My British ancestors were undocumented migrants arriving on the northeast coast of North America in 1635. Several generations later some of the family moved to a farm in New Hampshire where my father was born. He often repeated in detail to his children the family story about our ancestor, Maj. John Buttrick. He was a Minuteman shot and killed by the British military at Concord Bridge. The telling of this story has been inflated over the years. It now includes the claim that he was killed by “the shot heard ‘round the world!” He was a hero in our family.
However, there is another part to our story that has never been spoken. Our ancestors settled on a land already occupied by others.
These alien settlers were both welcomed and then resisted by the Native Americans defending their land. The indigenous people noted the pale faces of these settlers who spoke an alien language and wore eccentric clothes. And they carried guns. The Native Americans soon learned that the guns could be used not only against the British army but also to enforce an invasion of their ancestral land.
Taking farmland away from those Native Americans is a reality of our family history that needs to be acknowledged. It is a confession that our citizenship does not originate with legal documents. Citizenship was the result of conquering and displacing an indigenous people.
Our family story is not unique. Many early settlers believed that the “New World” was empty land to be taken. Other newcomers believed that the land they claimed was God-given. This idea of Manifest Destiny continued to fuel the expansion of our country. For example, under President James K. Polk the United States declared an unprovoked war on Mexico taking what are now California, Nevada and Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and New Mexico.
The defining of the boundaries of the United States by force and at the expense of the previous occupants of the land has implanted fear within Americans. Just as our ancestors took our country by force, we fear others might do it to us.
The origins of this fear may not be easily recognized or articulated, but the fear of displacement by outsiders is embedded in our psyche. Instead of pale faces overrunning Native Americans, this time pale faces fear being overrun by strangers of many shades and hues speaking incomprehensible languages, wearing nonconforming clothing, demanding unfamiliar foods and introducing foreign traditions.
This fear of losing our comfortable way of life has long corrupted U.S. immigration codes and attitudes. Each new wave of migrants seeking entrance into the country generates caution, suspicion and new immigration policies. Fear has fed the power of white privileged people orchestrating the slave trade, segregation, the Japanese internment camps and anti-Semitism, to name only a few. Fear continues to be cultivated by our present government immigration policies against Muslims and against people and their children from south of our border with Mexico.
However, an honest look at our own paths to citizenship invites humility. For some of us it involves confession and an apology for coming at the expense of others. For many it involves confession and an apology for demonizing each new wave of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees who have approached our borders.
Who has the right to live in the free democratic society of the United States? Are they ancestors of undocumented white Europeans who came here in the 1600s seeking a better life or fleeing religious oppression? Are they ancestors of those who were brought here as slaves? Are they ancestors of those who have come to pick our food, manufacture our goods, build our rail and road infrastructure, and participate in the scientific community? Or are they the ones now coming to our borders, some risking their lives, seeking economic survival or fleeing from domestic abuse, death threats from gangs or government oppression?
It seems, when we consider our histories and our diverse origins, there are really no outsiders. We are the “others.” Some, like my ancestors, came undocumented. Some were born here. Some have become citizens through grace or a complex system of rules and regulations. Some are migrant children held in cages desperate to be with their parents. Some are women and mothers fleeing their country to escape domestic violence. Some are young men who have escaped certain death for refusing to participate in a terrorist group. Some are escaping death by starvation. Some want to improve life for their families.
Wayne Martin Belger has published in Smithsonian magazine portraits of dispossessed people from five different countries. They are black and white photos, slightly blurred. We see them as shadowy outsiders, “the other.” With these fuzzy photos Belger seeks to communicate that governments, the media and “other powers (us)” do not know these people and therefore fear them. Belger observes, “then you meet them and want to show that there are these amazing gentle people out there.” The “other” becomes us. However, they do not, as did the early settlers, come to steal our land. They come to earn their way, participate in the freedom of a democracy and contribute to the prosperity of our country.
Fear has built walls, militarized borders and demonized outsiders. Fear will fade away as we bring ourselves into focus, with all our flaws, and remember from where we came. If our government included these memories into the protocols of immigration, the need to formulate a climate of fear would dissipate. Instead, the shadowy portrayal of the undocumented immigrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker and sufferers of domestic abuse would sharpen to look just like us. It is a story worth telling.
(The Rev. John Buttrick, United Church of Christ, lives in Concord.)