized that I was already part of a tribe; the network of family and friends and their family and friends and so on. And that all I had to do was learn to encourage and support a culture of rewilding among those people.
As far as making a living goes, everyone in my family and close friends chips in to help each other out. Where the money/food/support comes in doesn’t necessarily come from us working together (sometimes) but that we form our own bands to make money and than distribute it among our own networks or families.
Does that make sense to anyone? Please help me, I’m still working these ideas out of my head.