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

by Patty Krawec

We are related. Nii’kinaaganaa.

From our earliest creation stories, the Anishinaabeg (plural of Anishinaabe) understood themselves to be related not only to each other but to all of creation. Our language does not divide into male and female the way European languages do. It divides into animate and inanimate. The world is alive with beings that are other than human, and we are all related, with responsibilities to each other.

Western Christians have, as they say, lost the plot.

Each of these terms is correct and wrong, and it is likely that whatever term you use will at some point be corrected by somebody else to a term they think is more appropriate. The best thing to do is thank them for the correction and move on, recognizing that language is complicated. These terms were rarely what we called ourselves and represent colonial ways of thinking about us. And so they will all be wrong in some way.

Settlers: this word is just as fraught as any word for Indigenous peoples is, and it also refers to a collective group. You may be more inclined to think of yourself as American or Canadian. Perhaps being called a “settler” feels aggressive—a suggestion that you do not belong, despite generations of being here. You think of yourself, or perhaps your ancestors, as immigrants. Not settlers. Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants come to a place and become part of the existing political system.

Settler is a way of being here. Through this book, I hope to offer you another way to be.

Aambe: let’s go.

When I say that the land is my ancestor, that is a scientific statement”: Dr. Keolu Fox, a Kānaka Maoli genomic researcher, made this comment at a 2020 presentation. The land itself and the conditions of that land, like altitude and climate, impact our genome just as our human ancestors do. My roots reach out to and draw upon the land of many places, connecting me here, where they reach deeply into the land that created my paternal ancestors.

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.

look for how we arrived here so that they can position us as simply earlier settlers. This perspective of us—as people who wandered off from the garden, who wandered off from the truth—became a basis for authority over us. In trying to fit the new world into the Christian story, the Jesuit theologian José de Acosta, an influential sixteenth-century priest whose writing laid the foundation for many of the beliefs that shaped the Christian West, began to disconnect us from the land. Acosta organized Christian beliefs so that they justified the enslavement of indigenes and Africans, justified what would become a racial hierarchy of intelligence and moral capability, and justified colonialism and the white Christian hegemony that followed. It was Acosta who redefined Christian suffering to mean living alongside unbelievers—something we hear echoes of today in the way that many Christians feel persecuted by the war on Christmas or taking official prayer out of school. Acosta developed the imperial theology that underpins how “Christian” countries have behaved and continue to behave.

In her book All Our Relations, Tanya Talaga relates a similar story that was told to her by Cree writer and chief Edmund Metatawabin. Big Brother is always hungry, Edmund told her; he is a voracious monster that never stops eating. He is so hungry that he turns his little brother into a slave and forces him to go out looking for food. But no matter what Little Brother brings—trees for lumber, diamonds from the earth, fish from the rivers—it is never enough. Edmund asked, “When will Little Brother finally stand up and say enough?”

Silvia Federici, in her book Caliban and the Witch, connects the emergence of capitalism with the ideology of the witch hunts and describes them as a strategy to control and, if necessary, eliminate women. Witch hunts literally terrorized women into submission, removed them from the social sphere, and resulted in thousands of deaths across Europe and then the colonies. Over time, these ideas about inherent evil and dangerous powers were transferred from women to Black and Indigenous peoples, terrorizing us into submission, removing us from the social sphere, and resulting in thousands of deaths.

Settler colonialism destroys in order to replace,” writes Patrick Wolfe, an academic who studied global settler colonialism.

When we talk about demonizing or dehumanizing people as part of that destroy-and-replace process, we can take another important lesson from the wendigo. Although he sees beavers instead of people—as something he could consume rather than as humans, like him—the people are unchanged. They may appear to be beavers to the wendigo, but in the stories they remain human. It is the man who consumes them who is transformed. It is the man who consumes them who is dehumanized.

Developers still say that it “isn’t being used” when they want to develop an area of land. But that only means that people aren’t using it in a particular way. Plants and animals are using it. People are using it. It is never a matter of whether the land is being used. It is how and who that matter—that prioritize one set of uses over all others and give one group the right to push aside another.

own my land, but so do the city and region, the province and the country. We all have ownership in it, and responsibilities to it, in different ways.

