Stranger in a Homeland
“I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.”
- Martin Heidegger
A Homeland is born from the depth of one's roots, the sacrifices made, and the shared memory of a nation's journey.
My family has been in America since before it was America. My mother’s family arrived in the Virginia Colony around 1660. In 1677, where my 9th great-grandfather was executed for his participation in Bacon’s Rebellion. By 1760, they had migrated to Georgia, and by 1860, they were living in Natchitoches, before finally settling in Texas after the Civil War.
My father’s family has a slightly more interesting story. According to legend, they sided with the King during the English Civil War. When the King was decapitated, they fled Scotland for Württemberg, Germany, until my 7th great-grandfather moved to the colonies around 1750, where he joined the British Army to fight in the French and Indian War.
After the war, he made a home in North Carolina, eventually joining the militia and fighting in the American Revolution. When the war was over, they became one of the first families to settle in Tennessee, where they stayed until moving to Texas in 1901.
For centuries, my family carved a place for themselves in this country. They crossed frontiers and fought in its wars, lending their names to towns, schools, and battlefields. Blood was shed at King’s Mountain, Horseshoe Bend, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Belleau Wood, Guadalcanal, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Each generation left its mark on Americas history, creating a deep bond with the land they fought to claim as their home.
They arrived with nothing and built everything. They were heritage Americans.
The term "heritage American" has its share of detractors, but it encapsulates the essence of families like mine, whose stories are fused with every chapter of America's history. They are the families connected to every major event, crisis, and victory this nation has experienced, the families who have seen this country through its darkest hours and its brightest days.
They were pioneers, soldiers, and patriots, pursuing both freedom and fortune. Yet today, we are told that this history—this legacy— the time spent here, the sacrifices made, do not give us a unique claim to the title of "home.” We are told that that we have no more right to call this land ours than someone who arrived yesterday.
We are told this because we are not ruled by Americans. We are ruled by those whose ancestors did not bleed on her battlefields or toil on her farms. These new stewards, though they drape themselves in our flag, lack a connection to the land, the legacy. Their ancestors weren’t at Gettysburg or Concord, they have no connection to the sacrifices made on the beaches of Normandy or in the jungles of Vietnam. They are newcomers with no sense of the nation’s past, indifferent to its heroes—Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant. To them, these figures belong to a dead country. They see themselves as rulers of a new America, and heritage Americans are simply relics—unwelcome reminders of a past they wish to erase.
The America I knew, the one my family helped build, is morphing into something unrecognizable. The walls are the same, the cracks in the floor still tell the stories of those who came before, yet something fundamental has shifted. The place that once felt familiar now feels alien, the air is thick with a sense of displacement. It’s disorienting—living as a stranger in your homeland.
But this is still our home, and we must fight, we must live up to the title of Heritage Americans.
“Loving your homeland is just as natural as loving your father or mother - after all, your country nourishes you, protects you, and in many ways makes you who you are. Just as it's a virtue to honor your parents, it's a good and admirable thing to honor the land you call home.”
-William Bennett
-TJS
The America we knew is gone, relegated to the dustbin of History.
WE are now as the Italians are to the ancient Roman Empire.
We are barely a shadow of what we once were.
Our story is similar to yours, sharing in the triumphs and sorrows of building a nation with hands, axes, hoe's and shed blood.
We are the "somewheres" who pledged allegiance and stood, hand over heart, when the anthem played as Old Glory was raised.
Some fought and died wearing gray; others while wearing blue, or brown or green in now familiar, but then unknown, places.
We, whose people earned the right to be called "Americans", are ignored and ridiculed as deplorables.