Being an exile in your own land is a strange experience. People descended from more recent émigrés to our beautiful land here don't know (or understand) my last name. I've already had to spell it out twice today while explaining its long heritage, in this small hamlet that is rather fluent in "immigrant" (as is most of the New York area), so you can imagine what the rest of the country (and by extension, the world) is like for us. We need better publicity!
The land of "Acadia" pre-dates the creation of the current borders that divide the United States and Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadia), much like my sophisticated Norman ancestors (pre-dated by my ancient Greco/Roman/Mesopotamian ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_world) dominated Europe through trade and their cultured abilities to connect with the local people around them, wherever there may be around the globe, much like I do today. That does not mean that I have that state of awareness reflected back to me often, resulting in my infamously patient temperament I learned to develop, lovingly guided by my grandparents.
"You're gonna learn all about patience now!", was something my grandmother told me more than once, in recognition of those greater gifts that need much more extensive (and slower) explanation to the crowd gathered around me. Leadership is not easy, and like any great educator, repetition is a big part of our toolkit. Publishing is rife with trends in the human experience that need more than one or two nuanced marketing niches to accurately describe content to an interested audience, and that could be just a single genre.
We like to research by looking at a subject from all angles, then pick the entry point we think you can plug into the easiest, so as to enhance your comprehension as you move forward, with or without us. But, how do you do that with a people who were cast out, dispersed, and strewn around so as to prevent a congregation of support from building a case for us that we were supposed to make for you? You're reading it now, and how many years has it been? It seems backwards, doesn't it? That's how long it's taken for me to unfold our red carpet ride through history for you, with its complexities and various moving parts.
Today I am grateful to have this public forum that reintroduces you back to us as a concept in these modern times as your loving ancestors; marginalized, impoverished, and beset as we have been. Rest assured, my dear majority, we have always been here for you. Sometimes a minority group is small for its precious rarity, not for its insular exclusion, and so I ask you to rethink your rigidly guarded boundaries done quickly and incorrectly, to be carefully redrawn by the people who came here to lead the way back home, not block the passage of others seeking to enter. Are you worthy of us? Are you worthy of Acadia? I hope so, because we're here to stay. That's our “forever” promise to you, as our beloved descendants.
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