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

by Patty Krawec

Children deserve to be safe. But the language of safety has never meant true safety for Indigenous children. Just as with Indian boarding schools, the vocabulary of “safe” and “educated” and “civilized” has been used to justify war against our communities and to separate us from our families. Policies that define what “acceptable” homes and families look like disrupt our own family and communal practices. After governments and people with good intentions destabilize our communities, the language of safety is used to destabilize them further. 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. But we talk about children living in poverty, and children going hungry, and children “at risk.” We begin, with those words, the process of disappearing them into white families.