Becoming Kin

Anyone else reading this one?  Or want to read/listen to it with me?

I pulled Patty Krawec’s Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future off the shelf at Chequamegon Books a few weeks ago and then downloaded the audiobook so I could listen on my commute to work.  

Here are a few quotes:

“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” (18).

“Those who are part of the society that created the problem become the ones who think they can solve it.  So we must move from recognizing the fact of our relationship to actually existing together in reciprocal relationships….Rather than cutting off our roots because we are ashamed or afraid of what we will find, we can learn our history.  We can reimagine the relationships we have inherited, and we can take up our responsibilities to each other” (19).

“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.”

“'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.”

“We are in a flood event, and we have the potential to create something new.  But first we need to swim deep down through the waters of history, and that is hard….to rebuild our relationships with land and with each other and then mobilize those relationships to create something new” (21).