Communard Interview #9: Keenan Dakota

Keenan Dakota lives at Twin Oaks community in Louisa, Virginia.  He has been there since 1983.  Among other things, he has helped build several of the Twin Oaks buildings.  He is currently on leave from Twin Oaks and traveling around the country with his son, Rowan.  They visited Glomus Commune in June while I was still there and I interviewed both of them, separately.  We published my interview with Rowan in July. This is my interview with Keenan.

Raven:  Here’s my first question. How did you find out about community and how did you find out about Twin Oaks?

Keenan: When I was going to college, I was studying business management.  I was not interested in living in a commune. But I took an elective class on popular movements and active non violence. In that class, we had to do original research. And one of the parts of doing original research was to go on a tour of a commune that was just a few hours away. That sounded easy to me. As a business major, I thought I would have a good time just ripping apart the premises of this commune. So I went on a tour. I was shown around by Kelsey and she described how the systems work and how children were cared for and how old people were cared for and that there were businesses that were run on the property. And I couldn’t find anything obvious to make fun of. I thought, “You know, this makes a lot of sense.” So I thought about it. That summer, I went back for a three week visit. I was in the same visitor group as Kat Kincaid because she had left Twin Oaks and was returning. She and other people encouraged me to go back to college and get my diploma. (I was a junior.) So I went back for another year. It was an enlightening year and a challenging year. But I decided I didn’t want to have a foot in and a foot out. I didn’t want to hedge my bets. So at the end of June, the end of the school year, I still had two more classes to get my degree. Instead of taking those two classes, I went to visit Twin Oaks in May and then decided to join on July 10, 1983.  (Laughter.)

Raven:  What do you see as the joys and challenges of living in community?

Keenan: Well, one of the great things about living at Twin Oaks is taking care of children.  It is a great place to be a parent. It’s a great place to be a family. It’s a great place to raise children and it is a great place to be around children, if you don’t want to have children of your own. But also, Twin Oaks is a great place to be an old person. There’s a pension program and people who are aging get well taken care of and don’t have to worry about expenses or health care. But for most people, a lot of the benefits of living in community is the flexible work schedule.  You can get a lot of different types of work. You can gain a lot of different skills.There’s a lot of joy and not a lot of stress in the work environment.

Keenan and Rowan at Glomus

Raven:   What are the problems in living communally?

Keenan:  I have talked to a lot of ex-members of Twin Oaks and asked them, ”Why have you chosen not to live here?  You’re still friendly, you come over to visit.” Just to try to see if there’s any consistency in their answers. It turns out that the problems with living at Twin Oaks are about a loss of control. There’s a genuine loss of control over your immediate environment. I think it’s worth all the trade offs. But there are ex-members who say that they like going into the kitchen, and the only dirty dishes in the sink are the dirty dishes that they left there, and that they can decide to paint the room or take down a door or put up a door or put up a shelf without consulting with anybody or going through a meeting or hearing feedback about it. And I think that that is a legitimate issue about living in community.

I think the hardest thing about living in community is dealing with the opinions and emotions of other people and not being able to get a break from it. So when you just want to get a snack in the middle of the night, you might run into somebody that you’re having some emotional issues with.  The community is a little bit diverse so there’s going to be some diversity of opinion about anything. When I am doing something out Twin Oaks, even if I’m doing something I know most people like, I also know that I’m making somebody unhappy. And that’s hard. 

Once, when I went into another building, I thought I’d be nice, since I was waiting there, and I washed the dishes that were in the sink. Somebody came in after I was done. I was expecting praise for spending my own time washing their dishes.Instead, they said, “Who did all these dishes? That was the work I was supposed to do today! Now I have to go find other work.” So, even something as straightforward as when I think I’m going to help you, can get negative feedback. That happens all the time in the community. Even Kat Kincaid, at the end of her life, chose to live on her own in the house so she didn’t have to deal with unpleasant opinions of other people.

Raven: Okay, so what would you say would be the joys and challenges of actually income sharing?

Keenan: Well, the joys are, you’re never going to be poor. You’re never going to do without, you’re never going to not have health care, you never have to worry about finances next year or the year after that. For a lot of people that is like a huge burden lifted off of their shoulders. It’s like, “I’m going to be okay financially”. Even when the community is struggling, what we do is collectively tighten our belts and we get older vehicles and we don’t buy chocolate chips or we don’t have coffee. But the community itself doesn’t feel very different. It doesn’t feel like the community is taking this huge hit.

