Read it, and then read it again.
A career in Native American studies makes you the grammatical equivalent of a time machine. No sooner do people learn where you work, what you study, or what specific things you happen to be working on than they suddenly switch to past tense. Depending on the sympathies of the speaker, this may be accompanied by sad tones and slightly downcast eyes. Seriously, I’ve lost track of the number of times a few comments from me have led people to great moments of reflection about “what we have done to them.”
These moments of introspective time-travel usually leave me with a bit of motion sickness. See, the thing is that people go back to the past like this when I am talking about perfectly contemporary issues. When I worked on the Navajo Nation, simply telling folks what I do for a living was often enough to send their souls searching through…
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Big Blue Dot Y'all 
June 10, 2013
Doesn't Fit Anywhere Else