Originally published in Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1995
Reprinted in "Cities, Cultures, Conversations" (Allyn and Bacon, 1998) and "Reading City Life" (Pearson Longman, 2005)
by Jim Burklo
A CLUSTER OF HUTS, ALL BLUE TARPS AND BLACK PLASTIC BAGS straggles along the creek that demarcates Palo Alto and Menlo Park, California. This camp has been functioning since I came to town in 1979. It functioned as a home for the homeless during the seven years that I served as director of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto, which offers hospitality and other services to people on the streets. I now live about a quarter of a mile from this camp, and pass it every day on my way home from my job as the minister of a church. I check in with the residents of this camp whenever I check out books at the Menlo Park Library, which offers hot and cold running water in its bathrooms and is not far down the railroad tracks from the creek.
Looming on the top of the creek bank above the camp is the Stanford Park Hotel, an expensive place for a different kind of homeless people to stay. It is a place for people to sleep and eat and use hot and cold running water while they do business with high-tech industrial corporations. The people who stay at the Stanford Park Hotel have the money and skills needed to live most anywhere, and as a result, a lot of them live nowhere. So much of their lives is spent in hotels, airport shuttles, and jet aircraft that they suffer from homelessness. They have houses somewhere, but often they lack homes anywhere. The people sleeping under the tarps and plastic bags in the creek bed below them have homes, but lack houses. There is little romance in the houseless homeless life, as I learned in my work with people on the streets. But in a striking way, homeless people are more at home than the rest of us. According to the jet-setters who are members of my church, there isn't much romance in global nomadism, either. The people in the creek are indigenous, unlike the inter-urban wanderers who stay in the Stanford Park Hotel. The people living in the creek bed belong to a certain "home slice" of a specific geographic radius within which they have found ways to survive, within which they have synchronized themselves with the natural and social seasons. They know whom to trust and whom to avoid, where to get free food and clothes, which dumpsters contain the items they most need. People often asked me why the folks we served at Urban Ministry didn't move to Fresno or Modesto or other places where the cost of living is lower. I'd answer that homeless people, ironically, tend to be homebound. Most folks who live in houses are part of a mass culture, a world culture, that enables us to be unbolted from Palo Alto or Menlo Park, California, and twisted into place in Boston or Singapore or Atlanta or London. Our skills and our lifestyles are useful and acceptable just about anywhere, making us interchangeable parts in the world economic machine. We communicate with money, a language that most people everywhere understand well.
A few homeless people aren't indigenous -- they are on the streets temporarily, as a result of a personal disaster of a transitory nature. Often, these folks adamantly refuse to be called homeless, even though they live in the bushes like the rest. They are still interchangeable nuts belonging to the world economic engine; they just happened to spin off their bolts and land in the gutter for a while, and in the meantime, they cling tenaciously to their passports as world citizens. If they stay in the gutter too long, they might become indigenous, a fate which frightens them. These people tend to be more isolated and emotionally upset than the long-term houseless people around them. They are acutely homeless, in every sense of the word, and often this suffering motivates them to rapidly return to jobs and houses again. But few homeless people are interchangeable, portable economic units of the New World Order. Moving out of the hometown is a frightening prospect for someone so dependent on such a locally idiosyncratic web of delicate social and natural ecology. Most homeless people can't speak the global language of money. Their survival depends on intimate knowledge of a set of locally specific individuals -- other homeless people, cops, storekeepers, library employees, and social service workers.
Some of the most "homeful" people I know are technically homeless. At Urban Ministry, we served a 93-year-old woman who, for a period of months, slept on a park bench at night. She'd been kicked out of the residential hotels in town because she was a pack rat and never cleaned her rooms. We had no trouble finding board and care placements for her, but she refused them, because they were in Mountain View, the next town to the south. "I live in Palo Alto," she bluntly informed us, and returned to her park bench until we persuaded the managers of the subsidized senior housing in her hometown to let her name jump the waiting list and get her a place indoors again. Practically every merchant in town knew her well, since, at her plaintive request, many of them were storing her moldy boxes in their storerooms so that neither she nor her possessions would be separated from her place of residence, which was the whole of downtown Palo Alto. Until she died, she was a town character who made a major contribution to the character of the town. Palo Alto really isn't the same without her smiling ancient face greeting people on the sidewalks.
"Indigenous" need not connote "indigence." It is not a term that necessarily indicates poverty or houselessness. It is a mistake to presume that only seniors or disabled or houseless or unemployable people are homebound. Whether poor or rich, indigenous people have characteristic relationships to specific geographic places. They belong where they are, and where they are belongs to them -- or ought to belong to them. If they go elsewhere, by force or by choice, they tend to suffer physically, psychologically, and spiritually. But being indigenous doesn't have to be a crippling or marginalizing condition on home turf.
