ABSTRACT
I cannot order my early memories in any particular sequence—rather they swirl around me in an experiential place where time and space, as well as collective and individual perceptions, blur into an impressionistic totality (perhaps I will return to such a state upon my death). I do know that my parents dreamed of me before I was conceived, before such dreams I lived in a place without names and words. It was their dream that eventually enabled me to come into the world of words and then learn to be a human being. And so it was that I was brought into the world, and subsequently, through a barrage of seemingly random sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches, that concrete reality after birth gradually took on the shape of names and words. It was my parents and the rest of my family that named me when I was a child—not the outside world. That kinship identity and meaning was informed by the human and natural environments that I encountered in my formative years. As Native and mixed-blood people from the coastal Southeastern United States (we had another name for it, “Tama,” when we lived in that place in another world with only our native relatives), we understood that we did not own the earth—it owned us. We were simply “Tomathli,” or the people who live on the high ground or bluffs. Thus, the place of our birth vested indelibly in us, an identity, since we have always been and will always be there with the spirits of relatives of past, present, and future.