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

When I was studying to be a social worker, I learned about the Catholic Worker movement, a collection of communities formed in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. They are committed to particular goals around social justice, including hospitality and opposition to war and equality around wealth distribution. Catholic Worker commitment to these ideals includes choosing to live at or below the poverty line so that their taxes don’t support military expansion. This forces them to make countercultural choices about how they organize their homes and relationships. Those in the Catholic Worker movement adopt a way of life that prevents the accumulation of wealth and allows them to offer support to those who need it. They choose relationship; they choose a good life.

Unlike settlers, who stopped to work in one place before choosing to move to another in search of land, enslaved people are forcibly displanted, that term coined by human rights lawyer Anthony Morgan to describe the experience of Africans in diaspora.

When Senator Henry Dawes visited the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma decades after their removal, he found them to be thriving. This surprised him. They had a school, hospital, and bicameral system of governance. Nobody did without. According to Dawes, this was socialism. There was, he said, “no incentive to make your home better than that of your neighbor. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.” This propensity for collective ownership confounded settlers, who understood the buying and selling of land as the basis of wealth and civilization. The Dawes Act was their solution. It broke up reservations and divided Indian Country—that land west of the Mississippi to which Andrew Jackson had marched dozens of tribes—into allotments. Those allotments were then distributed to tribal citizens as individuals rather than as tribal groups.

Beginning in the eighteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, there were laws throughout the United States regarding race. Depending on the state, a person could be legally white if three grandparents or seven great-grandparents were white. 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. In Traces

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.”

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 put a stop to allotment, which had devastated tribal holdings throughout the Great Plains, not only in Oklahoma.

It is normal to see ourselves in these histories recorded in the Bible, but it is important to think about how we see ourselves and in whom. Too often the descendants of European Christians see themselves as persecuted Israelites rather than as members of the invading state of Babylon: an empire that imposes systems of oppressive leadership over the people of the land for the purpose of control and prosperity.

Every American Indian in the United States and Canada has been touched by the residential school system in one way or another. The generational trauma that resulted from decades of this policy is incalculable. There is the loss of language and stories, the loss of relationship. There is the deliberate forgetting of our personal histories to avoid the pain of not forgetting. This destruction of what was ours replaced our languages with French, English, and Spanish; our stories with the Bible; and our systems of kinship with isolated nuclear families. These losses have been woven into our existence as Native people, written into our DNA as surely as our ancestors are.

In fact, just five white people own nine million acres of rural property, which is one million more than all Black Americans own combined.

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.

In Canada, the last government-run boarding school closed in 1996, the same year that the Fresh Prince left Bel Air.

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. His plan may not have been successful, but his willingness to try speaks loudly.

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. The rest of the surviving Dakota were evicted from the state of Minnesota and sent to reservations in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Confederate soldiers, who also took up arms against the United States of America, were not hanged. In 1868, President Andrew Johnson granted them a pardon and an amnesty, restoring to them “all the rights, privileges, and immunities under the Constitution.” Far from being shamed or exiled, many of the leaders of the former Confederacy were restored to positions of authority. Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, was elected to Congress and became the governor of Georgia. Robert E. Lee became the head of Washington College.

I think about the difference it would have made for Lovely and Daniel to have had stable housing and care for their physical and mental trauma, for them to be safe. But we save children and not families, so Junior was taken into foster care.

If we wanted families to do well, we would put policies into place that protect the family—that ensure they have homes and food and all the things that our society says that people should have.

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.

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 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.)

Ojibwe Anishinaabe author and academic Lawrence Gross would agree with this science teacher. In his book Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being, he writes about the Anishinaabe language being more suited for quantum physics than English because it understands the dynamic nature of creation, particle and wave. It is a verb-based language, which talks about what things do rather than what they are. We are not human beings; we are humans being.

