The following letter was published in THE FREE PRESS, The Farm's newspaper.
The Farm is a 250 member hippie
counter-cultural community located near Summertown, Tenn.. Some hippies settled there in 1971.
Transplants from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury
acid scene, they arrived in a caravan of 50 or so brightly painted live-in school buses. The Farm
once had 1500 members, and according to their
spiritual mentor, Stephen Gaskin, was going to be a demonstration project for a sustainable
future, a nonviolent ecofriendly cooperative
community of pioneers ushering in a new age.
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Call for help
by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer
2003
Greetings from Wahkon, Minnesota, a village indirectly named after the Mdewakanton Dakota's (Great)
Spirit. I was a San Francisco Bay area hippy
when Stephen Gaskin's commune originated and then moved to Tennessee.
While in the San Francisco Bay area, I, and a friend of mine who knew Stephen Gaskin and attended
Monday Night Class, were, along with some other
hippy friends of ours, forming into a commune, so that we could, in imitation of Stephen Gaskin's
commune, move to a rural location.
We were successful at establishing a small commune, and we then moved to Wahkon,Minnesota. Our
commune soon came to an end; but I remained in Wahkon,
and it was not long after the breakup of our commune that I developed a worldview behind the word
wahkon, more commonly spelled wakan.
For 35 years. I have been trying to re-establish the original commune, and it looks like it could
come together again, in the near future. Note;
My friend who knew Stephen Gaskin and attended Monday Night Class is now an internationally known
environmentalist. His web site is:
www.CARTERCARE.com/care.
Recently, the Board of Directors of an international Native American organization representing over
300 tribes came out in public support for my
movement to change the name of a Minnesota river that is derogatory toward Native Americans. It's
derogatory because the white men's "punning
translation" name for the river is (according to Minnesota Historical Society files) a profanation
of the ancient Sioux name for the river (Wakan).
The primary purpose of this letter is to solicit The Farm's support for the name-change of this
badly named Minnesota river, the Rum River.
There is a temporary and under construction web site for the Rum River name-change movement. It's:
http:/7free. hostdepartment. com/M/Mdewakanton/. The new web site will be http://towahkon.org/. Thank
you for your time.
Thomas I. Dahlheimer
P.O. Box 24 - Wahkon, Minnesota 5638
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