“Nations themselves are narrations,” Edward Said wrote in Culture and Imperialism. Our narration wasn’t holding. That spring and early summer was like a national excavation, digging deeper than ever before in my lifetime. Interestingly, I experienced it as the opposite of vertigo. 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
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