{"id":14208,"date":"2026-10-31T14:37:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T21:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oceanecology.ca\/wp\/?p=14208"},"modified":"2026-10-31T14:37:36","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T21:37:36","slug":"why-did-we-become-homesteaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oceanecology.ca\/wp\/2026\/10\/31\/why-did-we-become-homesteaders\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Did We Become Homesteaders?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

So, to tell a little more of my story \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

I was born a farmer\u2019s daughter in the small town of Lillooet, BC.\u00a0 I spent my first seven years on a cattle ranch where our cows grazed on mountain slopes while the Fraser River flowed languorously through its valley far below.\u00a0 Then my family moved to Alberta, where they farmed cattle in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, raising Angus cows fattened on grain grown and harvested on the farm.\u00a0 Fast forward a few more years, and we were now living in orchard country, growing apples, plums, and peaches beside the Similkameen River.\u00a0 Farming is in my blood.\u00a0 I come by my desire to live on the land naturally.<\/p>\n

Succession was once the norm\u2014the handing down of the land from parents to children, to be stewarded by the younger generation in their turn.\u00a0 Homesteading was once a way of life\u2014not industrial agriculture as we understand it now, where the sole purpose of cultivating the land is to generate a profit, but rather a gentler, more sustainable approach where the people cared for the land and the land fed the people.\u00a0 Now, not so much.\u00a0 My father grew up as the product of generations of farmers where succession was always passed to a son.\u00a0 After all, in British Columbia, women have only been able to own property since 1964, a bare two years before I was born.\u00a0 There were no sons in our family to inherit the land.\u00a0 Furthermore, like many farmers of his generation, my father only perceived the land as wealth\u2014his wealth, which would one day be his retirement income.\u00a0 So, succession was not mine to be had.\u00a0 I moved on, got a career, got a job, had many great adventures, but still felt the longing to return to the land.<\/p>\n

My partner and I were lucky.\u00a0 We were able to purchase a piece of land before the prices skyrocketed, and land became largely unaffordable to most people.\u00a0 In the eleven years since, we have grown roots and settled in, and learned to live in synchronicity with the seasons.\u00a0 Sadly, as we became more committed stewards of our land, the community around us began to decline.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is our land like?\u201d\u00a0 That is a question we are often asked.\u00a0 We have fifty acres of ocean front land eight miles up Port Neville Inlet.\u00a0 Our property is zoned silviculture, and has been logged for large timber back in the early 1900s, then clear cut about 30 years ago.\u00a0 It was not replanted, and is now naturally regenerating, mostly in alder at this stage.\u00a0 Originally, there was an old homestead on the property (early 1900s) that encompassed about ten acres of the fifty.\u00a0 Currently, our zoning allows us to have two houses on the property (e.g., two “families”), with no possibility of subdividing.\u00a0 We don’t have any real issues with the zoning … two families on fifty acres is just about right for a level of sustainability that allows a significant proportion of the land to be set aside as an \u201cecological reserve\u201d (e.g., to keep the environment healthy and not abuse the land and its resources).<\/p>\n

The lower ten acres of our land is marginally arable, composed mainly of rocky, silty soil on relatively steep slopes, and is subject to erosion in the heavy winter rains.\u00a0 However, with a gentle hand, the land will produce a yield, especially when working with practices such as perennial food forestry, agroforestry, non-timber forestry product harvesting, wild foraging, permaculture, and rewilding.\u00a0 Having said that, our land cannot support intensive agriculture, since the soil fertility rapidly depletes, followed by erosion, leaving nothing but little stones behind.\u00a0 We’ve lived here long enough to learn by experimentation!!<\/p>\n

The upper forty acres is steep and heavily forested.\u00a0 We have been intentionally leaving this portion to recover and rewild.\u00a0 We believe the land could sustainably support two families (e.g., maybe ten or so people), but not much more than that.\u00a0 We also believe that retaining large amounts of land in their \u201cwild\u201d and treed state is absolutely vital to combating the current situation of climate change and keeping our supporting ecosystems healthy and viable.\u00a0 So, the ten acres under agriculture to forty acres left wild works well for us in an ecological sense.<\/p>\n

