“After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores.
They look at the toll on the land and say,
“The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.” This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past.
America has been called the home of second chances. For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second
Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants,
learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?”