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

by Patty Krawec

Prisons didn’t always exist either. Somebody had to think them up, and eventually somebody did. Quakers thought that capital punishment, particularly as it existed in the late eighteenth century, was inhumane. So in 1790, they created prisons as a reform. Based on the Calvinist idea that solitude and silence could lead to repentance—to penitence for wrongdoing—the Quakers created “penitentiaries” as a place for that solitude. Many traditions, Indigenous ones included, contain elements of solitude: time apart in fasting and prayer to realign relationship to self and environment. But chosen solitude is much different from forced isolation. Solitary confinement is now recognized by many as tortuous in its own right, but at the time, it was conceived of as a reform.

Between 2012 and 2019, Adam Capay, a twenty-six-year-old man from my reserve, Lac Seul First Nation, spent 1,647 days in solitary confinement while awaiting trial in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The UN Mandela Rules say that prisoners shouldn’t be alone for more than fifteen consecutive days. Adam was alone for more than one hundred times that. His story is one of tragedy and aggression, and he is both victim and perpetrator. For 1,647 days, he was alone, spending months in Plexiglas cells, with lights on twenty-four hours a day. His time in solitude was devastating for his mental health. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he offended again shortly after he was released. It did not lead to realignment or repentance.

In the United States, the rate of imprisonment for Native Americans is double that of white Americans, and in states with large Native populations, that rate can be as high as seven times. For every one hundred thousand people in each racial category, there are 1,291 who are Native, 2,306 who are Black, and 450 who are white in prison. In Canada, we make up about 5 percent of the population but account for almost 30 percent of federal inmates. Indigenous women account for almost 42 percent of the incarcerated. There is either something very wrong with us, or there is something very wrong with the system itself. And there is nothing wrong with us.

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In Canada from 1885 to 1951, there was a pass system, which controlled when and under what circumstances adult Indians could leave the reserve and that made them subject to questioning by police and citizens. Although slave codes and the pass system have been long abolished, neighborhood watches serve a similar purpose. When George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin and when Gerald Stanley murdered Colten Boushie, these underlying beliefs about who belongs where and who has the right to question or protect ensured their acquittals.

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.)

In Canada from the 1990s to the early 2000s, serial killer Robert Pickton murdered forty-nine women, mostly Native, whose disappearances were not taken seriously by police because they were sex workers from East Vancouver. He was eventually charged and convicted. But police forces do not appear to have learned from this mistake, because across the United States and Canada, Native women continue to go missing, and their disappearances continue to be dismissed.

In the fall of 2021, Gabby Petito’s disappearance dominated the news cycle. Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka noted that her case joined those of Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway, white women whose disappearances resulted in vast, sympathetic publicity. This public attention is denied to disappeared Black and Indigenous women. She quotes journalist Maria Schiavocampo, who said, “This actually has real life implications for women of color. Why? This makes them less safe because perpetrators, predators, know that if you want to get away with murder, you seek the victim that no one is going to look for.”

The sterilization of Native women in the United States and Canada goes back to the early twentieth century, when concerns about population control combined with eugenics. Policies began to target women who were seen to be defective: generally those who were Black, Indigenous, chronically poor, or deemed mentally unfit. Given how frequently it is Black and Indigenous women who are also chronically poor or deemed mentally unfit, this, too, amounts to genocide. Laws that permitted sterilization without consent remained on the books until the 1970s.

Sexual violence is not just something that happens to women. Our men also experience extraordinary rates of sexual violence, both in the way that they are seen as predators who are guilty before they’ve done anything at all as well as the sexual assaults that are endemic to prisons, or “rape factories,” as I have heard them described. We recognize that the prison rape of women is a problem, but when men go to prison, rape is either a joke or a threat. Sexual violence and threats of sexual violence are used by police to gain compliance. The assaults on our boys and young men moved from residential schools, to foster care, to prison.

Grief is the persistence of love. It sees my ancestors in stalks of corn and hears them whisper when I pour wild rice through my hands. It fills my bag with nettles and reminds me to be gentle when I strip bark from larch or dogwood. Grief is the sound of thunder you feel deep in your chest, the lingering smell of sage hours after it is burnt. Grief is the forgetting of names. It does not know which place the ancestors’ feet last touched before leaving home forever. It looks back over shoulders and sees only darkness. Stolen lives means stolen history means no thread to pick up and follow home. Grief holds the accumulation of centuries in its hands and watches it turn to ash and then reaches out for more. Grief is consuming and consumed, an endless cycle of loss.

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I want us to consider our relationship with land—to think about it beyond squabbling over ownership and rights and to think about responsibilities and reciprocal relationship. To think of ourselves as a part of creation rather than apart from it. What if the land is a being in its own right? That concept is not as foreign as you might think. And what if the land and all that grows from it and on it and in it are sentient beings in their own right? Then we need to make material changes that restore the land to our original agreements. We need to remember that the land belongs to itself, and everyone belongs to the Creator.

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Governments are increasingly restoring Indigenous names to parks and streets, reminding people that these places had an existence before Europeans arrived. In 2015, the US Department of the Interior officially changed the name of Mount McKinley back to Denali, which is what the local Koyukon people had called it for centuries. So we name the land, claiming relationship to it. And what if the land also claims us?

