In place of the ephemera and boosterism of national mythmaking and official histories, a solid idea seemed to be forming about where we live and how this land came to be available to settlers like me—and what it might take to finally be good guests and neighbors, without all the denial required of lives built on not-seeing and not-knowing. “An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought,” James Baldwin wrote. However, “to accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use
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