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The Callouses on Our Feet

As certain as the bones and stones they left behind them, the first Americans walked here from Asia and Siberia, and kept on walking to the place where land ended.

The walk began, eons before, almost certainly, in southern Africa.  "Out of Africa", as Karen Blixen named her book about something else, is how the human race has come on a path that goes almost everywhere.

When the Italians and the English and the Spanish came to the Americas in ships, other human beings were already here, having walked here so long before that no one, no one, had even a cultural memory about it.  It was common for people almost everywhere to assume they were the first people, and that they had been where they were since the beginning.  Maybe in a Garden in Iraq.  Maybe hunting seal in Canada.  Maybe at the foot of a pyramid in Central America, at the center of the world.  

We do know, now, that we walked, everywhere, eventually and occasionally building boats, but mostly walking.

Sometimes I go out through our back yard, through the fence that encloses our immediate living space, to the hillside that is pretty much what it has been for thousands of years, only occasionally spotting small iron stakes set by surveyors to help us pretend that we are the first peoples here, right here, in this place.  It is hard to find those stakes.  It is easier to find the paths that the javelina and the coyotes and the deer make, walking.  

The newspapers on our kitchen table are decorated with stories about human beings walking, sometimes sailing, everywhere:  from Central America back up the old pathways, from the Sudan, and Syria, and Iraq and The Sudan.  Almost to the land bridge from Siberia, to Greece and Hungary and Germany and France and Sweden.

And we, the First People whose ancestors came here at the beginning of time a few generations ago, scared by the people who look just like all of us, hear ourselves telling them to go back to where they came from, because we did not come from anywhere:  we were here first.

Weren't we?  We still have the callouses on our feet.

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