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Gakahbekong. That's the name our old ones call the city, what it means from ways back when it started as a trading village. Although driveways and houses, concrete parking garages and business stores cover the city's scape, that same land is hunched underneath. There are times, like now, I get this sense of the temporary. It could all blow off. And yet the sheer land would be left underneath. Sand, rock, the Indian black seashell-bearing earth. Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

The first time I visited Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it was the fall of 2004. Six months pregnant at the time, I had decided to travel on the Israeli airline El Al. I figured if I weren't to be allowed to enter Israel, I'd rather be held up in New York and not after a long flight. I had been told I would face difficulties trying to enter Israel because my American passport reveals that I was born in Iraq. Sure enough, I was detained with El Al Airline security for nearly five hours while my American friends passed through without incident. I was questioned over and over about my motivations for entering Israel. Was I visiting relatives or friends in the West Bank or Gaza? What about my relationship with Saddam Hussein? My political affiliations? My history? My parents' history? Was I a Muslim, and did I know any terrorists? What was I doing, where was I going, where had I been? Each question was asked as an innocent accusation: "Going to work with Arab groups in the West Bank, yes?" They scanned my body seven times, lifted my shirt to "make sure" I was pregnant, searched my bag three times, and confiscated my lotion and shampoo. I politely answered each question, but offered very little. I told them nothing of my hope to find my mother's childhood home in Jaffa, Palestine, now a part of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. "I'm just an artist," I said. Just an artist looking to take pictures of a home stolen from my mother's family in 1948. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948, known to Palestinians as "Al Nakba" ("The Catastrophe" or "The Disaster"), was built on a systematic destruction and depopulation of more than four hundred villages, massacres, looting, and the displacement from the region of 800,000 of the goo,ooo Palestinians who lived there.' Currently, there are more than four million registered Palestinians and descendants living in the diaspora, as a consequence of typical birthrates, subsequent wars, two intifadas, and a brutal occupation.2 Millions more are displaced from their own families' land and continue to live in internal exile throughout Occupied Palestine and Israel, prompting Palestine's poet laure

In December 1861, six young women armed with hatchets and axes marched into a saloon in Mound City, Kansas, and proceeded to smash all the bottles and kegs they could find. One of the ringleaders was twenty-four-year-old Sarah Grimk6 Wattles. While her collaborators, her younger sisters Emma and Mary Ann and the Botkin sisters, kept the bartender busy, Sarah walked out onto the street, where a whisky drummer had stopped his wagon and was standing with a group of onlookers enjoying the show. Sarah calmly strolled around the wagon and opened all the spigots on the barrels, letting the whiskey run onto the street. The drummer accosted Sarah, threatening to strike her down, but Amelia Botkin stepped between them and promised to split his head open with her hatchet if he did not back off. Townspeople intervened and nearly lynched him for even suggesting that he might hit a woman. Sarah, Emma, and Mary Ann, "almost drunk from the whisky fumes," returned home as conquering heroines.' Everyone agreed that their fledgling frontier town was much better off without the pernicious presence of the saloon. Even the bartender, "By" Hildreth, years later thanked Emma Wattles for turning him from his wicked ways.2 The Wattles girls moved to Kansas in 1855 with their parents, Augustus and Susan Wattles, who had worked for the abolition of slavery since the mid183os. Along with Augustus's brother and his wife, John and Esther Wattles, they migrated from New England to Ohio, lived in many places in Ohio and Indiana, and then moved out to Kansas to work for the free-state cause after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Like many abolitionists, both Wattles families embraced other reforms including temperance, diet reform, and women's rights. They passed their progressive views about the need to improve society and to expand opportunities for women on to their children, especially to their daughters. For the Wattles, migration became a necessary means for accomplishing gender reform. In their mobility, the Wattles family typified Americans of the nineteenth

The basic conception of the work, the idea of eternal recurrence, the highest for mula of affirmation that can possibly be attained?belongs to the August of the year 1881 : it was jotted down on a piece of paper with the inscription: "6000 feet beyond man and time." I was that day walking through the woods beside the lake of Silvaplana; I stopped beside a mighty pyramidal block of stone which reared itself up not far from Surlei. Then this idea came to me.

Today, if you drive north on U.S. Highway 84 through Pennsylvania, just before you cross the Delaware River into New York State, a sign for the town of Matamoras appears. When I first saw the name one summer en route from Texas, I assumed with surprise that people in Pennsylvania must have had some direct connection to Santiago, the patron saint of the Spanish Reconquest since his miraculous military intervention in driving the Muslims from Spain had earned him the honorific Matamoros, or Killer of Muslims. Yet, I found it puzzling that the Pennsylvania town spelled the reference to this saint with a feminine ending, a gendered alteration that does not exist in the Spanish-speaking world. Matamoras with an "a" seemed to embody a new saint, whose name as placed in Pennsylvania now meant Killer of Muslim Women. The forgotten Islamic past in the United States had, seemingly, been living under an assumed, invented name. Inventing Matamoras happened repeatedly in the nineteenth century in the United States. Between 1846 and 1849, four towns, as well as schools, churches, and one post office, would be named Matamoras. This nineteenth-century trend, reflecting the invasion and conquest of Mexico by the United States between 1846 and 1848, spatially memorialized American military victories that ultimately resulted in the creation of new southwestern borders. Before the war with the United States, the town Matamoros, Mexico, had not been defined as a site on the southern border of the United States. After the war, maps would be redrawn to reflect the extraordinary U.S. territorial gains, including its victorious national incorporation of Texas along with the former Mexican territories that would eventually comprise the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. As the first Mexican town conquered by the United States in 1846, Matamoros, Mexico, survived in U.S. history as an emblem of American victory. The Mexican Matamoros thus became a named precedent, celebrated with incorrect orthography, a series of U.S. heartland

In 1974 Marija Gimbutas, previously known for her theories about IndoEuropean cultures, published a scholarly work with an academic press on neolithic and chalcolithic Europe. Titled The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, this book argued that the neolithic (stone age) and chalcolithic (copper age) cultures of Old Europe 6500-3500 BCE were peaceful, matrifocal, egalitarian, sedentary, agricultural, highly artistic, and worshiped the Goddess. These cultures, Gimbutas argued, were overthrown between 4500 and 2500 BCE by patriarchal invaders who domesticated horses, worshiped male sky gods, and spoke Indo-European languages. Had it been published twenty years earlier, Gimbutas's book on Old Europe and the two that followed, The Language of the Goddess (1989) and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) might have been quietly ignored. But Gimbutas's book was published at about the same time as Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father (1973); the first issue of WomanSpirit magazine (1974); Z. Budapest's Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows (1975); and Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman (1976). It quickly became one of the works cited in support of the burgeoning feminist spirituality movement's contention that women were better off in ancient societies that worshiped the Goddess than they were in later cul

For several centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad.... The past once destroyed never returns. The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. Today the preservation of what little of it remains ought to become almost an obsession. We must put an end to the terrible uprootedness which European colonial methods always produce, even under their least cruel aspects. We must abstain, once victory is ours, from punishing the conquered enemy by uprooting him still further; seeing that it is neither possible nor desirable to exterminate him.