The great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers – taken from us far too soon at a mere 33 – has inspired me in many ways. I first encountered him through his modern (and very Canadian) sea chantey “Barrett’s Privateers“, a staple of folk singers at pub nights for drunken Canadian undergraduates like myself (and which has more American admirers than you’d think). The joy of singing along to that song was part of what led me to join McGill’s Folk Music Society club, and eventually become its president for a year. It wasn’t long after that that I had my life-changing Buddhist epiphany in Thailand – yet even there, Rogers’s “Mary Ellen Carter” played a major role. His “The Idiot” was a great comfort at the times I expected a tenure-track job would leave me in a long-distance relationship from the woman I loved on the East Coast. When I married her, “Forty-Five Years” was the last dance at our wedding.

Lately, though, there’s a much lesser known song of his that has been going through my mind repeatedly. It is the closing song of From Fresh Water, his posthumous 1984 album about Ontario – where, despite his well known ties to the Maritime provinces, Rogers (like me) was born and raised. This song is called “The House of Orange”.

Those who know Rogers’s work know it was only rarely political, but “The House of Orange” is a major exception. It tells the story of an Irish-Canadian man who is approached by a canvasser to give money to the IRA, the terrorist organization supporting Irish Catholics in the then-raging civil war, “the Troubles”. He bitterly refuses: “the damned UDL and the cruel IRA / Will tomorrow go murdering again / But no penny of mine will I add to the fray.” It’s a powerful and moving rebuke – not even in the name of advocating for peace, just of refusing to further a war.

The song would be great enough just in those terms, but for me personally it adds something else. I have no ancestry from Ireland, only Scotland – which, while culturally close, is not relevant to the song, since people in Scotland weren’t significantly engaged in Ireland’s conflict. What makes the song resonate for me personally isn’t that specific conflict. Rather, it is something a little more subtle: the song’s deeper underlying assertion of North American, New World, identity.

The narrator of “The House Of Orange” draws a stark contrast between the children of the 1980s in the New World and the Old: “Meanwhile my babies are safe in their home / Unlike their pale cousins who shiver and cry / While kneecappers nail their poor dads to the floor / And teach them to hate and to die.” It is something tremendously valuable about North American culture that here many old hatreds can be forgotten quickly, as hatreds go. The song’s narrator insists that the old hatreds inspiring the Troubles, on either side, are not his struggle – for, as he says in the penultimate line, “I’ve given my heart to the place I was born.”

It is this line that has resonated with me in particular, because it gives expression to something that’s come up over and over in my life: my impatience, or worse, with people who think I’m Indian. People calling me Indian, or referring to India as “my country” – which it never has been, just ask the Indian government – used to be an irritating but ignorable error. But it has felt a lot worse in an era that orders white people – like the family I’ve spent most of my life with – to treat everyone non-white as different while continuing to insist that mixed people’s white ancestry doesn’t count. That gets me lumped back in the “Indian” bucket, just as surely as the people who have asked “but where are you really from?”

I’m not Indian. I never have been. That much is obvious to people in India, who found me so obviously foreign that they didn’t even imagine I could have an Indian name. But it seems less obvious to people here in my homelands – the only places that have ever been mine – who are now being told to set up a distinction between themselves as “white” and me as “non-white” (or worse, a “person of colour”), and therefore mark me as no longer one of them. My culture, which also raised the other Asian-Canadian kids I grew up with, is not the culture of ADOS, just as it is not the culture of Québec francophones or of non-English-speaking immigrant enclaves; I generally refer to it as “mainstream” Canadian or North American culture to indicate its difference from such other rich cultures that share this continent. Maybe “mainstream” is not the best term – anglophone also covers most of it, except its difference from ADOS – but if you call this multiracial culture white (and me not), you are telling me I don’t really belong in the only culture that has ever been mine.

Now while many of my Indian family are Hindu nationalists (and sometimes outright rednecked in their prejudices in a way I’ve never seen in my Canadian family), they’ve fortunately never tried to ask me to support those causes that I despise. I imagine they’d already got the hint from my Marxist father, who was as staunch a foe of Hindu nationalism as you’ll ever find. But there have still been Hindu nationalists online who have looked at my name and expected that I should be a supporter of their cause, outraged to find that I would defend scholarship they didn’t like. First they sent me private emails calling me “fellow Indian” in the hopes that I would sign on to their cancel culture, and when that didn’t work they called me a “sepoy in training”. They have a lot in common with the canvasser in “The House Of Orange”.

And so I feel a powerful kinship with the song’s narrator, who defies the canvasser’s wish that he support his ancestors’ murderous civil war. He knows, as I do, that he is not his ancestors, and they do not define him. My ancestors – both the white and the Indian, mind you – have helped make me who I am, but a far greater role has been played by my world, this world, the mainstream North American world where I come from and where I will always belong.

I am an immigrant, yes – from Canada to the United States. I absolutely feel the conflicts that most immigrants do, about belonging to two different worlds – but they’re conflicts between those two worlds, the Canadian and the American, in a way that the Ugly Canadians make unusually painful right now. It’s not about India – or for that matter about Scotland, for that rare breed who can imagine that one’s white ancestry might actually matter.

For that reason, I felt a similar resonant spark when the Muscogee professor Joey Miller described the land-based nature of Native American philosophies – in part because the two places I come from are not that far apart from each other, despite crossing an international boundary. I am of Northeastern North America, the land stretching from the Laurentian basin to the Eastern Seaboard, from Montréal to New York, the land containing both my native Kingston and my adopted home of Somerville, the land where I have spent all but a small few of my fifty years. One way or another I come from here, from northeastern North America, and its flora and fauna and seasons – as people of indigenous ancestry did before there was a border, as they still do. This continent is my place, my only place, as it is for Miller. I have complex and conflicted feelings about my Canadian and American identities, for sure – but I can still say, with all my heart, that I have given that heart to the place I was born.