Not from Here

A Memoir

By: Allan Johnson

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Hardcover | 26 June 2015

At a Glance

Hardcover
176 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21 x 14 x 2

Hardcover

$49.75

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When Allan Johnson asked his dying father where he wanted his ashes to be placed, his father replied-without hesitation-that it made no difference to him at all. In his poignant, powerful memoir, Not from Here, Johnson embarks on an extraordinary, 2,000-mile journey across the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains to find the place where his father's ashes belonged.

As a white man with Norwegian and English lineage, Johnson explores both America and the question of belonging to a place whose history holds the continuing legacy of the displacement, dispossession, and genocide of Native peoples.

More than a personal narrative, Not from Here illuminates the national silence around unresolved questions of accountability, race, and identity politics, and the dilemma of how to take responsibility for "a past we did not create." Johnson's story-about the past living in the present; of redemption, fate, family, tribe, and nation; of love and grief-raises profound questions about belonging, identity, and place.

Industry Reviews

"What it means to be white, what it means to be American, and what it means to be from a place and to belong to it are questions that Johnson raises throughout the book. He is painfully aware that as a descendant of those who took the land from others, dispossessing and displacing them, he is today the beneficiary of acts he did not perform. . . . [T]hose expecting a son's gentle memoir will be in for a surprise."-Kirkus Reviews

"Not from Here is a fascinating journey into filiality, heritage, and the heart of this American land. It is a journey worth taking and a story well told."
-Kent Nerburn, author of Letters to My Son, Neither Wolf nor Dog, and Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce

"If those two great existential questions-Who am I? and Where am I from?-are linked, how are those with transient upbringings in our amnesiatic, immigrant-settled society to answer them? In Not from Here, Allan Johnson takes a road trip on the American plains to try to find out, haunted by his globe-trotting father's ashes in the trunk and the legacy of Euro-American conquest staring at him through the windshield." -Colin Woodard, author of American Nations and The Lobster Coast

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