A native is one who belongs to a place by virtue of birth. The native is from here. The term suggests that somehow your initial belonging to a particular place seeps into your heart in a way that can never be washed out again. This also recognizes that your first years in a place are the time when the main elements of your personality and presence are conditioned by the place, its inhabitants, and the tonality of life and atmosphere of soul that were there. The native is also the one who remains in the place. Others who were born there moved away; the native is faithful to the place and continues the initial belonging. No one knows the feel and memory of a place the way a native does. The one who remains knows the place from the inside and is attuned to the subtle world of longing the native place holds. In past times there was a powerful intimacy between the native and the place; this belonging has been diluted by travel and the voices from outside which have come in through radio, TV, and computers. The belonging has been loosened quite significantly. We are all moving more and more into the middle ground of nowhere in particular. The terrible sameness of the roads we drive has in part abolished place and space. We by-pass place and lose the sense of journeying through space. Consequently, we now find articles and programmes about the particularity and richness of life among indigenous people so fascinating and even exotic. Ironically, together with this general dilution of what is native, there has been the most sinister resurgence of tribalism, for example, in Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and Russia. This is the darkest and most destructive expression of native identity. Belonging is defined narrowly and exclusively in terms of land and tribe. Those who embody anything contrary become targets of hate and violence. Such destructive creeds of belonging become poisonous. True belonging is hospitable to difference for it knows that genuine identity can only emerge from the real conversation between self and otherness. There can be no true self without the embrace of the other.
There is always a complex and subtle network of life among the natives of a place. It has a rhythm and balance of its own. To the arrogant outsider, natives seem simple and naïve. This is always a massive over-simplification. It is only when the outsider comes in to live there that the subtlety and depth of the way of life becomes somewhat clearer. Given the immediacy of belonging among the natives, there is usually a whole roster of unsaid and unexpressed life that never appears on the surface, but that secretly anchors the way of life there. The limitation of the native way of life is that the code of belonging is often quite narrow and tight. Individuals who think differently or pursue a different way of life can be very easily identified, targeted, and marginalized. Yet there are treasures preserved by the natives: ancient rhythms of perception and attunement to the world. This way of seeing life and practicing belonging in the world finds unique expression in the language of the place. In the West of Ireland, for instance, the old people are the custodians of Gaeltacht, the Gaelic language. Each one who dies takes a vocabulary to the grave with him or her that will never be replaced. The continual presence of the native underlines the temporary presence of the visitor.