Summary Of Immune By Jonathan Berman

Commune, made by filmmaker Jonathan Berman, is a documentary about the beginnings and risings of Black Bear Ranch in 1968. The commune was created in response to the high amounts of injustice, protesting, and desire for change. Although there were many communes at the time, Black Bear Ranch was special due the large amounts of film and photographs that were taken there, in the early 70’s. In my opinion, the most important point that the director was trying to portray in the film was the reality of commune life; not the romanticized, Woodstock, granola hippy shit that most people think about when they think about the 70’s. Cedar described his first encounter with Black Bear men as not your typical Haight street hippies. The commune was created as a cultural and political response to the current situations occurring in America and most of the members were anarchists. The Nearing’s started their back to the land journey in the 40’s: a time where not a lot of people were doing this sort of thing in contrast to the mass amounts of communes being made in the late 60’s. I believe the Nearing’s and Black Bear both had the same

There’s an article by Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a native American woman, Called “Decolonizing the Black Bear Ranch Hippie Commune”, written earlier this year. This article articulates her, and many other natives’ views towards the 70’s hippie movement. They personally believe that the hippies were thefts then in a way we currently call cultural appropriation. “Hippies flocked to Indian reservations searching for Indian wisdom” but they then took that knowledge and bought cheap lands, stolen from “the very people they were trying to emulate”. Black Bear ranch is a piece of this stolen property and many are asking them the question that if its stolen land, can it really be “ free land for free