Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future
An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Included in the Lakota People's Law Project Decolonized Reading List for 2025
We find our way forward by going back.
The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."
Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history.
This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fierce debut by Medicine for the Resistance podcaster Krawec critiques the harmful impact of European Christian settler colonialism on Indigenous Americans. The author, who is of Anishinaabe and Ukrainian heritage, details Indigenous American history from the first humans to populate the Americas through the present and outlines ways in which descendants of European colonizers and Indigenous people can become "good relatives." Krawec recounts Indigenous creation stories ("The Inuit emerged from holes in the ice," for example) and oral histories of life before European colonization. She decries the role that religious institutions played in theft of Indigenous land, citing the papal Doctrine of Discovery that stipulated land "discovered" by European powers belonged to them because it wasn't owned by Christians. Encouraging readers to reconsider their relationship to their environment and what it would mean for churches and businesses to return stolen land, the author notes that an area in Hamilton, New Zealand, was returned to the Maori tribe who lived there pre-colonization and that the municipal buildings on the property provide the tribe with a tax base. Krawec's prose is electric, shot through with passion and knowledge, though some will find her suggestions too abstract to effect the change she advocates for ("It is important as settlers and as Indigenous people that we return to ourselves"). This may not have all the answers, but it offers some thought-provoking ideas.
