我们吃了他们

It’s tempting to revisit and retell our family history as a kind of laundry list of abuse, as a sum of the suffering we’ve endured at the hands of white immigrants. I’ve been tempted by, and succumbed to, that version of the past. But that’s not really a history. It’s a sentiment related to the settlers’ attachment to their innocence. It’s tempting to tell the story of your grandmother’s life the same way. But your grandmother was adamantly more than her hurts, more than her fear. So, too, is our history. Everything is more complicated than that. We’ve made our own history, too. It’s been just as bloody and complicated. And we’re not strictly, or only, the victims of it. …