Each local place has its characters, upon whom the character of the place depends. Each place has people who have developed roles or businesses that are site-specific. Their skills and their habits are not geographically transferable. They might be able to move elsewhere and have the money to live for a while, or even for a long time. But, emotionally, they would dry up inside. Many older people with money retire and move, only to discover too late that they are indigenous to their home towns. Outside of a given geographic radius, life makes no sense to them.
In today's world economy it is not considered safe to be indigenous. Our places in the system are temporary assignments, subject to the whims of global forces. To become indigenous is to risk losing a place anywhere, including one's dwelling "unit." We're accustomed to the global economic system. We are attached to its material abundance, even as our souls groan at the loss of any real home on the planet. But to embrace the indigenous life is a bold move that has deep pleasures and rewards for self and others. There is a wonderful intimacy that results from the face-to-face, year-in and year-out relationships that can only come by acting as if you are indigenous to a local place. The great attraction, and the great revulsion, that people have toward rural life is the prospect of becoming dependent on a local culture, to the exclusion of being able to fit into the world economy ever again.
I became a minister in order to create and sustain indigenous societies, groups of people who belong to each other in a local urban area over a long period of time. A lot of the volunteers who came to help us at Urban Ministry were spiritually homeless people with jobs and homes, yearning to taste the fruits of indigenous living.
They were attracted to the sense of belonging to a place that exists among people who live on the streets. In fact, I noticed that volunteering with us was an excellent way for newcomers to Palo Alto to get to join the town and its people. It's ultimately impossible to know the streets without knowing the street people.
I went to work as the minister of a local church in order to serve homeless people who live in houses as well as in creek beds. I'm in a church because it is not a support group or a therapy group, made up of people who are looking for something specific from each other, for a specific period of time, before moving on to the next group. A church or temple is a place where people go for good, for keeps, for birth and life and death. I'm interested in organized religion only insofar as it creates and maintains deep and intimate relationships in a community of people who have come together to live indigenously, for good. Understandably, lots of people -- particularly those who want to fit in anywhere on earth, in any nation or culture -- fear the sectarian nature of most religious congregations, the proprietary language and habits that go with people who have strong links to tradition and to a local church or synagogue community. People are afraid to give up their homelessness, much as they suffer from it. People will hang tribal masks on the walls of their condos, but they are afraid of wearing the masks and doing the indigenous rituals in which they were used. And people are afraid of having a home that is so precious to them that they would have a hard time leaving it when they receive New World Orders to move elsewhere.
I'm haunted by the words of a man who attends the church I serve. He's a Ph.D. with a job in a high-tech Silicon Valley firm. He said that if he had to go to another office party where people did nothing but exchange small-talk, another gathering of people who had no intimacy and no real connection with each other, he would scream. I heard his soul crying out for a place to call home, a specific local circle of people worth taking the risk of depending upon for his spiritual survival. A place and a people that, if he left them, would render him heartsick.
One of the marks of indigenous people is the persistent presence of annoying people among them. A church is not an indigenous community unless there are a few people in it who are permanent thorns in the sides of the rest of its members. One of the marks of non-indigenous societies is that they throw out obnoxious participants, or the societies fall apart because the rest of the participants leave and join or create other groups. At the Urban Ministry, we had our share of annoying homeless people who drank coffee at our drop-in center every day. They reminded me that I belonged to a truly local community of indigenous human beings. Go to a city council meeting anywhere, and listen to the people who speak during the part of the meeting devoted to "oral communication" from citizens. Listen to the ones who go up to the mike week after week, causing consternation or irritation among the council members. Those oral communicators are indigenous people. If they weren't there at the city council meeting, you would know that your town was a stone-cold-dead suburb, a place belonging everywhere, and, thus, to nobody.
A place cannot hope to be home to anyone unless there are people in that place who are indigenous to it. People who are gears in the global clockwork yearn deeply for the sentiments that come from indigenous living, but fear that they would have to give up too much in order to live that way themselves. Avoiding eye contact, they will pass by local houseless indigenous people, and they will proceed on their way to shop for conversation pieces at the ethnic art store. As they commute from faceless condos to faceless tilt-up industrial headquarters buildings, they will listen to Garrison Keillor on the car radio as he describes the latest doings among the indigenous citizens of mythical Lake Wobegon. To create a homey atmosphere, spiritually homeless people will buy antiques from quaint locations. They will travel to charming spots for vacations and "leave their hearts" with the indigenous residents, who have the good sense to keep their own hearts where they keep their bodies -- at home.
In my travels, I have observed that the greater the number of indigenous people in a place, the fewer houseless people there are in that place, relative to the population. In a culture of people who can live anywhere, and, thus, live nowhere in particular, you will find a subset of people who are reduced to living on the streets. In a culture of people who really live where they are, who are living in a permanent manner and are dependent on the local people around them, there is a social web that prevents all but a very few folks from having to live outdoors. The houseless homeless are our canaries. When they fall into the creek bed, the rest of us need to pay attention to what has become of our communities, and take the risks and rewards that come from making the choice to live indigenously in them.