I’m a 10th-generation Mainer and also lived 20 years in North Carolina. There, I was a Yankee (“from away”) until I discovered that my father had Southern ancestry. Having lived as a Mainer who is “from here” and in Southern communities where I was “from away,” I think it’s useful to recognize that “from away” is not a dismissive linguistic designation but a clan identifier.
In Maine, where my mother’s family has lived since before the Revolution, I’m part of an extended network of interrelated clans. My conversations here in the Midcoast regularly open with comments that identify our clan connections. “Oh, I raked blueberries for your Uncle Percy.” “Your brother is so helpful.” “So you baby-sat Betsy’s kids?” And even, “Did you know Jim? He hung himself on this property.”
In North Carolina, fast-growing suburbs overlaid transient new populations on the traditional communities, which were still clan-based. Prominent names mattered, to be sure, but so did the connections among ordinary folk. When my genealogical research began to uncover paternal ancestors in the Southeast, my boss urged me to visit the current generations.
“You could meet a cousin!” he said. I got my first welcome to the South after I discovered that an ancestor had fought on the Kentucky border during the Revolution. “Well, welcome home!” a longtime Southerner said. “Sorry it took you so long to get back.” I also learned that I’m related to a Cherokee so notorious that the Eastern Band can’t believe I’ll speak his name, but that’s a different story.
Since my return to Maine six years ago, I have found myself turning over and over to the distinction between the gift economies that occur within stable clans and the exchange economies that characterize relationships among transient people.
In Maine, people who are “from here” live among ourselves in a gift economy. We are generous in relation to one another even as we are often economically constrained and consistently frugal. One friend owns a plow, and he plows out his elderly neighbors at no charge. In line with the character of a gift economy, they don’t pay him but return his gift in their own ways. Perhaps they’ll give some muffins they baked, or a recycled yogurt container full of homemade soup. In a gift economy, the cash value of the exchange rarely equalizes. The core exchange value is the relationship itself.
Those who are “from away” can have a great deal to offer in the way of ideas from parallel situations in other places. But when they try to make currency of their ideas from elsewhere, they ask us to view them not as people but as strategies for sale.
They presume the value of the exchange economy that brought them here without acknowledging the gift of the economy we have. They can even malign us as Cary Tyson did in a recent column (“Maine Voices: Well yes, I am ‘from away,’ but hey, I’m here!” Oct. 8) as “geographic bigots” who suffer from “linguistic NIMBYism” when a more appropriate description is that we’re a dense, long-standing network of place-based clans who value the gift of our relationships, as well as the gifts of community, belonging and the many ways we share material gifts with and caregiving support to one another.
Oddly, “New Mainers” who are international immigrants often find it easier to understand us, because many of them come from similar clan-based communities with their own gift economies.
Those of us “from here” are glad that immigrants from the U.S. and abroad have chosen our beautiful state. We also hope you can understand that there is no rejection involved when we recognize that you belong to a different clan. Celebrate your own identity and live into the gifts we can share together.
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