I met Robbie Wood in the fall of 2006, when we were coparticipants in a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. Both from Commonwealth countries, and from quite remote areas, we bonded over our shared experiences of the oddities of living in a big city in the USA. Our senses of being at home within the American version of the English language and comfortable within our new cultural milieu were complicated by our distinct but related experiences of more overt and obvious forms of settler colonialism.