George Price (left, with his wife, Barb) grew up in a family of modern middle class Americans of diverse Indigenous ancestries (Wampanoag, Choctaw, unknown Indigenous African, French, British) whose connections to and memories of Indigenous cultural traditions had been nearly completely obliterated. They pursued the so-called “American Dream” almost unquestioningly, but George rebelled against all of that, beginning around  age 13.

 

He says, “I did not realize it at the time, but what I was yearning for and trying to do was to decolonize and re-indigenize my mind. But we lived far away from our Indigenous homelands and did not know our relatives in those places. We lived in Los Angeles and spent some time nearly every year visiting relatives in Berkeley and San Francisco. Being in California in the 1960s helped me to sense that there was possibly a very different, better way to live, but I did not know what that would be. Mother Earth was calling me.”

 

In the late 1960s he became a socialist and helped start a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (a precursor to Democratic Socialists of America) in his high school and  actively protested the Vietnam War. When he turned 18 he refused to register for the draft and soon after registered as a conscientious objector. In 1970, after participating in the first Earth Day event, he went to live on a commune near the North Cascades National Park in Washington for a year, then joined another commune in Oregon.

He and Barb, who would become his wife, left that commune in 1973 to live on their own for awhile and start their family. They returned to semi-communal living in 1981 in an intentional community southeast of Eugene, Oregon, until they moved with their four children to the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, in 1985. That is when they began living with the five-acre farm that they still live on now — as he says, “the place we belong to. We have done a lot of habitat regeneration work here, including creating wetlands and forests, and we also cultivate some food crops, for life, not for money.” 

 

You’ll need to register to join the Zoom meeting. Soon after the event we’ll post the lightly edited video on our YouTube channel.

 

The conversation will be guided by Ethan, who is interested in questions hovering within and between the related areas of land justice, food sovereignty, agroecology, political ecology, ecosocialist political theory, and environmental ethics. Broadly speaking: how to understand the historical roots of the polycrisis we face, and how to bring about greater justice, peace, interpersonal growth, and quality of life amidst the challenges. He holds an M.A. in environmental philosophy from the University of Montana.