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

by Patty Krawec

Just as we have all been touched by prisons and boarding schools, we have all been touched by violence against and disappearance of our women. The rate of violence against Indigenous women and girls and two-spirit people is heartbreaking. (The term two-spirit is a translation of the Anishinaabe word niizh manidoowag. Two-spirit emerged as a way to reclaim acceptance of people who do not fit neatly into a male-female binary and who are not exclusively attracted to what is thought of as the opposite gender. As with any broad term, like our earlier discussion of the terms for Native people, it doesn’t capture the diversity of attitudes regarding gender and sexuality in Native American tribes. Yet it is useful as shorthand, so I’ll use it here.)