By Milanka Šulejić

There is a particular kind of pride that comes easily to people.

It appears in crowded rooms, beneath familiar flags, in the sound of music that reminds us of somewhere our grandparents once called home. It lives in concerts, celebrations, speeches, photographs and the names of people whose accomplishments have become part of our collective identity.

We gather. We remember. We raise our glasses. We speak about our history and tell one another how proud we are of where we come from.

And there is nothing wrong with any of that.

A culture deserves to be celebrated. Its music deserves to be heard. Its traditions deserve to be practiced. Its history deserves to be honored.

But I have begun to wonder whether we have confused celebrating our heritage with preserving it.

Because pride and responsibility are not the same thing.

Pride tells us where we come from. Responsibility asks what we are doing with what we have inherited.

A concert can bring people together for an evening. A photograph can remind us of a family gathering. A familiar song can take us back to a place we may never see again. These moments matter. They give us a sense of belonging, especially when we live far from the countries and communities that shaped our families.

But what happens after the music stops?

Who is recording the stories of the people sitting in those rooms? Who is asking the grandparents about the villages they left, the languages they spoke, the hardships they survived and the lives they built somewhere else? Who is preserving the photographs whose names and places will soon be forgotten? Who is writing down the recipes, the family histories, the expressions and the small details that never appear in official records?

And who is making certain that the children and grandchildren will have access to those stories?

These questions have stayed with me.

I have come to believe that cultural preservation is not simply about remembering the past. It is about accepting responsibility for its future.

Heritage does not preserve itself.

A language can disappear from a household in a single generation. A family story can vanish when the only person who remembers it is gone. A photograph can survive for a hundred years and still lose its meaning because nobody remembers who is standing in it.

Sometimes an entire history is held in something very small: a name pronounced a certain way, a word spoken in the kitchen, a song remembered by a grandmother, a story about a village a child has never seen.

These things may seem ordinary while the people who carry them are still here.

We recognize their importance only when we begin to lose them.

I know what it means to begin something without waiting for an institution to make room for it.

I know what it means to write, to publish, to develop an idea and to keep moving even when the resources, connections and support are limited. I know the quiet determination required to take something that exists only as a thought and give it a voice, a shape and a purpose.

That experience has changed the way I understand responsibility.

I no longer believe that preserving a culture can be left entirely to organizations, committees or people with official titles. Institutions have resources and opportunities that individuals do not. They can build archives, support writers, record oral histories, establish educational programs and create partnerships that reach far beyond their own communities.

They can do so much.

But having the capacity to do something and actually doing it are two different things.

An institution can celebrate a great historical figure while overlooking the responsibility to preserve the stories of ordinary people. It can speak proudly of its heritage without asking what future generations will actually inherit.

And an individual can spend years trying to accomplish, alone, something that would be far more meaningful if an entire community chose to participate.

This is not an argument against institutions. It is a reminder of what they are capable of becoming.

Nor is it an argument against celebration. It is a question about what comes after celebration.

What would happen if we invested as much energy in preserving our stories as we do in gathering to celebrate them? What if we supported the writers, historians, artists and storytellers who are trying to give our heritage a future? What if we treated family memories as something worth collecting, protecting and sharing?

What if we stopped thinking of cultural preservation as an occasional event and began treating it as a responsibility?

For me, these questions eventually became the beginning of What We Carry, an ongoing literary and cultural storytelling project exploring migration, family memory, identity and the things that survive when people leave home.

I wanted to look beyond borders and official histories. I wanted to understand what families carry across oceans and what remains in the lives of their children and grandchildren.

A Serbian word spoken in an American kitchen. A Bosnian family photograph. A recipe never written down. A father’s memory of a place in Serbia. A mother’s connection to a homeland in Bosnia. A child growing up in Wisconsin, inheriting fragments of places and histories that existed long before he was born.

These are not insignificant details. They are pieces of a much larger human story.

And they deserve to be preserved.

I often think about the generations who came before us. Many left their homes without knowing whether they would ever return. They carried what they could: a few belongings, family names, memories, traditions and the hope that their children might have a different life.

They did not always have the luxury of documenting what they were leaving behind. They were busy surviving, working, raising families and building new lives.

Perhaps that is why the responsibility falls to us now.

We have tools they never had. We have cameras, recording devices, libraries, publishing opportunities and the ability to connect stories across continents. We can preserve voices that would otherwise disappear. We can make family histories accessible to people who have never met the relatives who lived them.

But technology alone will not preserve anything.

Someone must care enough to ask the questions. Someone must listen. Someone must write the stories down. Someone must make certain they are not lost.

And someone must be willing to begin, even when others do not yet understand why it matters.

I have learned that you cannot wait forever for permission to do meaningful work. You cannot build your entire purpose around whether someone recognizes its value. Sometimes the first step is taken by one person who simply cannot accept that something important should disappear.

That does not mean one person should have to carry everything.

It means one person can begin something that others may eventually choose to carry together.

Perhaps this is the responsibility we have misunderstood.

We speak of heritage as though it is something we own because of the families we were born into, the language we heard growing up or the country whose name appears in our family histories.

But heritage is not simply something we receive.

It is something we must care for.

It asks something of us. It asks us to look backward with honesty, to live in the present with intention and to think about those who will come after us.

One day, the people who remember the old stories will no longer be here to tell them. The rooms where families gathered will change. The voices will become photographs. The photographs will become documents. And the documents will mean very little unless someone has taken the time to preserve their stories.

I do not want our children to inherit only the names of the places their families came from. I want them to know the people who lived there. I want them to understand what their families endured, what they valued, what they lost and what they carried forward.

I want them to have more than pride.

I want them to have a history they can touch, read, hear and recognize as part of themselves.

Because cultural preservation requires more than people who are proud of their heritage.

It requires people willing to take responsibility for it.

And perhaps the measure of our pride will not be found in how loudly we celebrate our past, but in what we are willing to build so that the generations who come after us will still have a past to remember.

Heritage is not preserved by what we say we are proud of. It is preserved by what we are willing to do for the generations who come after us.

Milanka Šulejić
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