#becoming kin by Patty Krawec

[catsnuggler]

I want to love my ancestors, but how can I? Parents and grandparents, sure, despite their faults, just because I personally knew/know them, and know they love me - though not without the crushing guilt of knowing most of them don't give a damn about people they or our family have trodden upon, or think something like "well, it wasn't right, but at least we are where we are today because of that, so it all worked out (for us) in the end, didn't it?". Am I supposed to love my family, or hate my family? Are my ancestors worthy? If the solution in my case is to break off from them and try to start over, how do I go about that?

[songsofbloodandwater]

Settlers and newcomers, Black and Indigenous: the history we learn in elementary school is rooted in explorers and settlers. We learn about brave colonists fighting for freedom. [...] We all learn about how these countries were the ones that ended slavery. Somehow in this history, the very people who created the problem are transformed into the ones who saved us. Together we learn about immigrants and refugees who came here in search of something better and built a great country. The United States and Canada are positioned as communities of safety and refuge for newcomers leaving behind or sublimating their old identities and becoming American or Canadian. These histories become central truths, and when other histories are told or when somebody makes a racist remark, Americans say with surprise, “That’s not who we are!” Your collective memory is filled with stories about cooperation and communities, brave people banding together to defend their home and working together to create something for everyone. Our collective memory is filled with other stories. Other centers. [Our collective memories contain stories of displacement and disruption, occupation and domination. Even when we try to fit in, when we try to assimilate, we aren’t truly accepted.] Sometimes the center is created simply through the act of revolving around it. What if the things you have been told are not who you are?

— Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (2022) by Patty Krawec

[osmiumpenguin]

It's the solstice tonight, and a good time to reflect on my favourite books from the past year.

I'm making very little attempt to rank these titles. They're simply the books that I enjoyed most, and they're presented in the order I read them. • "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet," by Becky Chambers (2014) • "The Galaxy, and the Ground Within," by Becky Chambers (2021) • "Locklands," by Robert Jackson Bennett (2022) • "Beloved," by Toni Morrison (1987) • "Exhalation," by Ted Chiang (2019) • "Fugitive Telemetry," by Martha Wells (2021) • "Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future," by Patty Krawec (2022) • "The Vanished Birds," by Simon Jimenez (2020) • "The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family," by Joshua Cohen (2021) • "Utopia Avenue," by by David Mitchell (2020) • "The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery," by Amitav Ghosh (1995) • "Moon of the Crusted Snow," by Waubgeshig Rice (2018) • "Bea Wolf," by Zach Weinersmith; illustrated by Boulet (2023) • "Fighting the Moon," by Julie McGalliard (2021) • "The Empress of Salt and Fortune," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Glass Hotel," by Emily St. John Mandel (2020) • "New York 2140," by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017) • "When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Omnibus," by Ryan North et al; illustrated by Erica Henderson & Derek Charm & Jacob Chabot & Naomi Franquiz & Tom Fowler & Rico Renzi et al (2022) • "Buffalo Is the New Buffalo: Stories," by Chelsea Vowel (2022) • "Greenwood: A Novel," by Michael Christie (2019) • "The House of Rust," by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (2021) • "Children of Memory," by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2022) • "Jade Legacy," by Fonda Lee (2021) • "A Deadly Education: A Novel: Lesson One of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2020) • "The Last Graduate: A Novel: Lesson Two of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2021) • "The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2022) • "To Be Taught if Fortunate," by Becky Chambers (2019) • "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution," by Carlo Rovelli (2020), translated by Erica Segre & Simon Carnell (2021) • "A Psalm for the Wild-Built," by Becky Chambers (2021) Ah, but I said I'd make "very little attempt" to rank them, not "no attempt." So here is that attempt: my favourite five books from the last solar orbit — the five I enjoyed even more than those other thirty — also presented in the order I read them.

• "Nona the Ninth," by Tamsyn Muir (2022) • "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands," by Kate Beaton (2022) • "Record of a Spaceborn Few," by Becky Chambers (2018) • "Briar Rose," by Jane Yolen (1992) • "Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution," by R.F. Kuang (2022)

[umbralwaves]

Blood Quantum (2019)

I recently watched Blood Quantum (2019) and… wow. I’m blown away. Like after reading Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec.

Alan/”Lysol” is son to an absentee father (probably a survivor of the reeducation camps, not sure if it was explicit), a MMIW, and Canada’s child theft system – “foster care.”

His younger brother is an antithetical “Cain” archetype, and the father and grandfather characters serve as symbols of the patriarchal systems that infect Indigenous peoples, just as the ZED (zombie disease). The horror, cinematography, and storytelling make it well-worth a watch, if you can handle a deeply gory (the actors are having fun) movie.

When things go tits up, Canada is reeling. Suddenly, the settler colonial state is at the mercy of the people it has legally discriminated against, has murdered, tortured, torn communities, families, everything apart… for conquest… turned ‘round. Lysol (whose brand promises to “wipe out 99.9% of germs”) is Canada’s experiment, its own Indigenous son returned with the same bloodlust and emptiness that the settlers inflicted on us.

He is vicious, sexist, a toxic masculinity with only violence as a tool made of the rot of white society. When he comes for blood, it never mattered who or what; he needed an excuse to weaponize his hatred, and white society handed him the tools… the ones that undid his own humanity. He kills his own people when they attempt to rebuild through peace and diplomacy.

I disagree with him, but who else was this person ever allowed to become?

This movie's patriarch's are in active disagreement, and it is matriarchal and restorative ways that create the way forward. A truly incredible work of art.

