Who Gets to Move

Observations · RootedNomad · October 17, 2026

What the word nomad means to a Maasai herder, a Lakota bison hunter, an explorer, and a digital nomad, and who gets to move across the land.

In 2017, I drove around Ngorongoro Crater, through Maasai land. It reminded me of a reservation in the western United States. Not one in particular. Just broadly.

It was an association, not an argument. The histories are different, and at the time I didn't know much about Tanzania's. But the comparison has stayed with me.

I put the word nomad in this brand's name, so it seems fair to look at it closely. It comes from the Greek nomas, roaming in search of pasture. Before it was a lifestyle or a hashtag, it was a way of following grass. Movement wasn't the point in itself. It was how life continued. Today, the word is more likely to bring to mind a laptop than a herd.

Following the grass

Maasai and Samburu are pastoralist nomads. Cattle, goats, and sheep are wealth, food, and the ties between families. In dry country, grass grows where the rain falls, so herds move: to dry-season grazing, to water, and back again when the rains return. That movement isn't wandering. It's knowing where the grass will be, carried across generations. For that knowledge to work, the herds needed room, and Maasai grazing once ranged across much of the Rift Valley.

Then lines arrived. Colonial borders ran through Maasai country. In what is now Kenya, agreements with the British in 1904 and 1911 moved the Maasai off much of their best grazing and, in the end, onto a single reserve in the south. Settler farms took the land. Movement that had followed the rain now stopped at a boundary. The Maasai went to court over the second move. In 1913, the case was dismissed. The court said the agreements were acts of state it could not review. It never ruled on whether they were fair.

Following the herds

On the other side of the world, a different people followed a different herd.

Not every Native nation in North America was nomadic. But on the Great Plains, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, and others moved with the bison across hundreds of miles of open grass, first on foot and later on horseback.

Lines arrived there, too. In 1868, the Fort Laramie Treaty set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills. Gold was found there in 1874, and in 1877, Congress took the Hills. Meanwhile, the bison, once tens of millions, fell to fewer than a thousand. With the herds gone, and under military and political pressure, the nations who had followed them were confined to reservations. People whose lives had moved across the Plains now lived inside lines drawn by someone else. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled the taking of the Black Hills unlawful and awarded compensation. The Lakota have refused the money. They want the land back.

Reserve, reservation

The Lakota and the Maasai didn't live the same life. A Maasai family raises its cattle and passes them down. The bison belonged to no family, but they were bound up with Lakota food, shelter, ceremony, and relationships.

What they share is the question at the center of this piece. Both depended on moving across open grassland. In both places, governments drew lines around land and decided who may use it, who may cross it, and who must stay, then changed those lines when other interests prevailed. In Kenya it was called a reserve. In the United States, a reservation. Different institutions, different laws, a similar shape. When the land was fenced, the bison were gone, and the Lakota way of life could not continue as it had. The Maasai still have their cattle, but their way of life is also dependent on access to the land.

That access is still being narrowed. In Tanzania, Maasai were moved out of the Serengeti when it became a national park, and Ngorongoro was set aside as a place where people, livestock, and wildlife would share the land. Since 2022, the government has been relocating Ngorongoro residents elsewhere and calls the moves voluntary. Human Rights Watch concluded in 2024 that they were far from voluntary. In northern Kenya, community conservancies on Samburu land have brought income to some and closed off grazing for others, and the argument goes on.

Driving through Ngorongoro in 2017, I didn't know most of this. But I recognized the shape of it.

From explorer to digital nomad

Then there's the explorer, who moved for a different reason. The herder moves to keep a herd alive. The explorer has always moved to discover. In the age of exploration, the explorer also moved to name and claim. Speke reached Lake Victoria and named it for his queen. Explorers were often brave and curious, but many traveled with the backing of an empire, and their maps showed others where to go next.

The pith helmet faded. The idea that going far away makes you someone did not. Over the next century, travel became something more people could buy for themselves. Then laptops and the internet made it something people could work through. By the 1990s, that new traveler had a name, and it borrowed the herder's word: the digital nomad.

The digital nomad doesn't need an empire. The backing is quieter: a passport that opens doors, an income earned somewhere else, an employer who doesn't mind where you are.

Not everyone can get that backing, even people who already do the same work.

In Kenya, much of the work of training AI happens in large digital work facilities. A Kenyan who wants that work usually has to apply to a local company that bids on contracts from the United States or Europe. In 2023, TIME reported that Kenyan workers labeling data for OpenAI through one such contractor earned between about $1.32 and $2 an hour. A worker in the United States might sign up for an app, pass an assessment, and earn $20 or more an hour judging AI responses, without a specialist degree. A worker in Kenya may be shut out of that same opportunity by the platform's country restrictions, whatever their ability to do the work.

The work is the same. The freedom to move with it is not. That depends on the passport you carry, the visas you can get, and where you were born. Even the words change with the direction of travel. When someone from the North moves South, they are an expat. When someone from the South moves North, they are an immigrant.

Since 2020, a growing number of countries have created visas just for digital nomads. Some of what follows is good. People meet, and money reaches places that need it. Some of it is harder. In some cities, residents have linked rising rents to the arrival of remote workers.

One kind of movement is now marketed as freedom, and countries compete to attract it. The older kind is more often discussed as a problem of land use, conservation, and settlement.

Put the three side by side and look at what a border means to each. For the herder, a border is a line across the grass, and the herd has to stop at it. For the explorer, borders were there to be crossed, and later to be drawn. For the digital nomad, a border is a passport check, and a growing number of countries have built a visa to wave them through.

Same word. Very different freedom.

Where that leaves me

Movement became part of who I am because it has been the shape of my life.

I know my passport opens doors that many people's don't. I can cross borders that others cannot.

I follow life, and my life is in the soil, the herds, and the wild places.

Movement isn't simply freedom. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes it is imposed. Sometimes it is a privilege. And sometimes the freedom that matters most is the freedom to remain where you belong.

When I called this RootedNomad, I was reaching for a way to name a life where movement and rootedness have never been opposites. I'm still learning what that asks of me, what the word has come to mean, and whose lives we see, or stop seeing, when we use it.

So I'll leave you with the questions I keep asking myself. When you hear nomad, who comes to mind? When you move, what are you following? Who made it possible for you to go? And who is still following the grass, with less room every year?

Wander deeply. Live rooted.

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