Stephen Jenkinson, a white Canadian trained in theology at Harvard, best known for his writing and speaking about his work with people who are dying, has also reflected profoundly on what it is to be a non-Indigenous, a settler. He calls it being an “orphan,” a term that includes all the people uprooted from their ancestral homes for whatever reasons, whether it was by choice or not. The European settlers who came to the Americas are orphans, but so are the slaves they brought over, and so are the people lured to America’s shores in recent decades by the promise of work, wealth, and the
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