#im sry if this post is dumb to nonwhites cuz honestly yeah i feel that

[itsadragonaesthetic]

Forgive me for my rambling incoherent nature for I am very tired and scatterbrained. (Post about finding community and connection as a dummy little white American below the cut)

But like, sometimes... I don't know how I feel about things as an American. In general... honestly. I'm mostly white, raised in a white family. I have zero connection to my genetic ancestry, and I don't know most of it anyway. My mom's side is just, mostly white Americans that go back maybe hundreds of unrecorded years. My dad's side is Italian and Irish Catholics. I could not be more far removed from that culture. I grew up in an ecological community that no one in my family has ever known or cared about until I was born.

I just feel like this creature, abandoned to freedom. I feel like this is a very white American thing to say, but I have no... inherent culture at all. None that was given to me by generations of family, considering they all cut ties with me and my parents a long time ago. Me and my immediate family have just been adrift in the ebbs and flows of American life.

But I meet groups of people who have never been to the place I grew up and they have... a lot of reactions. They tell me they hate it here, mostly. They comment on the light stone architecture. They ask me about the old stone buildings in the middle of nowhere. They think the plant life is ugly. They hate how dry and "dead" everything is. They mispronounce words that I kinda forgot were native or Spanish words. People comment on how much I know about the plants.

I think about it sometimes and I feel really connected to this place. We have special holidays unique to only this city. Its nearly the birding capital of the lower 48. This place is literally covered in art. Every empty building face has a mural. The mountains stand like comforting friends to me. I really do feel like this place is a huge part of who I am.

Sometimes I go by Sentinel Peak. The hill the city was named after (an O'odham word that means "at the base of the black hill"). It was used as a sort of landmark to get to a spring where there were ancient settlements. Some of the houses and grinding bowls still stand and are still maintained by the O'odham. There is actually still a garden there dedicated to giving nursery jobs to the disabled.

Like you can guess, some Christian people built a church and began to kick natives out. The Black Hill became Sentinel Peak; a sentinel lookout for Apache invaders. The mountain is now mostly famous for the giant white 'A' that was built by university students around 100 years ago (giving it its somewhat more common name, "A Mountain"). It is also home to an annual firework display every 4th of July that can be seen from every corner of the city. The biggest problem is that the black hill is covered in invasive cattle grasses that combust easily. Every year, the black hill persists in maintaining its name.

I love that hill to bits. It hurts to think of its past, and I feel guilty for even looking at it from my paved sidewalk just under a giant, somewhat ugly highway that has pretty much destroyed any chance for archeological digs or cultural restoration. But I frequently remind myself that negativity gets me nowhere. I begin to feel humbled for this mountain letting me make not only a physical home, but a spiritual home here too. It's like an infinitely forgiving grandmother who welcomes me with open arms despite any wrongdoing people who look like me have done. It's because of the resilience of this mountain, it's people, and it's ecosystem that I have somewhere that my heart can call home.

Then I pull out my calendar and plan another invasive grass pull at the Base of the Black Hill.