Our beach is a mixture of sand, cobble, and mud.\u00a0 While not an \u201cexotic\u201d white sand beach, it is home to a great diversity of marine life, including many species of shellfish, such as cockles, clams, geoducks, and crabs.\u00a0 Five species of salmon swim up the Inlet to Fulmore Lake, and many types of waterfowl spend their winters in the Inlet\u2019s calm waters.\u00a0 Deer and elk graze on our land, and keystone predators are supported by the surrounding ecosystem.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is the Port Neville community like?\u201d\u00a0 This is another question that many people have asked us.\u00a0 In the absence of large sections of flat and highly productive farmland, the original community in Port Neville Inlet was quite spread out, composed of roughly 200 people in a number of small homesteads and two regions of slightly higher density \u201ctown sites\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the community in Port Neville has been in decline for many years, as has been happening in a number of small communities throughout Canada.\u00a0 I’ve spent some time pondering the issues that face these villages and homestead, especially the ones that I am familiar with.\u00a0 There seems to me to be two intertwined forces at work.\u00a0 The first issue is attrition, the bleeding away of community members, both young and old.\u00a0 Elders leave for health reasons.\u00a0 Young people leave because they want adventure, or see no hopes of a life or a career in their home community.\u00a0 Eventually the community shrinks to a size that is no longer sustainable, and finally just vanishes from the map.\u00a0 The second issue is the loss of vision, leading to a lack of resilience and an ability to adapt.\u00a0 These communities need to revision themselves in order to revitalize and recreate their purpose, to find their place in the world.\u00a0 Ultimately, if they could do that, people would no longer leave their home communities, but would find meaningful and fulfilling lives within the structure of the community.<\/p>\n

Over the past fifty or so years, most of the homestead sites in Port Neville have reverted back to crown ownership as people have left and taxes remained unpaid, thus they are no longer available on the market.\u00a0 With land claims and commercial interests, I’m not sure if any of these crown properties will ever become available to more than a very limited number of people\u2014mostly\u00a0 those who are not interested in living on the land, only in using it as a \u201cresource\u201d.\u00a0 During the past ten years, Port Neville has become a \u201cghost town\u201d.\u00a0 The majority of the remaining private properties are currently being held by absentee landowners, some from Alberta, some from the US, and a few from BC.\u00a0 These people visit their properties rarely, and do not participate in any \u201ccommunity\u201d activities.<\/p>\n

As the last remaining full time residents in Port Neville Inlet, it might seem that the best solution for us would be to sell our remote homestead to someone with plenty of money, and use the profit to buy land which is closer to services, accessible by road, and near some sort of community.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the qualities which make our land unique, and which we love so much, cannot be replaced, dollar-for-dollar and value-for-value by a property that is, for example, five miles from Campbell River.\u00a0 If we could have bought fifty acres of land with road access and a nearby marina for our boat using the money we had ten years ago (back when properties were much cheaper than they are today), we would have.\u00a0 It was not possible then, and even less so now, even with the profit we might make by selling our current property.<\/p>\n

However, we have not given up the hope of re-envisioning our community.\u00a0 We totally understand that we cannot recreate the community that was once here.\u00a0 Those days are gone\u2014the access to the land is gone, the steamships that used to service the community are gone, the people are gone.\u00a0 However, we know historically that people could live in small villages and homesteads on this coast, and be happy.\u00a0 Small communities (of the size fifty to two hundred people) were once quite common on this coast, and isolated homesteads were also the norm.\u00a0 You can find the remains of these homesteads all over the coast (and I have visited quite a few over the years).\u00a0 Small indigenous summer camps and \u201cmicro-villages\u201d (less than fifty people) were also quite common.\u00a0 These smaller clusters of humanity survived, not by growing, but by interacting with each other and the larger communities to which they were closest.\u00a0 One might visualize this like a web of connections (a \u201cfood web\u201d, if you like).\u00a0 This is what we are trying to recreate.\u00a0 At the moment, our hopes are largely to get as many people back into the Inlet as we can, whether through purchase of the remaining private lots, in sharing arrangements with folks like us, or as \u201clive in\u201d caretakers for the properties now owned by absentee foreign owners (and which are quickly falling to ruin through lack of maintenance and stewardship).\u00a0 We would be very happy just to see the old homesteads that were active ten years ago become active again.\u00a0 At that time, we had a healthy set of connections going where neighbors helped neighbors, and we would like to see that here again.<\/p>\n

