And now, I'm going to drop you in,
in the moment in that narrative when I'm returning to the US
and landing in Providence, in the summer.
"That was the summer I returned to the country of guns,
the land of guns.
I have my issues with Japan, but there
are no guns in Japan, so few that you can call it none.
It's rare for even the police to have guns.
The police don't need guns because the people
don't have guns.
The US has more guns than it has people.
I cat-sat for a friend whose home was not
in the midst of, but not terribly far from,
some amount of regular gun violence.
Every night, I traced the police-blotter feed
on the crime-tracking website, one
that tells you just what kind of crimes are taking place
and where.
There's an option to receive, quote,
'personalized alerts sent directly to your inbox,' end
quote.
Crime reports personalized just for you--
really?
I had arrived in the summer in the full, lush abundance
of flora that is summer in Providence.
It was beautiful.
I read about Roger Williams, the founder of Providence,
about his story of fleeing Boston to arrive
in this natural haven.
And it wasn't hard to see the allure.
According to the story, though, when he had first arrived,
it was dead of winter.
He would not have survived if he had not
been taken in by the local residents-- in this case,
the Narragansett people.
They were kind.
He was grateful.
He learned their language.
He wrote this book, A Key Into the Language of America.
Rosmarie Waldrop wrote a book of her own,
her own engagement with this book and this geography.
I found it difficult, unsettling to attempt to normalize
a new existence here.
There is an inextricable strangeness to having my actual
feet standing and walking upon the birthplace of settler
colonialism, to move through buildings whose opulence
and wealth are tied to the New England slave trade,
to step into an elevator with signage referring to, quote,
'the state of Rhode Island and Providence plantations,' end
quote.
This terminology was dropped only in 2020.
In 2017, a few weeks before the beginning of the fall semester,
the Pokanoket Tribe had set up an encampment
on a contested plot of land, demanding the return
of their ancestral lands.
The plot of land in question, 375 acres in Bristol
that had been donated to Brown University in the 1950s,
includes Mount Hope, a major site of Metacom's Rebellion,
more commonly known as King Philip's War.
Concurrent with Brown University's 2017 convocation
ceremony, the Pokanoket Tribe held a protest
and demonstration to bring awareness about the encampment
and pressure the university.
Incoming students processed through the hallowed gates
of the university, serenaded by a mix of Scottish bagpipes
and Native protest singing and dancing.
They were asking for their land back.
I made a friend in another department,
white, male, gay, and so millennial.
His phone rang.
It better be someone over 40, he said as he picked up.
I mentioned something about land acknowledgments.
Why do we not do that here?
He said flippantly or dismissively, I'm not sure.
Might as well give it back.
Yeah, give it back.
I read "Decolonization is not a Metaphor,"
by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, who is also
the author of A Third University Is
Possible, published under a pseudonym, la paperson, as in,
Paper Son, the Immigrant Response
to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
What is the difference between rhetoric, metaphor, poem,
performance, action?
What am I doing here?
So I'm new.
Being new is always tricky.
I remember when I was new in Tokyo,
and joined the Canadian guys playing
street hockey in the park on Sunday afternoons.
They let me play.
They let anyone play.
But the only other women there were Japanese women
trying to get a Canadian guy.
When the hockey was over, they'd change
into their cute outfits for the food and drinks afterwards.
I was the only woman who didn't change out
of my stinky hockey clothes.
I was the only woman who had come for the hockey.
There were rules that preceded me,
that minimized playing time for women who
all claimed they didn't mind.
Really?
I was new, so I held my tongue for a while, until I couldn't.
I demanded more playing time.
The women got more playing time.
I suppose some of them got what they were after,
a Canadian man.
Some got better at playing hockey.
That was 2002.
This was fall of 2017.
I was starting a new job.
I was back in US America, cis, queer, married mom of two.
I initially left my family behind in Tokyo,
so I was living alone.
After years of living in geographies
with no Thanksgiving, I had just relocated to the birthplace
of settler colonialism.
Real turkeys roamed the streets, almost getting hit by cars.
Did they know the history of their ancestors,
of their kin trapped in some turkey factory in Minnesota?
Was I about to get absorbed into someone else's Thanksgiving
meal?
Kind people invited me to join their Thanksgivings,
and I politely told them I had other plans.
I needed another plan.
So for that Thanksgiving of 2017,
I fasted, rode the bus all day, and wrote this book."