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

by Patty Krawec

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.