3/50: This land is your land
In this live recording, Pete Seeger declares: “Woody wrote a lot of verses that aren’t in the textbooks.”
“But the true crisis in America is diminished compassion for others. We have allowed the top 10 percent to determine the rhythm of our lives. As a consequence, we choose a type of exclusionary patriotism over freedom, enslavement to market forces rather than exploration of our calling and gifts. We harm one another and our environment because we cannot honor the s(S)spirit that enlivens everyone and everything and respects our differences”
My parents have nearly identical ancestral histories. Germans from Russia who immigrated to the Dakotas and eventually settled in Lodi, California.
Catherine the Great was a German who married Peter, the future czar of Russia. When she became empress, she gave incentives for settlers from her homeland to move to Russia and work the land. They were able to retain their language and build communities that maintained a familiar way of life. For a century, Germans established themselves on Russian soil with thriving farms and relative freedom.
In the late 19th century, Alexander II decided that he wanted to reform Russia and consolidate power through cultural homogeneity. He wanted the Germans to become Russians, erasing their language, their culture, their history and their independence. And so they looked for a better life and found it in the promise of the United States’ Homestead Act. They came with large families and steamer trunks and built new communities in the prairies of North and South Dakota.
The Depression lured some families to another breadbox of a town far west from the prairies: Lodi, California. Two sets of my great grandparents relocated west and established businesses and farms. One of my grandfathers came with the Civilian Conversation Corps, building dams along the way. My maternal grandmother came from South Dakota to marry my grandfather, with whom she shared an aunt through marriage. All four of my grandparents raised their children in Lodi.
This story is a single story. It is an immigrant story — the movement of families to secure a better future for their children in a new land. Behind that story is government theft from the Sioux Nation, displacing them from their ancestral lands. It is a story that benefits from the privileging of white bodies as the rightful owners of land.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says this about single stories: “…it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”
I’m interested in the full spectrum of my ancestral history. The ways in which they showed tenacity and courage, alongside the ways in which they were victims of and contributors to systems of oppression. It’s all there and one does not negate the other, but you can’t tell one without the other. Refusing the single story makes me see the eyes of my great great grandmother in the eyes of the Central American woman at the U.S. border seeking to find her own homestead in a new land. It helps me live towards an equal humanity.