In her book The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics, Norwegian Hebrew Bible scholar Mari Joerstad introduces us to a text that is filled with other-than-human persons, alive in the way that Gross and Yunkaporta describe and which is somehow missing from churches.

Settlers and migrants and the forcibly displanted get worried when Native people start talking about Land Back. What about their house? Where will they go? Unable to imagine any scenario other than what settler colonialism unleashed on us, people assume that Land Back means evictions, relocations, and elimination. In some cases, that might be appropriate. People own lakefront vacation homes that crowd Indigenous people out of traditional ricing beds,

“Further proof of human perfidy is their inattentiveness to the suffering of other creatures. The earth is left with no option but to cry directly to YHWH.”

There was a time when I wondered—do I really believe all of this?” writes novelist Louise Erdrich. “I’m half German. Rational! Does this make any sense? After a while such questions stopped mattering. Believing or not believing, it was all the same. I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as if it contained sentient spiritual beings.”

In the United States and Canada, institutions are beginning to talk about improving relationships between institutions and Indigenous peoples. They call it “decolonizing.” Churches, colleges, and settler organizations are beginning to recognize the colonial history of these countries and are trying to improve their relationships with Indigenous peoples. But decolonizing is not another word for anti-racism or anti-oppression; it is not just another way of saying diversity and inclusion. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, decolonization is not a metaphor. We could be the most anti-racist society on earth, but as long as America relies on stolen land and the displacement of Indigenous people, it will remain a colonial state. Decolonizing means returning the land to the people from whom it was taken.

Theorists like W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the importance of land in discussions about wealth and poverty. Contemporary theorists see inequity as lack of access to social resources. They talk about racism in our social structures rather than also analyzing land ownership itself. And that is interesting to me because by disconnecting inequity from access to land, any social justice action that we take reinforces settler colonialism. We’re simply making settler colonialism fairer and more just, which means that our movements are built on Indigenous erasure.

Naomi Klein has said that 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. Now we’re going to unpack what it means to live together, to become kin.

Helping feels good, but it is paternal; without relationship, it embeds hierarchy.

Being confronted with racist ideas or behavior—our own or in the systems we’re part of—is hard, but it is not the worst thing. The worst thing is being unwilling to listen, unwilling to do better.

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. Aanikaw, the root word, refers to the act of binding or joining. Depending on prefix and suffix, this root can become a variety of words used to describe the sewing or tying together of the things.

In her book As We Have Always Done, Michi Saagiig Nishaabeg author and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes about the importance of thinking backward and forward at the same time. Thinking in cyclical rather than linear time, we see more clearly the ways that generations are linked. We are so used to thinking of history in a linear way. But there are things we do every year, at a particular time, that return us to cycles. Annual holidays and gatherings are a way of marking cyclical time as we come back to those places and meals and specific family gatherings again and again. Each cycle brings us closer to the time when certain family members will no longer be present and new ones will. These spots in the cycle, feasts and gatherings, are thin places where past and future generations are tied together.

In Not “A Nation of Immigrants,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz unpacks similar claims sometimes made by settlers in Appalachia. She observes that J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy describes Scots-Irish settlers finding belonging in the mountains that reminded them of home—and the way this belonging exists without Indigenous people, who were moved off these mountains, and without Black people, whose labor made these states possible. Vance identifies with a white ethnicity that works to separate itself from the elite but doesn’t recognize its own participation in the erasure of others. Calling his people hillbillies allows them to take on the role of a downtrodden minority without taking responsibility for their role in colonization. Dunbar-Ortiz also describes ranchers in the West making claims to the land by virtue of working on it, living and dying on it. She contrasts the federal government’s treatment of the Cliven Bundy family’s occupation of Bureau of Land Management lands in eastern Oregon with the state’s response to the Oceti Sakowin at Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Bundys were handled carefully, while the Natives faced attack dogs and water cannons. This is not inconsistency; this is settler colonialism at work. And for all that Vance and the Bundys claim the land, this is not kinship with the land or with people; this is erasure.

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.