In the Upper Country

by Kai Thomas

I yearned for nature, as I mentioned, but that yearning was beginning to crystallize as a desire for a meaningful connection to land. And land, I was learning, is rarely void of human belonging, even if it seems that way to the untrained eye. I began to understand my black identity as an inheritance of enslavement, yes, but first and foremost of the theft of African peoples’ connection to land—in other words, the theft of indigeneity. How intriguing the relationship might be then, between black and Indigenous peoples—peoples whose relationships to land had been profoundly interrupted by colonialism in parallel yet distinct ways.