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

by Patty Krawec

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.