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

by Patty Krawec

becoming human is hard. It is marked by terrible suffering and profound beauty, especially in an age of cacophony and chaos.

nii’kinaaganaa means “we are related”—and also more than that.

Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants come to a place and become part of the existing political system. When the colonists arrived in what would become the Americas, there were many political systems already in existence.

Biskaabiiyang: returning to ourselves.

Aambe is an Anishinaabe word that can mean “Attention!” or “Come on, let’s go!”

Americans admire this desire to boldly go and then bravely defend themselves from those who resent discovery. Discovery, after all, has never been good for those it has uncovered.

Creation stories, whether Christian or Hebrew, Anishinaabe or Hopi, aren’t meant to be histories—not in the sense that the Western world has invented the idea of history as an unbiased set of facts. They are meant to explain who we are and create a communal sense of self.

giiwedin, the north, contains the idea of going home.

Europe, dominated as it was by Christians, had a single creation story and had previously dealt with difference by eliminating or absorbing it. But the Americas had many; we had learned to live with multiplicity.

Anishinaabe principle of the “good life”: bimaadiziwin.

The Doctrine of Discovery said that lands discovered by European powers belonged to those powers because it wasn’t owned by Christians.

Mishigami, the Ojibwe word from which “Michigan” comes, means “large water” or “large lake.”

Thousands of years ago, Aristotle believed that the temperate climate of the Mediterranean created superior people. The barbarians to the north and the Black people to the south were less evolved, he thought, because their climates were either too hot or too cold to promote true civilization. Thus, he began to connect race and slavery.

The Trail of Tears was the most well-known removal of the Cherokee from Georgia to Indian Territory. Yet it is only one of several removals that took place in the 1830s, an ethnic cleansing of the lands east of the Mississippi. Clearing these states not only freed thousands of acres for plantations and led directly to the rise of King Cotton but removed Indigenous tribes who often acted as allies for escaped slaves. More than one hundred thousand Indigenous peoples were removed

The term environmental racism was coined in the 1970s to capture this pattern of locating industrial processing, waste storage, incinerators, and bridges near primarily Black and Indigenous neighborhoods and lands.

Native people did not become US citizens until 1924.

In Canada, we were gradually enfranchised, losing our Indian status if we went to university or fought in the military, and it wasn’t until 1960 that we stopped being “wards of the Crown” and became Canadian citizens.

It wasn’t until after the Civil War, when slavery was no longer available to keep white and Black separate, that the “one drop rule,” a principle meant to address “invisible Blackness,” began to be adopted in law. In 1924, the Racial Integrity Act in the state of Virginia defined a person as legally Black if they had any African ancestry. This was also the act with the so-called Pocahontas exception: if you had Native American ancestry, you could still be considered legally white. Do you see what happened there? One Black ancestor and the whole family is Black. One Native ancestor and you’re still white. Why? Because a country whose economy relied on slavery and land always needed slaves more than it needed Indians.

Settlers who wanted land during the allotment period often made spurious claims to being Creek, or Seminole, or Cherokee in order to get an allotment or control over an Indian child and the land allotted to the child. These spurious claims became family myths, and even today people will say that they are “part Indian” as an entitlement to belonging. But this kind of claim to being Indian isn’t about belonging to a community; it works to erase us, to shift us off the land and replace us with white settlers who are “part Indian.”

Through the Indian Reorganization Act in the United States and the Indian Act in Canada, governments have imposed not only a kind of leadership that makes sense to them but one that undermines our communities and forces hierarchies of power where they didn’t exist before. That has led to conflicts and corruption in some tribal governments just as we see in American governments.

In 1891, a new law allowed US government officials to forcibly remove Native children from their homes and send them to residential schools. Between 1894 and 1947, Canadian law required Native children to attend these schools. Parents who refused could be jailed, but most often they were simply overpowered and their children taken away.

Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt sought to instill in the American Indians through the education of their children. Pratt had served in the Union Army, and in 1875, he transported seventy-two captive Cheyenne Indians to Fort Marion, Florida. He held them there, and during this period of captivity, he transformed them: he cut their hair, dressed them in military clothes, and drilled them daily. Pratt developed what would become the goal of the entire network of Indian residential schools: “kill the Indian, save the man.” Four years later, in 1879, he would found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first Indian boarding school in the United States.

Although these schools predate the UN Genocide Convention by over fifty years, they meet the criteria of that definition of genocide.

Off-reserve education of children was mandatory in the United States until 1978, and although most of the schools have closed, a few remain open.

