Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

by Patty Krawec

Colonization has gotten inside our heads. It is more than driving cars and talking on iPhones, more than the food we eat or where we shop. It is how we think. We often put colonialism in the past, dressing it up in sixteenth-century costumes. But as Patrick Wolfe has said, colonialism is a process and not an event. Settler colonialism came to stay in the Americas in the sixteenth century, but it neither started there, nor has it stopped. It cut its teeth on the Crusades, where the rape and violence enacted on Jews and Muslims were the price of Christian freedom. A violence that persists and finds expression in the burnings of mosques and synagogues, shootings, and travel bans. It sharpened its blade on the repeated expulsions of Jewish people from Europe and the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, which banished Muslims from Spain. It consolidated its power over women through the fires of the witch burnings. And it arrived on these shores with the authority of the Doctrine of Discovery tucked beneath its arm, settling into our lands and our heads, shaping everything about how we live. It is an ongoing process of destruction and replacement, destroying Indigenous beliefs and lifeways and replacing them with churches and board meetings.