Stones are also our relatives. Whatever I eat has taken up nutrients from the ground, including minerals, and the land itself becomes part of me. Thunderstorms and rivers become part of me. The land and the waters have absorbed the blood and sweat of generations, watched babies become old men and women and return to them. We are part of each other. Civilizations rise and fall, and the land and the waters continue. They hold memory of us all. Standing before a presence that large and that old—and making one-sided claims of ownership—is an act of extraordinary hubris.

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First, Abraham did not enter as a conqueror; he entered as a supplicant, as a guest. Abraham lived among the people of Canaan, and when God said he would destroy the city of Sodom, Abraham argued with him, pleading for justice. Second, as Willie James Jennings writes, when the Hebrews returned to the Promised Land after centuries in Egypt, it was God who asserted sovereignty over the land, not the people. They developed a relationship with it, but the land itself belonged to God. These colonizing Christians took the conquest of Canaan as their model but not the form of land ownership that was instituted immediately afterward.

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As a thought experiment, I want you to think about what would happen if churches and businesses returned their land to the Indigenous people from whom it was taken. They would run the risk of eviction, that’s true. But how would it change their behavior now that they are motivated to avoid eviction? How would churches act toward Indigenous peoples to ensure that their yearly lease gets renewed? What practices would businesses put into place to keep their place? How would that change in ownership change priorities? What ripples would that have in the broader community?

Some things are difficult to hear not only because they are upsetting, in and of themselves, but because they challenge things about the way that we interact with people and point out harms that we do. Helping feels good, but it is paternal; without relationship, it embeds hierarchy. The conversations that lead to kinship feel personal because they are personal.

A six-year-old told me that he doesn’t like Scooby Doo cartoons because “everyone is white except Scooby, and he’s a dog.” A fourteen-year-old said that he notices the way that old women look at him, the way they change where they carry their purse when he walks by. One day, after the topic of race had become a normal part of our conversations, an eleven-year-old told me about overhearing his teachers’ comments about his younger brother’s hair—how much tidier it would look if his afro was shorter. He told me how it made him feel.

Becoming good relatives, for settlers, is also not about becoming Native. Some white settlers seek belonging by looking for Native ancestry, which is another form of erasure. Race shifting refers to the act of people claiming Native identity based on an insubstantial, imagined, or invented connection to Native communities. They shift their racial understanding of themselves from white to Native. As DNA testing gains popularity, many scour their family tree for that one ancestor—that one of eight or sixteen or thirty-two or sixty-four grandparents, depending on how far back they need to go—who will make them Native, even though they have no familial relationship with an existing community.

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This large-scale tourism push would actually displace the poorest Irish people, while people like me with family stories but no lived connection to Ireland—no connection to the political struggles and social realities of Ireland—came home and played at being Irish for a week or two.

My mother made a choice to raise me among settlers and apart from my Ojibwe relatives. Her decision wasn’t malicious, but the harm was real, and I have to sit with that. I can’t pretend it didn’t happen or that it didn’t insulate me from some things even as it failed to insulate me from others. Because of the way that others saw me—as the brown child in a white family—I had identity without relationships. That combination—identity with no community—impoverished me. That impoverishment was a constant hum in the background of my life. My face told a story that the rest of me couldn’t articulate except as loss and absence.

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My darker skin makes me a stranger, not from here, possibly dangerous. People whose skin color or religion marks them as migrants, whether they are Black or Muslim, Asian or Mexican, often have a similar experience—but where are you from?—

There are several stories of how the hand drum came to the Cree, or to the Anishinaabe, or to whomever is telling the story. The story I learned is about a mother and daughter who were very close. They spent all their time together, gathering medicines and singing and taking care of each other and their community. The daughter died. The mother was inconsolable. One night, the mother was out looking at the stars—because we understand that we came from the stars and that we go back to them when we are finished here—and she saw the northern lights dancing in the sky. These lights took the form of her daughter and held her close. They gave her the drum and taught her to play it, striking the hide in a way that evokes a heartbeat. And the mother and daughter remain connected. Aanikoobijigan.

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Alexis Shotwell and Aurora Levins Morales offer us a helpful way forward as we consider our unwanted kin. “All of us inherit history,” Shotwell writes; “the life we enter is a product of what has come before us. We inherit the life experiences of our ancestors as well as the material conditions in which those experiences unfolded. That inheritance sets the conditions for our individual lives.” She continues: “We aren’t personally responsible for the social relations and material conditions that came before us or that we enter in to, but we can become responsible for what we do in response to those conditions.”

Using the Doctrine of Discovery, the governments of the United States and Canada have described the land and its people as “empty.” They use settlers to fill the land, and they use religion or social theories to fill the people. Settler colonialism does not notice what abundance is already there, what good news we might have to share that would help them. So what is my responsibility in these relationships? What is yours? I did not create the policies that shaped what I did as a social worker or the theology that shaped my beliefs as a Christian. But we become responsible for what we do in response. We return to ourselves by picking up our bundles and taking responsibility for the relationships and material conditions we have inherited.

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