I think that’s the main benefit. We can say to somebody who’s walking in off the street, “For the rest of your life, you’re never going to be poor. You don’t have to worry about that.” That’s great. The main drawback is you’re never going to be rich. We can say to anybody, ”Whatever you see around you now is basically what’s going to be here for the next 30 or 40 years. Things might get a little bit better, but you’re not hitting the jackpot here. There might be newer vehicles, there might be a new building, but you are not going to be rich.” And for most people that is a huge turnoff. Even very poor people can maintain the fantasy that someday they’ll hit the jackpot. But in community, you don’t hit the jackpot. Instead what you have is a soup pot. Everybody gets a little bit of soup but there’s no jackpot.

Raven: How did you learn to be a builder and what have you built?

Keenan:  I love that you get to learn things at Twin Oaks and in community. Before I moved to Twin Oaks I had built a bookshelf.  Now I am a skilled, capable builder.  In the mainstream, if you’re going to take on any career, you have to get training.  If it’s being a plumber, an electrician, a doctor, a nurse, anything, you’re going to have to receive training and certification in that field. A huge amount of the training or the degree that is required is irrelevant of what you need to know in order to do the actual job. Most jobs are not that difficult to do. And these days with YouTube, you just look up on YouTube, like how do I lay tile and then half an hour you can know how to lay tile. The second benefit of being in community is that if you want to be a plumber, you just start fixing toilets. If you want to try building, you can just start building or doing building maintenance.  When I came to Twin Oaks, I wanted to learn how to do mechanical things, to learn how to build things. And basically I just started building things and when I had questions I would ask the experienced builders in the community, but mostly it was just filling up by doing it or reading a book. Back in those days you would read a book like Modern Carpentry about how to build. 

What I have built:  There’s the visitor building at Aurora. I was the co-honcho, building it with Alexis, who’s now at Living Energy Farm, and Gordon, who is now a dual member with Acorn and Twin Oaks. I was co-honcho with McCune in building Nashoba. I was the sole honcho of a very large warehouse building. I built a lot of swings and play structures. I really like building play structures that are multigenerational, that little kids can play on and adults can play on, and so there’s playgrounds all around Twin Oaks. I was in charge of building Appletree, which I built as a homeschooling project with my teen boys and the other teenage boy who was living in the community at the time, Elijah, who’s a planner now

Raven:   What other work do you do when you’re not building things?

Keenan:  What do I do? I like having a very flexible schedule. So, most of the time, my labor sheet is blank when I get it and I wake up in the morning and decide what I’m going to do. One of the things that I do is that I am the Trustee Manager, which is about acquiring furniture and fixing furniture for people’s rooms and moving furniture around. I do most of the road maintenance manager work because I like to stay in shape. Mostly that involves shoveling gravel  If the weather’s nice outside I go and shovel gravel and fill potholes for a few hours. That’s my workout for that day. I take care of some little kids at Twin Oaks, but I also do a construction class once a week for teenagers. What I tend to do is special projects. I’m also the conference site manager and I work at fixing up things there, which is why there’s a huge epic swing there and a zipline. So, come to the summer events and you can see the epic swing and the zipline.

I try to keep my schedule flexible so that if there are special projects that need doing, I can do the special projects. So each of my days is really very different from every other day. Somebody asks me to build a shelf in their room, or somebody asks me to take them to  the doctor that day. And because my schedule is more open than a lot of people, I often get pulled into things that require somebody who is not more scheduled.

Raven: You did an ‘Ask Me Anything’ on Reddit and it got a lot of views. What did you learn from that experience?

Keenan: I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never been on Reddit. I didn’t know what ‘Ask Me Anything’ was until somebody else set up the interview. Somebody else put the information on there. I thought if I get even a couple people asking questions, I’ll be happy to answer their questions. I was just floored when, like, literally thousands of people went online and were asking me questions. I was doing Reddit from a porch in Costa Rica where I was on vacation. 

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the comments showed a profound misunderstanding of intentional community. There was a lot of concern about what people thought was a lack of freedom at Twin Oaks.  There were a lot of fearful questions and concerns about the well being of the children. Of course, there are cults and there are places where children are unsafe. But, arguably, children are safer at Twin Oaks than they are in a Boy Scout troop or in the Catholic Church. I tried to correct those misunderstandings in my AMA. But I think a lot of people have prejudices about communal life. Many of them were fearful and were saying to other people, don’t go there because you’ll never get out.  We’re a 100 people living in the woods of Virginia. So far, this has not taken over the world. There’s not a lot to be afraid of.

Raven:  Yeah, I saw somebody who said, “Oh, that would never work.” Well, Twin Oaks has been doing it for 55 years. All right, so the final question I always ask is, is there anything else you want to say to Commune Life readers?

Keenan:  I’ve been around long enough that my opinion about a lot of things is already in the public domain. What I want folks to know is that the Communities Conference is coming up after not happening for a few years and I think that anybody who’s interested in communal life should come to the Communities Conference this September at Twin Oaks.