This is a deep, powerful, effective installment of a winning white narrative. Why do all of our adopted educational textbooks leave out the Tulsa Massacre of 1921? Why is the relocation of indigenous people described as “voluntary” when their descendants call it the Trail of Tears? Why aren’t we taught about the bombs dropped on MOVE, a black liberation group, in Philadelphia in 1985? Now I have to question everything. We should all be questioning everything.
Read MoreThis is how it happens. This is how ancestral knowledge gets lost. How do you know who you are if you don’t know who—or where—you come from?
Read MoreThis is just the beginning of this reckoning. As amazed as I am at finding my own direct ancestor’s name in the First Census of the United States, I cannot share that fact without acknowledging how his name got there, and the distinct privilege of whiteness that exists by it being recorded anywhere at all.
Read MoreI had flown some 8,000 miles across vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean, stopping first in Honolulu, then Auckland, before finally arriving in Tauranga where my mother and step-father were waiting for me. Then the next morning, we drove another 8 or 9 miles to Grandad’s house. I didn’t really call him Grandad though. I called him David, my step-father’s father who I had met exactly once before, eight years ago.
Read MoreBut then I looked at her address. Nancy and Gram must have been neighbors.
Read MoreI come from a long line of women who have endured.
Their names fade now from weather-worn stones
their stories dissolve on their decaying lips
voiceless beneath the earth,
survival notched and nicked in their bones
where someone tried to break them.
My Italian was minimal at best, and Angela spoke no English, but in this moment, viewing the photos side-by-side this way, she said something with a sentiment I understood perfectly: Of course we’re family. What more proof do you need than photos like these?
Read MoreHow she managed to move on
from such unspeakable loss
I will never understand.
A new town
absent the stares
and the whispers of ghosts
and the seven tiny stones
of her babies’ graves
she began again.
It was in this existential compost heap that an idea was planted: maybe I could make sense of it all if I just understood who I came from.
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