YOKED

Walking around Cambridge, it is impossible to say where Harvard University begins and ends. The town is full of the redbrick, white framed Georgian buildings that so distinguish Harvard architecture. These dignified walls and buildings line the edges of Harvard square, a tourist hub and central pulse of transportation. They extend outward, down the forked web of avenues to the 9 graduate schools connected to the University- schools of medicine, dentistry, divinity, law, business, design, education, public health, and government. It is unmistakably a center of learning, with a graduate student population double the size of its undergraduate students. I do not mean to rhapsodize the university for its grandeur and prestige, or even to place it at the center of the Cantabrigian universe. In fact, I have not yet developed any particular intimacy, or personal bias for the institution, apart from the fact that I am just entering its divinity program. I am but a stranger in a

In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out on the high seas in search of a better trade route to India. Instead, he landed upon the shores of the Americas, which for his people was truly a new world. With that said, my appreciation of American history has evolved since the fourth grade. The binding of my Elementary school textbooks and the narrow, Eurocentric story contained there within has been busted open by the knowledge that thousands of Native American tribes populated this continent before the European arrival and were flourishing in ways that European society could not measure. Disease, violence, deceit, and arrogance were heaved like cargo unto this “discovered” land and that only approximates the real story of the New World. And yet, as I prepare to move to Boston, I can not help but feel the tingling excitement and naïve optimism of moving to a place that is, for me, a new world. I have lived in California my whole life. Actually, my recent sojourn in Northern Cal