@akjcv i find it interesting that this person says “It is a million specific places that human communities must relate to, each of them different” and yet, (1) never bothers to actually position THEMSELVES, speaking only of a nameless forest and childhood memories which could be transposed across any number of forests and any number of childhoods, and (2) goes on to talk about “white people” as tho they are all the same, or at least, presently, mostly interchangeable. is that right? certainly, white people are bound together by their mistakes, their colonialisms and settlements, their historic wielding of power; that is what makes them white.

but were all the people who walked those paths the same people? or were they, as the contemporary american scholars would have it, a great many different people, who gave up (or were pressured to give up) their individual identities in exchange for a privileged, and more liveable, place in society’s orders?

and do all those who descend from those people form the same people? or is there, perhaps, a difference between those who grew up in the humid midatlantic swamps versus the cold deserts of the inland northwest? is the land not also, perhaps, part of what raised us, and part of the culture to which we belong? (i think the piece is arguing in favour of this one)