We walked through the kitchen, where the children prepared meals for staff from the fruits and vegetables that they labored to grow. Then we went into the dining hall, where the children ate the mush that gave the school its colloquial name: the Mush Hole. We stopped in the basement, where priests would instigate and then bet on fights between the boys. We heard stories of fights that went “too far” and of children who didn’t return to their beds. One story about the Mush Hole that I have heard several times is about the orchard: that trees were planted after children went missing as a way of hiding unmarked graves.

Although the residential school system has ended, many young people in the United States and Canada still need to leave their reservations to go to high school in cities. They stay in boarding homes and dormitories at places like Pelican Falls, youths as young as thirteen in cities for the first time, attending schools far from home.

Even as the government was taking their children, the tribes were experiencing other losses—disruptions they had been navigating for several generations. The loss of their children took place alongside the loss of land and relocations that we read about in chapter 3. It took place alongside the ravages of epidemics and military aggression.

Illnesses like smallpox, tuberculosis, and measles killed up to 90 percent of some tribes.

there is evidence of deliberate attempts at infecting Indigenous people. General Amherst recommended that blankets known to have been used by smallpox victims be distributed to Indians so that they would fall ill as well.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of thirty-nine Dakota men. The Dakota had been relocated several times and by this time were confined to part of southwest Minnesota, on land that was hard to live on and much smaller than the treaties previously agreed to. Food and trade goods that were supposed to come didn’t, and the Dakota were starving. A local storeowner refused them credit for food and reportedly said, “Let them eat grass.” Skirmishes between the Dakota and the settlers turned to war, and by the time it was over thirty-seven days later, many soldiers, settlers, and Dakota were dead. When the storeowner’s body was found, his mouth was stuffed with grass. Some of the Dakota fled, and others surrendered. Of the two thousand who were taken into custody, twenty were sentenced to prison, and 303 were sentenced to death, charged with rape, murder, and robbery. According to military practice at the time, all two thousand should have been released. Describing this in his book Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer calls this the actions of a sovereign nation rising up against foreign invaders. It was a military action with a military result. But Lincoln ultimately approved thirty-nine executions in the largest mass hanging in US history.

Beginning with the Lakota and spreading to others, the Ghost Dance was a message of hope that promised that the white invaders would leave and that everything would return to the way it had been. Native people began gathering in large numbers and dancing the Ghost Dance to see visions of those they had lost and to bring a new vision into being.

Almost thirty years after the hanging of the Dakota, in December 1890, the US Cavalry opened fire on a camp of nearly three hundred Lakota ghost dancers near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. The fully armed US Cavalry came to one of these camps with a Hotchkiss gun, a cannon with a rotating barrel, and the intention of disarming the Lakota. One Lakota man refused to give up his rifle, and according to some witnesses, the rifle went off when he was grabbed by soldiers. The US Cavalry opened fire. At least 150 Lakota were killed and fifty wounded, including women and children. Because of a blizzard, it would be three days before the dead were buried. Twenty US soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor.[*]

As a profession, social work, of which child welfare is one branch, emerged in the late nineteenth century as a way to manage the problem of poverty in a growing and prosperous country. Then as now, only middle- and upper-class women could afford to stay home. For the rest, both parents had to work long hours to earn enough money to pay for food and shelter. Industrial jobs were dangerous with high fatality rates, mortality rates in general were high for those living in poverty just as they are now, and then, just as now, many children lived in financially precarious single-parent households. Social workers initially focused on poverty, but by the 1920s, they were starting to focus more on families and children. The idea began to emerge that some children needed to be protected from their own families and placed with more suitable ones. In the middle part of the century, as the horrors of the German concentration camps were made visible to the world, Canada and the United States began quietly redirecting the horror of residential schools to the more congenial removal of children from their families via the now fully engaged child welfare system. Instead of redcoated RCMP officers working with nuns and priests to tear children from their families, social workers, sometimes with police officers accompanying them, would take children from parents considered neglectful or dangerous and place them with other families. Once again, children were disappearing from reservations. Bu...

Removal of Indigenous children from their families was so widespread that in Canada, it was given the name Sixties Scoop: the scooping of Indigenous children from their homes with little investigation before reaction. The Indigenous children scooped from their homes were adopted out to families as far away as Europe and New Zealand, echoing the earlier practice of putting children in residential schools far from home to discourage running away.

by the 1970s, approximately 25–35 percent of Native children in the United States were placed in foster homes, adoptive homes, or institutional settings. Some 85 percent of those children were placed outside of their communities altogether. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act was supposed to address this disparity; thirty years later, however, serious disparities persist.

