Conversation

Nativism is an endemic poison in settled culture. Nobody is immune. I grew up close to the Bangladesh border and grew up being taught to think of "them" as a somehow subhuman presence in India though only 50 years earlier they'd been part of the same country...
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...and going back 200+ years, the town I grew up in was part of a historic regional kingdom that on average had borders that roughly spanned eastern India, and modern Bangladesh. Note though that I'm not a "native" of that region either, since my parents migrated from the south..
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Being a "native" is basically a process of forgetting. You forget how borders looked historically. You forget that any given (latitude/longitude) point on earth's land surface was included in borders with points that are now "foreign" points. It's pure myth-making.
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Largely utterly toxic and poisonous myth-making based on erasure of memories and identities, denial of complexity in family heritages etc. We need and deserve a better kind of storytelling than this for the 21st century.
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I'd even go so far as to say that nativism is the first and original ideological sin, ahead of isms like fascism and communism. Cf: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael where Cain (farmer) killing Abel (herder) is allegorically and imo correctly interpreted as settlers vs nomads.
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