Assuming The Position: On Settler Belonging

One of the most persistent questions amongst people who look like me in the places I’ve lived is around belonging.

Do we, as people of European descent, the unsettled descendants of settlers, belong here in what’s now called North America?

If not, how long does it take before we belong? Does it happen in one lifetime? Can individuals belong to a place or only ‘peoples’? If we don’t belong and never will then might our kids have a chance? How many generations? And if we don’t belong is that the same as saying we shouldn’t be here and that, by staying, something is out of order?

This was on my mind as we drove home from The Crow and Gate pub in Cedar, BC (a pub which, itself, was build from the materials of a building shipping over from the old country). My old friend from Edmonton, Alexander and his partner Kayliegh had come to visit and the conversation found itself there.

“It’s good to be welcomed in,” Kayliegh said on the drive home.

”That’s the only way you get in!” I replied. If you’re not invited ‘in’ you’re not actually in.

In my early twenties, I remember seeing a cool hipster crowd and trying to insert myself in their crew over a few years. But it never felt right. It always felt off. Looking back, it was me vampiring off of the cool vibes but bringing nothing other than my own need to belong to the table. And, of course, by approaching in that way, the shields went up.

I was there with them but my presence had changed the tone and tenor of what I found there. When I left, I am sure they breathed a sigh of relief and their way of relating reverted to the natural flow that I’d so admired from a distance but could never get closer to my getting closer.

If you’re not invited in, you’re not really there.

I think of my grandmother telling me of her friend coming back from a therapy session.

“How was it?” my grandmother asked her.

“He didn’t even get close,” her friend replied.

My friend

Chris Christou

made this point once at a storytelling event I hosted by asking the group, “When’s the last time you travelled somewhere because you were invited?”

You can travel to a place and never break the surface tension of it and yet think you were there. There’s the town you see as a tourist and the town you’re shown as a guest. And they’re not the same town. The town of the tourist is filled with box stores, Starbucks, the shops you see on the main street and whatever events you can glean from the local media. But the town you’re invited to as a guest includes secret festivals, kitchen parties, potlucks, picnics, river trips and late night beach parties by the fire. It includes introductions to the kind of people you’d never otherwise meet and who might never, otherwise, open to the likes of you: a stranger.

And so, how does one get invited in? By being willing to be assume the position of being a guest and the willingness to never graduate from that position. Unless you’re willing to be a guest forever there’s a good chance this will be felt and you’ll be kept at a distance forever. And, likely, you won’t ever graduate from that status yourself but the coming generations might have a chance.

What is the relationship between being a guest and belonging? Are they opposites? Do you only, truly, belong when you aren’t a guest anymore? Is the goal to move past guest status to being a ‘local’? And, if you become a local, does that mean you finally get to relax? It might be but then, what of when the stranger appears at your door? What does this ask of you as the host (assuming you’re willing to assume that position).

The willingness to be a guest fully, and take on all of the responsibilities and courtesies attendant to that role, it was has the community feel safe enough to invite you in as a guest if they choose. The willingness to proceed without the entitlement of a tourist is what has the doors to guesthood begin to slowly open which may, over time, lead to a deeper belonging.

The unwillingness to be a guest has the locals peg you immediately for a tourist. You’ll be met by all manner of a charm designed to have your spend your money and keep you at a distance. They’re glad you’re out there but they’re not going to let you ‘in here’.

Willingness to be a guest and never graduate from that status is what gives our kids and their kids a chance to belong and become local.

I recall hearing a story from Martin Prechtel on his audio lecture series of an indigenous man who moved to the land of his wife’s tribe. He made himself useful, volunteered a lot and did everything he could to conduct himself as a good guest, never pushing but always present to help.

One night, the weekend of a big ceremony, the elders came to collect him and told him to pack for the weekend. Finally, he was being invited. to the sanctum sanctorum of his wife’s people. He was overjoyed. They bundled him into a car and drove him to a motel and told him they’d pick him up on Monday. While disappointed, understood. Things happen in their own time and some things will not happen in our own lifetime.

The best advice I ever got while attending Sabhal Mor Ostaig on Skye was to “let the community embrace you”. If you push in too fast to embrace them you don’t give them the chance to embrace you.

I think of the creation stories of so many indigenous peoples. Humans were placed here into a world already full of the soil, water, air, plants and animals. We were the strangers here and, in many of these stories, we, the youngest and most dependent of the creatures, were kept alive and taught by the rest. We were the guests and, over time, we had to find ways to belong.

I think belonging is something that is usually only recognized in retrospect. You don’t notice it when it happens. You look back and realize, at some point, they welcomed you in and you became one of them.

So many settlers, after centuries being on the outside of any meaningful culture, standing in the cold, understandably want to get on the inside of real cultural happenings and to be warmed by the fire of those things. But the instinct, mauled and marred by our own lack of instruction, becomes twisted. Instead of bringing wood to the fire, we go to the fire to take a burning long away for ourselves to be warmed by privately, not seeing how it diminishes both the collective fire and our chances at being warmed. That’s what a tourist does. A guest shows up with more wood for the fire.

A guest hangs around the ceremony and culture, looking for ways to be useful and helping out where they can, until they’re of more use than they are trouble.

In 2024, I found myself in County Kerry, Ireland with Stephen Jenkinson.

Marvelling at being there with Stephen and the other fine folk, I said, “So much of the thing in life seems to be about conducting yourself in a way that has you be invited.”

“That’s pretty much the whole thing,” Stephen replied.

