In Maine, there is the long standing predisposition to believe that if you weren’t born here, you can never be from here. Even if you’ve lived in Maine for decades, most of your life, you will always be “from away.” I have friends who’ve lived here longer than I’ve been alive. If you ask them where they’re from, they’ll tell you Connecticut or New York. They know better than to ever claim Maine as their own.

Some of our native people, the Abenaki, have a word for strangers, white men, those w...