We strongly support the concept of a \u201cnetwork of villages\u201d.\u00a0 We’ve been in touch with several other Vancouver Island initiatives for \u201cintentional communities\u201d, not because we wish to join their communities, but because we want to make connections that can allow us to share ideas, resources, services, etc.\u00a0 We need that to survive what will be coming … there is change in the air, and our current sociopolitical environment is slowly eroding.\u00a0 Connections make for resilience, something that will help us cope with an uncertain future.<\/p>\n

One of the issues facing us in the future is the process of aging on our homestead.\u00a0 We are totally committed to what we are doing here.\u00a0 Whether we find someone to take over the stewardship of our land when we pass or not, whether we have assistance or not, we have chosen to \u201cage in place\u201d.\u00a0 For us, this is not a discussion point.\u00a0 We are not interested in returning to the city (been there, done that).\u00a0 However, aging in place is a challenge in our location. \u00a0We are sixteen miles by boat from Sayward, so getting in and out of town can be something of a hassle, particularly in bad weather.\u00a0 In spite of this, historically, many elders living in the region often achieved ages of 80 to 90 years or more.\u00a0 That being said, if an emergency does come up, Coast Guard can deliver a person to the Campbell River hospital in less than forty minutes. \u00a0A reasonably healthy person has nothing to fear in the life that we lead.\u00a0 However, a person requiring extensive medical intervention on a regular basis (e.g., dialysis, oxygen) is not going to be able to survive in a remote location like ours.\u00a0 Most elders these days leave their homesteads not because they are currently suffering health issues, but because they fear the possibility of having a serious health problem and not having any assistance … which is why having a supportive community around our elders is so important in enabling them to age in place.\u00a0 At the same time, elders who wish to age in place must develop the capacity to face death, which comes to us all in time, with grace and acceptance.\u00a0 This is something our current society does extremely poorly, and the push for life extension technology at the loss of quality of life is hard to fight against.\u00a0 We need to learn how to go gently amongst family and friends.\u00a0 Quality of life is far, far more important than quantity.\u00a0 As an aside, many of the elders I have know who leave their rural homes to move to the city where there is \u201cimmediate\u201d medical assistance do not live long lives, often passing within a couple of years. \u00a0The stress of no longer being \u201cat home\u201d takes its toll.<\/p>\n

Given the remoteness of our location and the declining community, people have asked us \u201cWhy would anyone want to live there?\u201d\u00a0 I’m going to address that shortly.\u00a0 However, it’s worth noting that in the six or so years that we have been trying to get a person(s) to share our land with us, we have had numerous people, many of whom were definitely like-minded, and some of whom I still communicate with regularly, who would have happily joined us if they could.\u00a0 Sadly, most of these people were responsible enough to realize that they had commitments (to family, community, property, jobs, etc.) that prevented them from making the \u201cbreak\u201d and taking us up on our offer.\u00a0 Of course, we’ve also had a number of people approach us who were clearly unsuitable, largely due to addictions, health problems, instabilities, and personal crises.\u00a0 Many people think that by jumping from a troubled situation into a new, fresh situation, they can leave all their problems behind.\u00a0 Unfortunately, that seldom works.\u00a0 So … our problem is not so much finding the right person as it is finding the right person at the right stage in their life for making a big transition.<\/p>\n

So, why would someone come to our homestead?<\/p>\n