“Behaving in a way that has you invited.”

If you’re not invited in, you’re not really there.

I recall a friend of mine who insinuated himself into three networks without being invited. No one wanted him there but a mixture of kindness and cowardice stopped them from telling him. Finally, sitting on a hallway floor in a hotel in New York during the State of the World Forum, as gently as I could, I told him the truth of it.

“Had anyone told you this before?” I asked.

He shook his head, heartbroken.

A friend of mine in BC found herself being left alone with an elder she was only just meeting for the first time. They sat in silence for a long time. Finally, he said to her, “I don’t trust you.”

You can imagine the sting and how a desire to be seen as trustworthy and to prove this could rise up in someone in that situation. I know it has done for me many times in my life. To be told we’re being seen as a tourist (or worst) and not a guest is a painful thing that seems to stymy our strategies for belonging.

Many women, people of colour and indigenous people don't trust us.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that we think they should.

The problem is that we think they are wrong for feeling as they do.

And that stops us from seeing that their mistrust isn't a roadblock. It's the road. It's not in the way, it is the way in. It's not getting in the way of the connection. It's pointing directly to the place where a reconnection might yet happen. It's not the end. It's where we begin.

"I don't trust you," is not a problem to be fixed.

"I don't trust you," is a gift.

"I don't trust you," is a blessing of candour.

"I don't trust you," is a red carpet rolled out for you to show how you are able to carry yourself with a deep, regal humility.

"I don't trust you," is a deep invitation and challenge to show your trustworthiness over time.

"I don't trust you," is an invitation to look at all the ways we may, indeed, be untrustworthy and, when we find them, to shower them with kind thanks for helping us see it.

"I don't trust you," is a shattered clay jar. There's not point in arguing over how it became shattered when there is so much gold of love laying around with which we can put it back together more beautifully than it was before as the Japanese do with their practice of Kintsugi.

"I don't trust you."

What is that?

Their lack of trust is one very important thing. It's none of my business. It's their business. My business is how I carry myself in the face of it.

When we hear it, the invitation is to not bristle but to nod. Of course, they don't trust us.

The redemptive move is not to make them wrong, it's to make every iota of trust they give to us worthwhile by what we do with it. It's to demonstrate our willingness to work for their and our collective liberation without their trust. It's to show them that we don't need their love to feel okay about ourselves.

The redemptive move is not to make demand trust in the face of everything they and all of their ancestors have experienced from people who look like us. It's to demand more of ourselves.

"I don't trust you," is a chance to show what unconditional love in this world looks like. "I don't need you to trust me. If I were you, I wouldn't trust someone who looks like me either. I love you even in your suspicion and not trusting. I am standing inside the home of your heart and I will be a good guest. I would never dream of telling you how to arrange the beautiful furniture you have gathered here. I have no intention of being rough on it. How can I help?"

Our need for them to trust us before we become useful is connected to why they still don't trust us.

"I don't trust you," is not the disturbance.

Our resistance to it is.

But I don’t think that belonging, with all of its burdens and attendant obligations, is what most of us want as the relative newcomers to this land (and I say this as someone whose family is seven generations deep in Alberta). I think what many of us crave is acceptance, forgiveness and absolution.

“Look,” we seem to say. “We know that our ancestors took so much from you: your land, your languages, your ceremonies and your children but could we just take one thing more?”

By being the generous host of your own yearning for belonging, you don’t burden others with it.

"The resistance to the disturbance is the disturbance." - Vernon Howard

My friend in BC, sitting with the elder replied to the lack of trust in a trustworthy way, she replied to her exclusion as a guest, not a tourist. “Why would you?” she replied. And that planted the seed of trust between them that has, since, flourished.

If you’re not invited in, you’re not really there.

I remember one night at Three Boars restaurant in Edmonton, I walked in to see three people from that cool crew I’d tried to insinuate myself into so many times out a desire to be ‘cool’ like them. I almost walked over to them and then it struck me.

They really loved each other. I could see it written on their faces. I didn’t love them. I wasn’t bringing them anything. I wanted something from them.

So I didn’t impose. I nodded and sat down the bar from them by myself and enjoyed a drink before heading off. As I left, one of them called to me, “Tad!” I looked back. She was smiling the biggest, beaming smile. “Good night!”

And that moment of unprompted farewell felt more real than all of the connection I’d tried to manufacture for years.

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And so, how does one get invited in? By being willing to be assume the position of being a guest and never graduating from that position.

I know a few people who do this beautifully (and few better than Cari Burdett whose land I live on). They create beauty and do their best to be useful to the place they live and the people who inherited the original instructions on how to live in a good way on the land. She’s a good guest who’s not trying to get out of the obligations of that role.

I think that is what’s asked of us, those of us from away, during these times, to be willing to be guests and to conduct ourselves in the ancestral etiquette our old timers from the old country knew, an etiquette that, for the most part, didn’t survive the mayhem of the largely elderless flight from Europe’s wars, famines and clearances or the typhus ridden boats and hard labour that awaited them when they arrived, and to engage that etiquette for the rest of our days free of the hope of any reward but full of gratitude for the life granted to us by the place we find ourselves in.

I don’t suppose that this all offers much in the way of easy solutions to the modern conundrum we find ourselves in and heaven knows there’s much more to say and more voices who could say it.

But I am struck by this central notion: Perhaps being a guest isn’t the opposite of belonging. It’s a way to and of belonging but it’s alchemy is that it only seems to work when we stop trying to move past it.

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