[reiacorn]

I just finished reading "Becoming Kin" by Patty Krawec. The book was full of so much wisdom, especially in the last few chapters where she weaves together everything else in the book to make a clear case for what we do next - to dismantle colonialism and restore our connection to the land and just as importantly, each other.

I’ve seen references to seven generations in the sustainability movement - mainly of dish soap labels. So I wondered if this was the source. According to Wikipedia, “seven-generation sustainability” may come from the Iroquois, who think seven generations ahead and decide whether the decisions they make today would benefit their descendants. So the origin seems to be indigenous, even if the exact source is lost. Maybe the Iroquois or the Ojibwe, or some other group.

I appreciate the Ojibwa version. Seven generations is a far way to look forward and I wonder if, at that long a length of time, we may put an undue burden on the people here and now. This version centers on the now and looks equally to the past for wisdom and the future for hope.

[anniekoh]

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

by Patty Krawec

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.

[lowcountry-gothic]

Our emotions have a physical response. We feel sadness, and our body responds by crying. In the ancient Middle East, drought was often connected with mourning as the land’s physical response to an emotional state. Just as a Hebrew mourner would fast and pour dust over their head and body, so, too, the land expresses her grief by fasting and covering herself in dust....

The land mourns, but it also responds with joy. The same prophets who describe a land fasting and covering herself with dust in response to human wrongdoing and harm also describe beautiful scenes of rejoicing and jubilation upon the return of the people. “The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom,” the prophet Isaiah says.

—Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

[nexility-sims]

What (book(s)) are you reading right now?

i don't read !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

actually, i listened to the audiobook version of patty krawec's becoming kin: an indigenous call to unforgetting the past and reimagining our future recently. i think i finished it last week? i'm proud of myself because i "read" it for fun, lmao. i've been wanting to read jessica hernandez's fresh banana leaves: healing indigenous landscapes through indigenous science for a hot minute, so i might listen to it next ?? my goal, now that i've discovered audiobooks, is to get around to all of the brilliant ndn women thinkers i've missed out on. oh, and spare some weeks ago. loved that.

this week, for work stuff, i'm going to try to read adam rothman's slave country: american expansion and the origins of the deep south, thavolia glymph's out of the house of bondage: the transformation of the plantation household, and tamara walker's exquisite slaves: race, clothing, and status in colonial lima. light reading, obviously. i'm trying to finish my reading lists for colonial latin america and atlantic slavery and emancipation by next week, so i can move onto native america & the early republic for the rest of february through march. so :^) lots of reading, hopefully lots of writing.

[morpheus-ravenna]

Completely exhausted today, but replenished in spirit after a weekend of volunteer service at Indian Canyon for the Indigenous Storytelling Winter Gathering. (In an epic storm deluge no less.) The more I find ways to do my part in supporting Native communities whose lands I live in, the more i begin to have hope in the possibility of dismantling whiteness and coming into right relationship. I’ve been reading Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec and it’s a realy good learning accompaniment to doing this work. Might have more to say later when I’ve recovered a bit from the chronic illness crash. 💙

[twoq24]

[scienceofdirt]

we once spent a week in my religion class at the Jewish high school i went to debating the possible interpretations and meaning behind a single line of text in the Torah. jews have spent centuries debating and interpreting and writing prose about alternative interpretations of the text of the Torah. it is fundamental to our religion to debate the text and find new allegorical meanings and learn new lessons from the text. I'm not dismissing anything as allegory, I am in fact embracing the nuance in our source text like our ancestors did.

failing to see how these tags from a completely different post that you clearly went digging through my blog for are denying converts legitimacy?? if anything, Jews attitude towards converts supports the argument "not all Jews are indigenous to eretz yisrael." we are a multi national, multi racial, global tribe who have ties to different physical lands depending on our individual stories and relationships and that is what makes Judaism beautiful. a convert does not renounce their history to become Jewish, they can in fact be anyone from anywhere with any personal connection to any lands. a convert is just as Jewish as I am, and their history is one I can learn from and grow from and together we can build upon to build a better future.

indigeneity is more than a genetic link to a region. it's about relationships to people and the land and the way you treat them. would recommend becoming kin (patty krawec) and fresh banana leaves (Jessica Hernandez) for their discussions on indigeneity.

in discussion with people who are different from us, we can learn a lot about ourselves. and find that maybe we're not all that different. instead of making inflammatory statements and dismissing people because you don't agree with a portion of their thought, you might try listening and absorbing and understanding and learning. nuance is the beauty of the human experience.

Zionism is not evil, it is not responsible for any sins in this world, and it is certainly not a modern invention. It is the fucking foundational premise of my religion, and it has existed before your shitty country, before my shitty country, and it will continue to exist long after every one of us are dead and gone.

[songsofbloodandwater]

These stories—about Western settlement, and Indians who simply vanished, about well-intentioned white folks in the North standing up to slavery—are created and maintained on purpose to protect a particular way of life and a particular social class. Remember: all historians have a point of view, and storytelling is not neutral. 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. The stories are like isolated snapshots of the American dream, with important context cropped out of the image. Isolated stories are told in part so that the whole picture cannot be seen. The creation story we have been taught is incomplete. It is incomplete, but it is not inaccessible, and nothing stays buried forever. These histories are emerging, and the stories are being told. What would happen if you listened? What would happen if you, the churches and countries who settled upon us, listened to our histories and heard the good news that we have for you? Biskaabiiyang: returning to ourselves.

— Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (2022) by Patty Krawec