Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future
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.
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Patty Krawec is an Anishinaabe and Ukrainian writer from Lac Seul First Nation. She is the cohost of the Medicine for the Resistance podcast and cofounder of the Nii'kinaaganaa Foundation, which collects funds and disperses them to Indigenous people and organizations. Her work has been published in Sojourners and Canadian Living. She is active with the Fort Erie Native Friendship Center and the Strong Water Singers. Krawec is a member of Chippawa Presbyterian Church and lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario.
"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's prose is electric, shot through with passion and knowledge [and] offers thought-provoking ideas." --Publishers Weekly
"Following a timeless structure of creation, destruction, and (hopeful) rebirth, Patty Krawec outlines 'a story ofhistory . . . in the hopes that it will explain our present and help us weave a new world into being." It's in this way that Becoming Kin is something of a creation story in itself: by describing the history of Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, Krawec begins to take the burden of education and progress off the shoulders of Native people and put it into the hands of settlers....Ending each chapter with a call to action, Krawec uses encouraging and lyrical prose to inspire readers that 'reimagining our future' is possible." --Booklist
"An invitation and a challenge to become better relatives to one another at this critical moment in human and planetary history. Generous and wise, Becoming Kin is a rare book designed to be put to immediate and practical use." --Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author and professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia
"Becoming Kin is a powerful invitation into unlearning and learning. Krawec offers an essential vision for our relationships with the earth, the land, and each other." --Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World
"A must-read for those working toward understanding and dismantling colonization. Patty Krawec reminds us what it means to come home to ourselves, this earth, and one another, and invites us to ask the beautiful, difficult questions that will help us reclaim that belonging." --Kaitlin Curtice, author of Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God
"Krawec holds space for Indigenous kin in a broad sense--and Black displanted people--and offers us a needed treatise on how to think. I will be reading and rereading this book for years to come, and I know it will inform my work as a Black feminist scientist." --Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred
"Generous but also demanding, in the best way possible. A wonderful expression of how we can become better kin, with the world and with ourselves." --Jesse Wente, author of Unreconciled, arts journalist, and director of Canada's Indigenous Screen Office
"Patty Krawec has written a passionate and profound meditation on lineage, community, and systemic erasure. Grand in scope and depth of research, yet intimate in the telling, this book is an education for the soul." --Omar El Akkad, Giller Prize-winning author of What Strange Paradise and American War
"Crucial for understanding both colonization and Indigeneity, Becoming Kin is part history, part memoir, and part inspiration, lighting a path forward based on successful race relations, peace, and understanding." --Keri Leigh Merritt, historian and writer
