Passage Land: The High Plains, the Long Roads, the People Who Remain

You inherited a debt you never agreed to pay.

I want you to consider that statement before you dismiss it. Not a financial debt, not a mortgage or a student loan with your signature on the paperwork. Something older. Something that attached itself to your bloodline before you were born, before your parents were born, before anyone now living had any say in the matter.

This is not metaphor. This is how land works in America.

The house you grew up in, the town where you learned to read, the state whose history you memorized in school, all of it sits on ground that belonged to someone else first. The transfer was not clean. The transfer was never clean. And the people who were displaced did not disappear. Their descendants are still here, still remembering, still holding ledgers that no one on the other side wants to examine.