The border between the Jewish and the Palestinian, all their cousins and in-laws, the Ukrainian who knows the Russian soldier at the threshold, the Navajo married into the Hopi, the entanglements across a line of chalky rock, the knotted thread of time, a kicked-in wall with an anonymous footprint—if all those borders are false, maybe the border between you and me is false as well.

My family history is pure silver. So much it is mine, I don’t even keep it under lock and key. I don’t even have to be proud of it. That’s how much it is mine. The mines. The mine fields.

My grandmother told many stories of her time at Hopi where my white grandfather was Superintendent of Indian Affairs. In high school she had me read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee because she knew all about the crimes of mine.

In one of her stories, my father is a young boy whose friend was Hopi and also living at the Indian agency at Keams Canyon. Together they made rockets and rode burrows around the mesas and through the canyons.

Their older brothers were friends, too. And when they all played together, the older boys were old enough to want the Indians to play Indians and the Cowboys to play Cowboys.

But my young father and his Hopi friend would not change sides. They would both be Indians or they would both be Cowboys

to the consternation of the older boys who already knew the way of the world.

The boys had all the maps, all the lines and all the territories of treasure; and not one of those maps drew a line between them.

My father was in his eighties when he went back to Hopi. He cried when he found out his young friend had died a decade or so before. And when my father dies, he will reach his childhood once again and there will be burrows to ride with his friend through the Hopiland where they will meander and thread back and forth across the ingenious borderlessness.