Which Side Am I on, Anyway?

Abstract

A frontier has two sides. is an interface, a threshold, a liminal site, with all the danger and promise of liminality. On the front side, the Yang side of the frontier, you boldly go where no one has gone before, pushing forward, like a storm front, like a battlefront. Nothing before you is real. is empty space. It was not certain that Britannia existed, until I went there, Julius Caesar wrote. Seeking gold, annexing all before you, you enlarge your world. The other side of the frontier, the Yin side, is where you live, a real world, a full world. And they come. You were not certain they existed, until they come. They are not people of your world, but they take it over. And as your world is meaningless to them until they change it into theirs, so you are in danger of losing your own meaning to yourself as you live among them. In the wake of the frontier is where my father the anthropologist did his fieldwork, among the wrecks of cultures, the ruin of languages, the shards of an infinite diversity swept aside by a monoculture, the broken or almost-broken continuities.' A postfrontiersman, a white man learning Californian Indian cultures and languages in the first half of the twentieth century: trying to save meaning. To learn and tell stories that would otherwise be lost. The only means he knew was translation, recording in the language of the conqueror, the language of science. An act of imperialism. An act of human solidarity. My mother continued his work with her history of a survivor of the frontier, the last unacculturated Native Californian, Ishi.2 Innate or acquired, an ability to learn an unfamiliar meaning, and an inability to limit significance to one side of the frontier, have shaped my writing. Americans have considered the future as a frontier, an empty place to be