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

Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants come to a place and become part of the existing political system.

Being confronted with racist ideas or behavior—our own or in the systems we’re part of—is hard, but it is not the worst thing. The worst thing is being unwilling to listen, unwilling to do better.

p. 26: Unlike the Christian creation story, the Anishinaabe creation story does not contain a fall or an expulsion. Our expulsion only happens later: at the time of colonization, when the Western world arrives at our doorstep.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz talks about the process of “unforgetting.” The divisions between us are only possible because we have forgotten our history, forgotten our creation stories. Forgotten how to articulate the knowledge that is held in unspoken ways. Unforgetting is the process of reclaiming that knowledge—of moving these truths that our society holds silently out to where we can articulate them and examine them. Then we can see if they really are a center worth revolving around, worth the emotional response they engender.

Grief is the persistence of love,” Krawec writes. Indeed. Grief and love are not bound by time and space. In Indigenous worlds, Land Defenders act out of necessity and survival, protecting rivers and landscapes from destruction. They do so out of mourning for a world taken from them through centuries of colonialism. But they also do so out of love and solidarity for life that currently exists and life that has yet to be created on this planet. They are ancestors of the future, motivated by grief as the persistence of love. Grief is also about remembering, or unforgetting, the future and a history that could have been.

Concepts of race are malleable and strategic, always benefiting those in power. A particular understanding of race allowed Americans to increase the population of those they wanted to continue enslaving and to erase the population of those they wanted to disappear.

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.

It isn't wrong to think about your ancestors, to hear their stories and understand where they came from. And if your ancestors have been in the United States or Canada for a long period of time, it is possible that there is a Native ancestor back there. And if you have a Native ancestor -- somebody who married or moved out of their community by choice or by force -- it is understandable that you would want to know more about them, more about how they left and why...they didn't return to their communities and instead remained among the colonists....Our ancestors' communities are not always our communities, but we can build relationship with each other and honor our ancestors in that way.

Work through the tasks together with others so that when the difficult emotions come, you have somebody to sit with. Be with someone as you let the floodwaters of history—and your ancestors’ and your role in it—wash over you. That way you don’t need to fear the waters of guilt or loss or grief. With the support of others, you can trust that you will surface, still breathing and holding on to a handful of mud with which to imagine and create something new.

When we talk about demonizing or dehumanizing people as part of that destroy-and-replace process, we can take another important lesson from the wendigo. Although he sees beavers instead of people—as something he could consume rather than as humans, like him—the people are unchanged. They may appear to be beavers to the wendigo, but in the stories they remain human. It is the man who consumes them who is transformed. It is the man who consumes them who is dehumanized.

Ultimately what we inherit are relationships and our beliefs about them,” writes Aurora Levins Morales. “We can’t alter the actions of our ancestors, but we can decide what to do with the social relations they left us.” In order to understand these relationships, we need to listen to the histories that we were not told so that we can begin to remember the things buried beneath the histories we were.

Land theft is not only the taking of land; it is the profound alteration of it through extraction rather than relationship. Land theft includes extracting water, extracting lumber, extracting minerals and animals and people.

Each of these terms is correct and wrong, and it is likely that whatever term you use will at some point be corrected by somebody else to a term they think is more appropriate. The best thing to do is thank them for the correction and move on, recognizing that language is complicated. These terms were rarely what we called ourselves and represent colonial ways of thinking about us. And so they will all be wrong in some way.

The book Living in Indigenous Sovereignty, by Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara and Gladys Rowe, is a collection of essays and interviews written by settlers who are working through what it means to become kin,

Settler colonialism does not notice what abundance is already there, what good news we might have to share that would help them.

In her book As We Have Always Done, Michi Saagiig Nishaabeg author and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes about the importance of thinking backward and forward at the same time. Thinking in cyclical rather than linear time, we see more clearly the ways that generations are linked.

This is a story about a lot of different things. It’s about being lazy and trying to get something without working for it. But it’s also about our own willingness to keep our eyes closed to what is happening around us—to enjoy the things we have without paying attention to what they might be costing others.

Days and vigils—those meant to honor those who attended residential schools or who disappeared into prisons or who simply disappeared—mean different things in different communities. For Indigenous people, these are moments to collectively grieve. For others, they may mean something different.

In Indigenous worlds, Land Defenders act out of necessity and survival, protecting rivers and landscapes from destruction. They do so out of mourning for a world taken from them through centuries of colonialism. But they also do so out of love and solidarity for life that currently exists and life that has yet to be created on this planet.

Throughout the book, I offer Anishinaabe stories and Indigenous knowledge not so that you can claim them as your own but so that they can provide a lens through which you can see your own stories differently. That is part of what I hope to explore in these pages: how we can read these histories differently and find a way to live together in peace, honesty, and respect.

Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) is a historian and author of Our History Is the Future, Standing with Standing Rock, and Red Nation Rising

In these pages, Patty Krawec, an Anishinaabekwe, meditates on those moments of calm, which seem always on the brink of being entirely consumed by a terrible danger. It is the moment a Water Protector locks down pipeline equipment, silencing the guns and money people with a humble prayer, even if for a moment. It is the moment humble people try to make sense of why another brother, sister, mother, relative, river, mountain, and life is needlessly destroyed or stolen. A

Settlers and migrants and the forcibly displanted get worried when Native people start talking about Land Back. What about their house? Where will they go? Unable to imagine any scenario other than what settler colonialism unleased on us, people assume that Land Back means evictions, relocations, and eliminations. In some cases, that might be appropriate... And although we are often, and I think reasonably, looking for change in ownership, at its core, Land Back means profoundly changing our relationship with land.

Blood quantum is a race theory that still forms the basis for legal Indian status in the United States and Canada.

In the May 2021 issue of The Atlantic, Ojibwe writer David Treuer wrote a piece entitled “Return the National Parks to the Tribes.” In it, he describes how the US government displaced the Miwok tribe from the land that would, thirty-nine years later, become Yosemite Park.

As a profession, social work, of which child welfare is one branch, emerged in the late nineteenth century as a way to manage the problem of poverty in a growing and prosperous country.

This is a central theme in literature and movies; from Wagon Train to Star Trek, Americans admire this desire to boldly go and then bravely defend themselves from those who resent discovery.

These myths are packaged and sold to newcomers and working-class white people so that they will chase promises that were never meant for them.

Iroquois may be more familiar to you than Haudenosaunee, Sioux more familiar than Lakota. But the former terms are French versions of Wendat and Anishinaabe words meaning something like “snakes.