Borderlands

When I lived in Michigan, ten years ago, I never really thought of it as an edge space. To my thinking, it was solidly in the mid-west. “Middle” was even in the name of the region.

We crossed from the “South” to the “Midwest” at Cincinnati, Ohio

Yet, traveling there this summer, while also enrolled in a PhD course on “race and ethnicity” in the United Sates, changed my perspective completely. The course started with Pekka Hamalainen’s excellent Indigenous Continent which centered the story of North America on the many Indigenous nations that lived in every one of its habitable regions for more than 1000 years before Europeans arrived in ships and began coastal incursions seeking resources and glory. 

Historical interpreters representing British soldiers with the Mackinac Bridge in the background

Told from this perspective, American history becomes a lot more like European history: hundreds of kingdoms and nomadic peoples vying for control of territory, making and breaking alliances, seeking spiritual alignment, and negotiating trades. Seen within this framework, Fort Michilimackinac, Mackinac Island, and all the waterways that link the Great Lakes, become sites in a dynamic space of shifting borders and exchanges of cultural power. And, I would argue, they become all the more exciting for it.

Looking down on a U.S. flag from the fort on Mackinac Island

At its best, history can do this for us. It has the power to elevate contingency. Putting things in perspective makes our daily anxieties feel smaller. Nothing is unequivocally significant. And that revelation feels significant to me.

Riding out toward Lake Superior past Grand Island

Speaking of perspective, stay tuned for a missive from Seattle where I am currently at an Accessibility conference. My plan is to take photos each day that represent “perspective” and then write about them at the end of my trip. Just like that little girl in “Je suis petit, moi?” Here’s to feeling small, and vast, and just right.