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

by Patty Krawec

Land is our first relationship, and it is the first relationship that we need to restore. We are used to standing on it, planting in it, and marveling at it, but our relationship with it is complicated and colonial. We buy and sell it, extract resources from much of it, and then idealize parts of it.

It’s one thing to consider our relationship with the land—our kinship to it—as individuals. We read books like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which is a lovely book and one you should definitely read. Reading books in solitude may alter our individual relationship with the world around us. But like our histories, our lives do not unfold in isolation. We exist collectively: as neighbors and community groups, as workplaces and sports teams, as book groups and families. We exist in overlapping relationships with faith communities and cultural groups: places and people with whom we have reciprocal relationship and with whom we can act together.

We are related, and all of our creation stories make that point one way or another. So the question has never been whether we are related but how we live out these relationships with the land, and with other-than-human relatives, and with each other.

We have begun to unravel the history we have been taught, unforgetting our relationships with this place and each other. We are challenging the myths that we were told about ourselves and each other, and we are learning the language to transform and confront settler colonialism. But there is no magic bullet. No single book you can read, no one podcast to listen to, no perfect Twitterati to follow, no percentage you can donate, and no amount of time you can spend outside in nature will put things right. We have to build relationships.

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.

Becoming kin often begins with having difficult conversations, and being willing to listen to the things marginalized people, the ones we are so used to helping, have to say can be difficult. It is one thing to help those who need help, but having conversations with the people around me about injustice in our community? Listening to them talk about their experience of injustice? That was hard. Maybe that’s why we like charity and short-term mission trips, voluntourism that takes us far from home to where people who aren’t like us need our help, need our generosity. And then we go home, thankful for our blessings, thankful that we aren’t them. But you have to begin where you are, you have to organize the people around you, and that means listening to the people you want to help.

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

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 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.

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.

DNA is very good at identifying family relationships. It will tell you if somebody is a parent or a sibling, and it can even identify cousins and other relationships. But it is not good at identifying race because race is not biological; it is not encoded in our DNA. When geneticists look at our DNA, they see patterns or markers. Then they compare those with people in a particular area and see what patterns or markers are common in the people who were tested and also live in that area. If you have enough markers, these tests claim, then you are probably from a particular area. Probably, but not definitely. This is a precarious and self-interested identity that lacks the solid grounding of relationship.

Matt, a white Twitter user who goes by @Witch_of_SoCo, wrote about himself and his family tree: “Choices were made that put us on the side of the colonizer and we have to sit with that instead of pretending it didn’t happen.” He had found out that he had Native ancestry and “went through a phase” where he thought that made him Indigenous. But over time, he realized that although he had made friends within the Native community, he lacked that web of family relationships that connect generations. “Your ancestors are always your ancestors,” he wrote, “but their communities may not be your communities.”

My mother made a choice to raise me among settlers and apart from my Ojibwe relatives. Her decision wasn’t malicious, but the harm was real, and I have to sit with that. I can’t pretend it didn’t happen or that it didn’t insulate me from some things even as it failed to insulate me from others. Because of the way that others saw me—as the brown child in a white family—I had identity without relationships. That combination—identity with no community—impoverished me. That impoverishment was a constant hum in the background of my life. My face told a story that the rest of me couldn’t articulate except as loss and absence.

When Paul wrote that there was “neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female,” it wasn’t that people stopped being those things. These things just stopped having social importance within the communities he was trying to build. The power or authority that some social categories have was supposed to stay outside the church. Similarly, the non-Native women who join the drumming circle don’t stop being non-native; they respect our teachings and practices without needing to become us. We form a community of sister-friends. We become kin. Aanikoobijigan.

We return to the idea of being claimed, because when we think about kinship and becoming kin, we generally think about who we want to be related to. But what about those we don’t want to be related to? Whether it’s ancestors we don’t want to admit to having or larger social groups we don’t want to be part of: what do we do with unwanted kin?

Alexis Shotwell and Aurora Levins Morales offer us a helpful way forward as we consider our unwanted kin. “All of us inherit history,” Shotwell writes; “the life we enter is a product of what has come before us. We inherit the life experiences of our ancestors as well as the material conditions in which those experiences unfolded. That inheritance sets the conditions for our individual lives.” She continues: “We aren’t personally responsible for the social relations and material conditions that came before us or that we enter in to, but we can become responsible for what we do in response to those conditions.”

Levins Morales also writes about these legacies we inherit. In her essay “Raícism: Rootedness as Spiritual and Political Practice,” she writes about acknowledging our ancestors’ positions of power and then choosing to balance the books on their behalf as well as our own. We all, Black and Indigenous, settler and migrant, have at least one axis of power, and so while we gravitate toward those stories of being oppressed, it is important to acknowledge these other stories, particularly if those other stories make up most of your history. “Deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act. Acknowledging our ancestors’ participation in the oppression of others (and this is true of everyone), and deciding to balance the accounts on their behalf and our own, leads to less shame and more integrity, less self-righteousness and more righteousness, more humility and compassion and sense of proportion.”

Returning to yourself means understanding how your ancestors were used, wittingly or not, to displace and replace, and then working with us to ensure that we are safe from further displacement.

This very simplistic way of understanding apology and forgiveness is okay for small children, and it helped me move past my frustration with whatever it was he had done and would probably keep on doing. But it is not sufficient for adults. Yet when we talk about reconciliation with Indigenous people, that is exactly the way that we talk about it. There is a push for the Catholic Church to apologize for its role in residential schools. Other denominations in Canada have apologized. The government has apologized. And after the remains of hundreds of children were found outside one residential school after another after another in the summer of 2021, the demand for the Catholic Church to apologize heightened. But the way that settlers and Indigenous people think about apology and reconciliation is very different, and so we use the same language, but we don’t mean the same thing. Churches and governments keep what they stole and tell us, “We said we’re sorry; you have to forgive us.”

If you’ll stay with me a moment, you’ll see why this matters to our consideration of apology and reconciliation. As I told you, Anishinaabe is a verb-based language. In the Anishinaabe way of seeing and naming the world, we are humans being. But this applies elsewhere too. In Anishinaabe, my shirt is not blue; it is being blue. The rock is not hard; it is being hard. The things that we observe are not the inherent qualities of whatever we are looking at; the shirt or the rock is simply what it is being in this moment. This is a very quantum-mechanics way of thinking. Remember: light, depending on how you look at it, is both particle and wave. This applies to people as well.

Being a settler or a colonizer is not something you are; it is something you do. It describes your relationship to this land and the people in it. Remember that settlers come to impose a way of living on top of the existing people. Settler colonialism destroys in order to replace. If you are going to stop being a settler and start being kin, that’s where we start. With what you do.

We walk this path together, as the Two Row Wampum, that original treaty that the Haudenosaunee offered the settlers, lays out: each in our own way, but together. Nii’kinaaganaa. We are related.

Finally, to the land of the Ojibwe Anishinaabe that holds memory of me. To the waters that carried that knowledge to the place I live now, land that holds memory of Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee. Land and water that remember treaties and agreements made between humans and greater-than-human relatives. Stars and other beings that bore witness to these agreements. I acknowledge and thank you for taking our follies and our gratitudes and still providing, still keeping your promises even while we don’t keep ours. I say miigwech. Chi-miigwech. You are eternity in my hands, above my head, and beneath my feet.