密歇根新闻广播 在密歇根土地上你看到了什么?

"My mother was a gardener," he says. Each spring, as she got her garden ready, she would spray water on the dirt, and tell him to plunge¹ his hands deep into the wet soil.

"And she would turn to me and say, 'You feel that? You feel that son? That's life.'"

Jennings grew up on the Southeast side of Grand Rapids. Now, he's a scholar at Yale Divinity School, and he talks about dirt a lot. He says dirt is important to understanding each other as people because dirt is what joins us in a place. We may have differences, but we have the land in common.

And the land tells our story, if we stop to look.

You know the state motto: If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you. Forget about what you're seeking for a minute. Just, wherever you are, look about you.

If you're in a building, look at the walls. If there's a window, look at the trees, the grass, the parking lot. The land.

Just about everywhere in Michigan, even out in nature, you can see how humans have changed things.

You can see our ideas inscribed² on the land.

The most noticeable idea that shapes our land is the idea of property. We hardly stop to think about property. It just is.

Sure, a person can own a piece of the earth. Just imagine a line. Imagine a rectangle sitting there. Everything inside that rectangle is yours. Take that dirt, do whatever you want. It's yours.

But that idea came from somewhere. It has a history. All the ideas we live with about our land, they came from somewhere.

And a lot of them haven't even been here that long.

"If you were here in 1817, Michigan would have seemed an entirely³ indigenous⁴ space," says Michael Witgen, a historian at the University of Michigan. "It was dominated by native peoples who lived in Detroit, Mackinac, in the Grand River valley, in the Upper Peninsula. And anywhere you went, you would have encountered native people, and it would have been native people continuing to live as their ancestors had done."

Witgen is a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and author of An Infinity⁵ of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America.

He's written about the history of native people in the Great Lakes in the time after Europeans arrived

A lot has happened in that period, but some people missed it in history class.

"The first thing they miss is that we're still here, that there's still significant native population in the state of Michigan," Witgen says. "There are 14 reservations, 14 communities. So that's the biggest thing."

But that's not the only thing they miss.

"The next biggest thing," he says, "is the kind of misconception that when the territory that's now Michigan gets claimed by New France, that it's suddenly, actually, a part of New France. That it's dominated and controlled by Europeans, when in fact it's still entirely a native space."

There just weren't that many Europeans for hundreds of years. They had little villages in Detroit, in Fort Mackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, and not much else.

They saw the rest of the land of Michigan as unsettled wilderness⁶.

Unsettled even though there were thousands of people on it. People with political systems, economic systems, and agricultural systems.

"But from a European standpoint," Witgen says, "because it's not been carved up into individual farms that are fenced in and have built structures. For them, that means it's a wilderness."

A wilderness to be taken and tamed.

We all know that this happened. The Europeans came in; they did what they did.

But why did they see the land that way, and why did they see Native people that way?

Those ideas came from somewhere.

Willie Jennings says a big part of those ideas came from the Europeans' distorted understanding of the Bible.

"They came believing that they were the people of God, having replaced Israel as thepeople of God," he says. "And so that God's hopes for the world rested on them."

It was also important who they believed they were, and who other people were not. They were the white people.

And that combination, Christianity plus whiteness, shaped the New World, Jennings says.He's studied and written about this history a lot. He wrote a book called The Christian⁷ Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.

Jennings says whiteness should not be thought of as a person or as group of people.

"No one is born white," he says. It's an idea, "a way of being in the world."

At first, it was a harmless way for the Europeans to designate people in a land where not everyone looked the same.

"And what began as really harmless designation," he says, "soon took on a world ofharmas they did one crucial thing with their life in the new world: They seized land."

And why did they seize it? Because they believed it was already theirs, as white people, the chosen people of God.

"And so they helped to create a new vision of the world as not only a possession given by God, but as infinitely⁸ possessable," he says, "i.e. individual, private ownership of the world itself."

Private ownership of land. That idea we don't always think about, but that shapes our entire experience of the land.

Jennings says it even shaped the history of why so many Europeans came to the Americas. Because here it was possible for common people to be landowners, not just tenants⁹ of the aristocracy.

That hope of land ownership is what brought many Europeans to the shores of the NewWorld.

You can see why it would be so tempting¹⁰.

"Imagine coming to Michigan," Jennings says. "You're staring out at the majesty¹¹ of Lake Superior. And the beauty of the trees and the food and the animals. And of course there are people. And someone whispers to you, 'All this is yours. All this is yours.'"

Tomorrow, the series continues with the story of the Supreme¹² Court case that set theprecedent for indigenous property rights in the U.S..

1 plunge   

v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲

参考例句：

• Test pool's water temperature before you plunge in.在你跳入之前你应该测试水温。
• That would plunge them in the broil of the two countries.那将会使他们陷入这两国的争斗之中。

2 inscribed   

v.写，刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；内接

参考例句：

• His name was inscribed on the trophy. 他的名字刻在奖杯上。
• The names of the dead were inscribed on the wall. 死者的名字被刻在墙上。 来自《简明英汉词典》

3 entirely   

ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The fire was entirely caused by their neglect of duty. 那场火灾完全是由于他们失职而引起的。
• His life was entirely given up to the educational work. 他的一生统统献给了教育工作。

4 indigenous   

adj.土产的，土生土长的，本地的

参考例句：

• Each country has its own indigenous cultural tradition.每个国家都有自己本土的文化传统。
• Indians were the indigenous inhabitants of America.印第安人是美洲的土著居民。

5 infinity   

n.无限，无穷，大量

参考例句：

• It is impossible to count up to infinity.不可能数到无穷大。
• Theoretically,a line can extend into infinity.从理论上来说直线可以无限地延伸。

6 wilderness   

n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠

参考例句：

• She drove the herd of cattle through the wilderness.她赶着牛群穿过荒野。
• Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means.荒凉地区的教育不是钱财问题。

7 Christian   

adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒

参考例句：

• They always addressed each other by their Christian name.他们总是以教名互相称呼。
• His mother is a sincere Christian.他母亲是个虔诚的基督教徒。

8 infinitely   

adv.无限地，无穷地

参考例句：

• There is an infinitely bright future ahead of us.我们有无限光明的前途。
• The universe is infinitely large.宇宙是无限大的。

9 tenants   

n.房客( tenant的名词复数 )；佃户；占用者；占有者

参考例句：

• A number of tenants have been evicted for not paying the rent. 许多房客因不付房租被赶了出来。
• Tenants are jointly and severally liable for payment of the rent. 租金由承租人共同且分别承担。

10 tempting   

a.诱人的, 吸引人的

参考例句：

• It is tempting to idealize the past. 人都爱把过去的日子说得那么美好。
• It was a tempting offer. 这是个诱人的提议。

11 majesty   

n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权

参考例句：

• The king had unspeakable majesty.国王有无法形容的威严。
• Your Majesty must make up your mind quickly!尊贵的陛下，您必须赶快做出决定！

12 supreme   

adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的

参考例句：

• It was the supreme moment in his life.那是他一生中最重要的时刻。
• He handed up the indictment to the supreme court.他把起诉书送交最高法院。