The Inheritance Issue explores what we have inherited, how, and from whom, reflecting on what we bring forward and what we must leave behind; what we have reckoned with and the consequences of failing to reckon. The lived experience of Indigenous people in the American and global Souths is crucial to the issue’s reflections on place, identity, and origin and to the discussions of solidarity, allyship, identity, and belonging that must precede collaboration and reconciliation.
"There is no recipe to follow for historical reckoning. Some of us spend our entire lives trying to find the instructions.”
“my lament begins / where the bodies are buried / beside each other . . . ”
“This was genealogy as survival, genealogy with land and livelihood on the line.”
“Like many Lumbees, we know what it is to have our community’s expertise dismissed and diminished on matters related to our own identity.”
“I remain haunted by what I can never know or speak of.”
“Understanding the persistence of colonial power structures reveals the ways in which our pasts can so monstrously echo our present.”
“Chattel slavery and Indian Removal have bequeathed us a ‘hard history’ indeed.”
“This chorus forgets. It elides place and time. It forgets that Spivey is not the originator of a method of aquatic travel in the border country of the eastern Carolinas.”
“Betsy Love’s life experiences stand in for a broader historical phenomenon: the complex and exploitative relationships between people of color.”
“The tree that blooms outside your window in spring is the same tree, or elicits the same feeling from the tree, that my ancestor may have experienced two hundred years ago.”
“Today’s settlers are not planting a flag; they are buying up buildings and using media to construct Detroit as a vacant space needing ‘civilizing’ settlement.”
“My civil engineer grandfather and father dealt with the ill-fated consequences of government programs to control and contain the Mississippi River in their lifetimes.”
“You grew from your granddaddy’s dirt / and evergreen spaces . . .”
