A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.

Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.

I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.

I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future. And let me illustrate this with a story, if I may.

I am, of course, married to the daughter of South Asian immigrants to this country. Incredible people. People who genuinely have enriched this country in so many ways.

And, of course, I’m biased, because I love my wife and her family, but I it’s true.

Now when I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, “Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky.”…

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now. Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland.

These comments of Vance’s have inspired freakouts from multiple sides of the American political spectrum – from the Reaganite Republican Jeff Jacoby to the socialist John Ganz. Rushing to implement Godwin’s Law, both Jacoby and Ganz describe Vance’s viewpoint, “contrary to the notion that America is an idea”, as “blood-and-soil nationalism”.

When I heard that, I thought: would you say the same thing about Miller or Cordova?

Whatever else Canada and the United States are, they are large pieces of land – land which has been home to the descendants of immigrants for many generations, and to Native Americans for considerably longer. It’s not crazy for either Natives or later arrivals to attach a deep importance to that land – a land on which their ancestors were born and died, and on which they too expect to die someday. Or to think of themselves as constituting in some respect a nation – a term that many Native groups, often referred to in Canada as First Nations, bear with pride. It certainly doesn’t make them Nazis.

Jacoby isn’t wrong to see the contrast between Vance’s nationalism and Reagan’s – the latter based entirely on the “ideas and the principles”. Reagan proclaimed “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman…. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” But Reagan was wrong about this comparison. France opens its doors to immigrants who become citizens, just as the US does, and in one respect even more so: the US has nothing comparable to the open path to citizenship provided by the French Foreign Legion. A man with French citizenship has become un français, a Frenchman. Sure, he’ll still be an outsider in some respects. But I hate to break it to you, Jeff: so are we naturalized Americans. Benedict Anderson wisely pointed out long ago that every naturalized immigrant is well aware of the difference between “I have become an American” and “I am an American”. We still find a lot of things weird about our adopted home, and we still feel deep roots in our ancestral lands the way Vance feels in his.

My fellow American immigrant Ben Koan gets this, as Jacoby and Ganz do not. Neither of us immigrated to an idea. Koan notes: “my two children became citizens simply by being born on American soil. No one in the delivery room asked if they supported the Constitution and form of government of the United States. And no one can rescind their citizenship if they grow up to be monarchists.” Like most immigrants to the US, we didn’t come here for the Constitution. I came to the US for my PhD because the University of Toronto turned me down and Harvard accepted me – I went to my safety school – and I stayed because of a person, my wife, since her family and friends were rooted in the Boston area. The US is my home now because of the people. The American form of government is okay, I guess.

As an immigrant, I don’t hear anything in Vance’s remarks above that tells me I don’t belong here. I hear him speaking with pride of his immigrant-descended wife and the children they share, whose racial background is the same as mine. Like me, half of those children’s ancestors are from India and half are not – and also like me, their land will be the place that their non-Indian ancestors are from. We are not from India. I’m from Canada, they’re from the United States. If they decide to immigrate somewhere else – even to India – they will always be from the United States, just as I will always be from Canada, and that fact matters.

One of the readings from the workshop quoted Anishinaabe elder Fred Kelly to this effect: “if you understand Sacred Law and the Great Law, that you are an integral part of Grandmother Earth, then is it conceivable that you could sell her? Firstly, to sell her is tantamount to selling yourself. Can you do that? Not under Great Law, not under Sacred Law. So therefore, you can’t sell your Grandmother.” Vance is obviously not advocating anything like that traditional Anishinaabe conception of land. But his view is still closer to Kelly’s and Miller’s Native views than is Jacoby’s abstract nationalism of ideas. Vance and Kelly both see a close tie between their land and their grandparents; Vance and Miller both see it as deeply important that we human beings are from a place.

Vance then ties that place of origin to the nation-state. Such a view is the cultural nationalism likely shared by most people around the world. American nationalism is typically less culturally oriented than others; Jacoby is right that American exceptionalism is all about America as an idea, rather than as a nation and a place. But let me put this delicately: fuck American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism has made a mess of this place that I have come to love. In realms from social-welfare programs to public transit, the US would do well to learn a lot more lessons from the rest of the wealthy world.

None of this is an endorsement of Vance or his politics. I am alarmed by Vance’s views on enough issues, from climate change to higher education, that I think it’s important to oppose him – to say nothing of his senior partner, who has said plenty of things suggesting that I, and Usha Vance, don’t belong here. But I have at least as much alarm toward Reagan, the man who slashed assistance to the poor and replaced Latin American democracies with murderous dictatorships. The Republican Party’s been awful my whole life. But it’s not its attachment to homeland that I’m worried about.