I am a Swedish-American.

Granted, my family on the other side has been here in America a lot longer than have the Swedish side, but I've chosen to identify with the Swedes. It's not because of strength or purity of lines (even though that would be true if I bought into that dubious myth of identity). I identify as Swedish-American because the stories I got from that side of the family were immigrant stories, still redolent of another place and of the need to negotiate the fit of an old culture in a new place.

America is a fucked up place. And it ought to be, built as it is on the corpses of the First Peoples and the stolen labor of slaves. But though that is the reality of the country's history, it is a reality that is constantly being erased and overwritten by a myth of brave pioneers come to claim a future out of the bounty of a new land. It's the unreality -- the myth, the face-saving lie -- that has come to define what people mean when they speak of being a "real American." Somehow, in all the self-serving propaganda of the American identity, people have come to rewrite their immigrant ancestors as always already Americans and have rejected those who are coming here now as being a dangerous, foreign element that will spoil the essence of the American identity.

My Swedish ancestors didn't come here to be good Americans. They came here to be good Swedes in America -- not Swedes in the political sense, but certainly Swedes in the cultural identity sense. They left the old place because they were disappointed with the ways in which they felt that Sweden was falling short of allowing them to be good Swedes. That's all they really wanted. So they came to America and traveled to the places that allowed them to become Americans with the least amount of reinvention. They sought out climates and soils and growing patterns and seasons that were familiar. They tried as much as they could to recreate the sense of place that had defined them, while at the same time trying to maintain the ties of community to those around them. Guest rules and host rules were, as ever, important markers of character -- as much so as the grit and wisdom required to make a living from a Northern environment.

(If you've been watching American Gods or, better yet, if you have read it, you should recognize the themes here. Gaiman's story is itself a meditation on what you bring and what you leave behind and how place and time change you.)

Those who scream loudest about being American-with-no-hyphen (and, always, linking that to being Western European in culture) are seeking to erase and overwrite history. By owning that hyphenation I am foregrounding that history and proclaiming that, despite being a citizen of the US, I am part of an ongoing immigrant heritage and have no exclusive claims to land, culture or politics. I have a duty to show the same spirit of generosity to other immigrants that made it possible for my ancestors to come here and find a home. And I have a duty to recognize those whose ancestors were here on the land and who were driven off of it for my ancestors' opportunity. And I have a duty to recognize those whose ancestors did not have the choice to come or the freedom to build a life of their own choosing as their lives and labor and progeny were being commodified for the enrichment of others. There is justice still owing in both these cases, and I am not just if I don't acknowledge this and put their case ahead of my own.

If I believe that my heritage matters to me and that the character of my ancestors inform my own character, speaking to me across the ages, then I must acknowledge that the injustices suffered by others because of their heritage must also carry across the ages. And I must stand with them against the perpetuation of that injustice, even if I am not a party to the commission of that earlier injustice. If I do not, then how am I to claim to honor either justice or ancestry?

This is nothing new, by the way. It's recorded as part of Norse myth. Look at what I had to say about the Vanir and Skaði in my last post here. The Æsir were newcomers to the land in the mythological stories. They actively practiced peace-making and negotiated familial alliances sealed in intermarriage and recognized that their own structures of justice and honor needed to be extended to others, especially when those others sued for justice within the Æsir's own laws, but even when those others occasionally violated those laws as the Vanir did when they took Mimir's head.

The Æesir never stop being Æsir just because they have moved to the lands of the Vanir or when the Jötnar come to them and demand intermarriage in order to settle a blood debt, but they do take on complex mutual relations and engage continually in actively maintaining frið both as an affirmation of who they were and in an affirmation of who they are becoming and with whom they have joined in alliance.

There's no hard nationalism or supremacy in either of those things.