American Indian children are almost twice as likely to be in foster care as white children; in South Dakota, they are eleven times more likely, making up 53 percent of the kids in care. Canadian numbers aren’t any better: 7.7 percent of all children under the age of fifteen are Indigenous, but of all the children in foster care who are under fifteen, 52.2 percent are Indigenous.

the French colony of Haiti and its reliance on enslavement of Black people. It goes back to the Haitian Revolution of 1804, when these enslaved Africans revolted and freed themselves. It goes back to the French government imposing reparations—but not reparations paid to those who had formerly been enslaved. These reparations were levied against them. In other words, those who had been enslaved were forced to pay reparations to those who had enslaved them for the “theft” of their “property.” These reparations were financed by French banks and the American Citibank. The amount, twenty-one billion in today’s US dollars, was not paid off until 1947. This scheme is widely recognized as being responsible for Haiti’s persistent poverty.

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.

The UN Mandela Rules say that prisoners shouldn’t be alone for more than fifteen consecutive days.

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.

Much crime is related to vagrancy, which is vague and useful for controlling excess populations. Vagrancy laws emerged in the Middle Ages to control peasants who were no longer tied to particular lords. These laws made it a crime for a person to wander about without any visible means of support, effectively making it illegal to be homeless and without a job. These laws are expressed in a number of ways, ranging from loitering charges to carding. Carding, or street checks, is a practice used by police officers to check the identity of somebody who is not doing anything obviously wrong but who is occupying a place the police believe they have no reason to be. In practice, that has meant stopping racially marginalized men who are in predominantly white neighborhoods and documenting their names. Over time, they become “known to police,” suggesting something shady and questionable.

In addition to criminalizing homelessness, vagrancy laws are also used to criminalize prostitution, public drunkenness, gambling, and criminal association. The criminalizing of sex work forces many of those already on the margins further from safety and into increasingly dangerous and precarious circumstances. Probation and parole orders usually include stipulations against avoiding criminal association, something that is difficult to do when you are part of a population that is as deeply criminalized as Black and Indigenous communities.

The story of Pocahontas is familiar, but the familiar story couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is told as a love story when it is actually the story of an abduction. She is, perhaps, our first Missing Sister. Her name was Metoaka—Pocahontas was a nickname—and she was the daughter of a Wampanoag chief. Metoaka was twelve when she met John Smith, and she may indeed have saved his life. But it was John Rolfe she eventually married, years after she had been kidnapped by the English and held by them for a year. Recounting this story in The Baptism of Early Virginia, historian Rebecca Anne Goetz writes that, at the time of her kidnapping, Metoaka was married to one of her own people. The sea captain who kidnapped her demanded a ransom, which her father did not pay. (Perhaps he did not “negotiate with terrorists.”) After more than a year of captivity, Metoaka converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca. She agreed to marry Rolfe, and they moved to London, where she is buried.

The homicide rate for Native women is almost six times as high as the rate for non-Native women, and while most women tend to be killed by somebody within their racial group, this is not true for Native women. We are more likely to be in relationships with white men. We are more likely to be exploited sexually by white men. And we are more likely to be killed or assaulted by white men.

And although former Prime Minister Stephen Harper declined to investigate this “sociological phenomenon” and insisted that these cases be seen as individual crimes, this direct action eventually forced the Canadian government to hold a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Their report, Reclaiming Power and Place, was released in June 2019 after two years of hearings and testimony. It contains the testimony of thousands of family members and survivors, 231 calls for justice, and named this “sociological phenomenon” genocide. Canada’s report on MMIWG2S is the first time that an official body has used the term genocide in relation to the actions of Canada or the United States.

In the fall of 2020, a whistleblower alleged that migrant women, many of whom are indigenous to Central America, were being sterilized without their knowledge or consent in an ICE detention center in Georgia.

“between 1968 and 1982, 42 percent of Native women of childbearing age were sterilized compared with 15 percent of white women.” On some reserves, up to 80 percent of women were sterilized.

The US National Park system has been displacing Indigenous people for more than one hundred years. Just like governments use the language of safety, conservationists use the language of environmentalism to push aside the original peoples of the places where the parks now exist. In

it is not enough to say that this is Indigenous land. We have to act like it is. Living as if the land belonged to the people we acknowledge means forming and working through relationships.

Aanikoobijigan is the Ojibwe word for “great-grandparent” or “ancestor.” But it is also the word for “great-grandchild” or “descendant.” The word I would use to describe the person three generations before me and the person three generations after me is the same word and it connects seven generations.