I read this post my friend Ian wrote last month, and it’s stuck with me. He speaks of documentary film makers and what they bring back from travel. And he talks of how much you can be from Maine while not being entirely from Maine. New England is a place of small villages and deep roots. We do have a habit of playing an escalating arms war of who is a ‘real’ resident. Mainers and Vermonters habitually complain about hordes of Massholes, and all of us look at Connecticut with a squint. It’s full of Yankees fans, after all. The one-upsmanship requires that we ignore those other even older natives, the missing Algonquins and Mohicans who were here before the clapboard Congregational churches went up on town greens.
I am more definitively from a single place than Ian — I was born in the same city limits as my parents and grandparents, in the heart of the ignored part of Massachusetts. Some of their lines go back further, all in that same town. My other ancestors cluster close, split between New England and Quebec and old Acadie for most of the last four centuries after they skimmed over the Atlantic. One slender branch of my personal tree goes back much further, because a Mik’maw forbear married into those Acadiens.
I wonder coyly if that ancestor earns me a free pass from performative stolen land acknowledgements. I suspect not — but on what basis? Blood quantum? That’s a dangerous game. Lack of cultural continuity? That’s mostly the fault of others — and if I dove headfirst into correcting that by learning tribal lore, I’d surely get those same dirty looks. It’s also jarring to speak in terms of unceded tribal land claims, when most tribes rejected the concept of permanent ownership in the first place.
So I’m firmly from a place. But the place I’m from is a hard one. Its great era of economic opportunity ended decades before I was born. For years now, its main exports have included intelligent children. Almost all the kids I grew up with are elsewhere. And the place wasn’t notable for its kindness to its queer children when I was a kid. If we can only be from the place of our birth, what happens to those of us who can’t ever feel at home when at home? Do we have to wander the world unwelcome, or stay at home unwelcome in a different way?
So I hear the protests about overtourism, and they do resonate. I have grumbled when I cannot see the lights on the canals in Venice because some asshat in bad fitting clothes is shouting into their livestream in front of me. I dream routinely of being the only person at a place of beauty or peace, and get irrationally outraged when the next visitor comes up behind me. I hiked twelve miles to get here and have some peace! This spot is MINE!
But there’s exactly one practical way to limit travelers: make it cost more. Any other system would just become that. Travel would become the province of the rich even more than it is already. Maybe it would give us a Venice with more Venetians and fewer gawking crowds annoying the hell out of me. But then, how is a city built on a lagoon as a trading nexus itself without hordes of visitors? Venice has never been a place where just one language is spoken. If it ever becomes one, that’s when it truly sinks.
I step back and ask: what is culture if it is not shared? I’ve always understood ‘appropriation’ as a problem when one group can make a living or fame off elements of culture, while another group is barred from the chance. The trouble isn’t the transmission, it’s the barrier. It’s not fixed by building another. Otherwise, the rule becomes “you can only do the thing you’re born to.”
Do art and music really pass down through DNA? Do places no human actually created — a mountain, a river — really give people born there some magic claim forever down their line? And if so, which millennium is dispositive for those claims? That gives a modern Greek veto power over who can read Homer, and then revokes it if it turns out that Greek’s ancestors migrated from Scythia a thousand years after Homer lived.
And then we face darker questions, of what happens to those who come from an island that is submerged by earthquake, or a forest burned out by the lightning, or a plain that has become a desert? Nature has spoken and taken their ancestral homeland; so is it our duty to finish the job with some politely phrased genocide?
I’m a stranger often. I nomad a lot, a probable side effect of that childhood in a place short on hope and futures, and shorter still on kind words for little fairies. Perhaps I’m looking for a real home for people shaped like me, and haven’t found it yet. Or maybe I’m most at home when I feel most a stranger, like I do right now, writing these words in a cafe in Tainan in southwest Taiwan. Nobody here expects me to act like them, or be normal. I just have to stand up to establish that.
I’m comfortable with that, which is my only point of bravery in traveling more than others might. But I can’t help but think we’d be more comfortable sharing and less inclined to moat and wall off culture behind ownership claims if we all felt the stranger more often. In a world full of strangers, everyone is home.