Perpetual Visitors

Can we protect the depth of original belonging without making future belonging impossible?

Prefer to listen? Voiceover above, or subscribe to The Aperture Field Notes on the podcast platform of your choice.

This morning I spent several hours thinking about what it means to build a truly shared community on land that carries unresolved history.

My first, and perhaps obvious, instinct was that the Indigenous nation whose territory it is should be recognized as the host nation. And host nation in this context wouldn’t just mean being acknowledged ceremonially, but being present as a real founding authority with its history, laws, knowledge, and relationship with the land woven into the community from its beginning.

And I was happy because it seemed obvious and right.

And then as I kept the space open, it didn’t feel so right.

I had an unsettled feeling underneath that I couldn’t put my finger on right away. Eventually, I realized it was the word host. Because if one people remain the host forever, does everyone else remain a guest forever?

At first, that maybe seems appropriate. It recognizes who was there first and refuses to erase the injustice through which the land came under another society’s control. It protects against the familiar process in which newcomers become the majority and then use their numbers to eliminate the authority of those who welcomed (or simply preceded) them. But I wonder if it also creates another problem?

Can people ever become true stewards of a place if they are told, across generations, that they don’t fully belong to it?

A guest may respect a home and care for it beautifully, but they don’t carry the same responsibility for its distant future, because the home ultimately belongs to someone else. And what happens to the child born into that community and to that place? Or to the family who has lived there for four generations? At what point does someone cease to be a visitor and become part of the place itself?

I think there are two truths here that resist being placed neatly together.

The first is that we can’t create a shared future by pretending everyone arrived through the same history. Indigenous peoples didn’t simply arrive earlier in an otherwise neutral competition for land. Their societies, laws, and relationships with particular territories existed before the governments that later claimed authority over them. And much of what followed involved displacement, broken agreements, forced assimilation and the deliberate interruption of those relationships.

Any new community that declares, “We are all equal now,” without addressing that history risks converting the results of injustice into the neutral starting conditions of the future.

But the second truth is that repair also can’t mean arranging people permanently into those who truly belong and those who remain conditionally present. While that may preserve historical memory, it can’t create a shared people.

So maybe the movement needs to look something like this:

Consent. Co-founding. Shared inheritance.

Consent means that a new community can’t simply declare itself into existence on someone else’s territory. Its presence must begin through an honest agreement with the Indigenous nation whose relationship with that place has been carried across generations.

Co-founding means that the original nation is not included as a cultural advisor within someone else’s project. Its knowledge, laws, history, and authority help shape the project at its foundation.

But shared inheritance means that what is then created together must eventually belong, in responsibility, participation, and future possibility, to everyone who fundamentally becomes part of it.

This shared position doesn’t make every resident Indigenous. Historical and cultural identities can’t simply be adopted through proximity or good intentions. Nor should the original nation have to surrender the practices, knowledge and institutions through which it remains a distinct people.

Recognizing the depth of Indigenous belonging does not require us to deny that other people may also develop an authentic relationship with the same place. One relationship may reach back thousands of years, while another begins with immigration, birth, marriage, invitation or commitment. Each relationship is unique, but difference doesn’t necessarily require that one remain authentic and the other permanently provisional.

Perhaps belonging is something that can be inherited and also something that must be cultivated. I think we need this to be true, not only so that newer relationships can become real, but because care for the land cannot remain a responsibility we assign primarily to Indigenous peoples. There is something romantic in imagining them as its natural stewards, but also something that lets the rest of us off the hook. We can’t admire the depth of another people’s relationship with the land while continuing to treat our own as optional. If we are to belong here, then stewardship must become part of our relationship too. It might grow through learning the history of a place, caring for its water and soil, accepting responsibility for what our presence changes, participating in its community, and committing ourselves to a future we may never personally see.

Many Indigenous peoples have carried place-based knowledge of reciprocity, responsibility and ecological relationship across generations, and the wider world may have much to learn from them, where that knowledge is freely shared. But learning cannot mean extracting a set of attractive principles while leaving our existing assumptions and structures untouched. Nor can it mean asking Indigenous peoples to “save” the rest of us. The learning will not move in only one direction; no culture carries everything the future will require. Perhaps what comes next, by ecological necessity as much as moral aspiration, will depend upon learning across different knowledge systems without collapsing them into one. And that may require us to form communities differently: around relationship as well as ownership, obligations as well as rights, and the understanding that our lives exist within the living systems that sustain them.

Under that model, the land wouldn’t pass from ownership by one people into ownership by another, nor would one group remain its eternal landlord. The land itself would become the enduring participant.

Every generation would receive rights of habitation and use, but also obligations. The original Indigenous relationship would remain present in the community’s language, law, memory, and stewardship while new relationships would be permitted to become real rather than being dismissed as inherently lesser because they began later.

Historical repair would still be necessary. Land, authority, resources, and cultural continuity can’t be replaced by a generalized language of togetherness. But perhaps repair also needs a destination beyond permanent moral roles. Otherwise, descendants remain arranged as creditor and debtor peoples, with one carrying an unresolved claim and the other an inherited guilt, and neither position offering a clear way forward.

The past can’t be reconciled if reconciliation means making it not have happened. Lives can’t be returned, cultures can’t always be reconstructed, and an apology can’t restore a forest, a language or a century of interrupted relationship.

But maybe the damage itself can become part of a founding covenant:

• We will tell the truth about how we arrived here.

• We will not use equality to erase history.

• We will not use history to deny the possibility of future belonging.

• We will protect what must remain distinct.

• We will share what can become common.

• And we will understand our place here not as ownership, but as responsibility.

I don’t know yet what institutions could hold all of that, and maybe no structure can resolve the tension completely. But I do think a truly shared future must allow people to become something more than hosts and guests. Maybe the deeper question is whether we can create a we capacious enough to remember that our beginnings were unequal without making inequality of belonging permanent.

Different histories. A shared responsibility.