I came from a small town.
Not the kind of place where the world always came knocking at your door with different languages, histories, cultures, and perspectives in hand.
It was smaller than that.
Quieter.
More insulated.
The kind of place where you could grow up thinking the map in front of you was the whole world simply because no one had handed you another one yet.
And I had a lot of missing information.
Missing pieces about history.
Missing pieces about people.
Missing pieces about systems.
Missing pieces about my own family, my own identity, and the way all of those things can shape how a person understands power, belonging, culture, and survival.
That is something I do not want to forget.
Because every time I learn something new now, I remember the girl I used to be.
The small-town girl who knew some things deeply and other things barely at all.
The girl who could recognize struggle without always having the language for it.
The girl who could feel when something in a story did not add up, but did not yet know where to look for the missing chapters.
That girl still walks beside me.
She is probably why I keep asking questions.
Why I keep circling back to history.
Why I keep wondering who was left out of the version I was first given.
The more I have learned about Francophone and Anglophone history, especially through the lens of Canada and Québec, the more I have realized that language can become more than a way of speaking.
It can become a border.
A wound.
A shield.
A memory.
A declaration that says:
We are still here.
It made me think harder about how power moves through schools, laws, government, economics, religion, land, and language.
Who gets to decide which culture is dominant?
Who gets labeled difficult for resisting assimilation?
Who is told to adapt?
Who is told their history is too uncomfortable?
Who gets remembered as the builder of a nation, and who becomes a footnote beneath the foundation?
Those questions followed me straight back home to America.
They made me think about the way this country has treated Native American nations.
They made me think about how entire cultures were pushed, renamed, relocated, educated out of themselves, and told that survival required becoming something more acceptable to the dominant culture.
They made me think about broken treaties, stolen land, boarding schools, suppressed languages, and the strange arrogance of calling destruction “progress.”
They made me think about Black history too.
About how slavery did not simply vanish and leave a clean page behind.
How Reconstruction was followed by backlash.
How Jim Crow became policy.
How segregation became normal.
How redlining, unequal schools, economic barriers, voter suppression, and generational exclusion kept rewriting the same inequality in different ink.
And none of these histories are the same.
They should never be flattened together for the sake of making a neat point.
Pain is not a competition.
Oppression is not one universal script.
But systems leave patterns.
They leave fingerprints.
They leave habits.
They teach governments how to hide inequality behind language that sounds reasonable.
They teach people how to accept injustice when it is dressed up as tradition, law, order, civility, or “the way things have always been.”
That is what I keep coming back to.
History is not dead.
It is not trapped in museums.
It is not resting quietly in old photographs.
It walks around in policies.
In neighborhoods.
In school funding.
In generational wealth.
In who feels safe speaking their language.
In who is expected to prove they belong.
In whose pain is believed.
In whose anger is considered dangerous.
In whose culture is celebrated only after it becomes marketable.
And the uncomfortable part is realizing that progress does not erase any of that overnight.
We like to believe that passing a law means the wound is closed.
We like to believe electing a new administration means we turned the page.
But history does not work like that.
You cannot heal a century in four years.
You cannot repair generations of exclusion with one speech.
You cannot celebrate progress while refusing to look at what progress still has not reached.
That is where I hope the next administration, and every administration after it, understands the assignment a little better.
Not just politically.
Humanly.
Keep building.
Keep listening.
Keep investing in Indigenous sovereignty, cultural preservation, education, voting access, civil rights, economic opportunity, and communities that have spent generations fighting for an equal seat at a table they helped build.
And stop treating progress like a party trophy.
It belongs to all of us.
Or it belongs to no one.
I think that is what this journey has taught me more than anything.
You do not have to hate where you came from to admit it did not teach you everything.
You do not have to abandon your roots to grow beyond them.
You can love the road behind you and still admit that road did not show you the whole country.
You can be grateful for your upbringing and still challenge the blind spots it gave you.
You can say:
I did not know.
Then learn.
Then do better.
Then keep going.
That is probably the most honest thing I can say about my own path.
I came from a small town.
I carried missing information.
I walked into a much larger world.
And every time I thought I had finally understood it, another voice, another culture, another piece of history cracked open the horizon again.
Maybe that is the point.
Maybe growth is not about finally knowing everything.
Maybe it is about refusing to stop looking.
Refusing to stop listening.
Refusing to become so comfortable with your own story that you stop caring about the stories written beside it.
The little girl from that small town is still here.
But she is carrying more maps now.