Becoming Kin

Introduction

Hey everyone, we’re nine months away from Becoming Kin being available in bookstores and I’m not sure how many months before you can pre-order, but be assured that I will let you know about that date as soon as I have one. People are starting to plan book launches and if you are interested in planning one wherever you are I am interested in finding a way to be there! The pandammit will be over by this fall won’t it?

The book has eight chapers and an introduction, so every month between now and September I will send you excerpts and reflections on that month’s chapter. It’s been more than 18 months since we started and I am not the same person who set out on this journey.

Before we even get to the introduction there are epigraphs, the forward by Nick Estes, and something that we called Nii’kinaaganaa which is kind of the introduction to the introduction. Not really sure how that happened but I wanted to explain my use of language in the book and why I did some things the way I did, there just seemed to be so much I wanted to say up front before I even got to the beginning.

Nii’kinaaganaa means something like we are related, and this came from a discussion about early ideas for the title, variants on “all my relations.” Not only is that phrase ubiquitious almost to the point of being meaningless, but it is linked very strongly to the Lakota concept of mitakuye oyasin which gained popularity in non native parlance around Standing Rock, which is one of those times when Indians were cool again. The idea that we are all related is not unique to the Lakota, but it still felt appropriative so we landed on Becoming Kin .. which is what I was hoping to do with this book. Help us all, all of us, become kin.

So epigraphs, and a forward, and then a pause where I talk about language and how it relates to the various peoples that I will be talking about: Indians and Settlers and Black people oh my.

But I promised you an excerpt from the Introduction:

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 learn about Native people who, despite early Thanksgiving friendship, become dangerous and then mysteriously vanish. The history of slavery is placed comfortably in the past. The American story is one of a war fought to end slavery. The Canadian story about slavery is being the final stop on the Underground Railroad, the place of freedom. We all, settler and newcomer, Black and Indigenous, 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.

Sometimes the center is created simply through the act of revolving around it.

Sometimes the center is created simply through the act of revolving around it.

I read that line in a book by Alexis Shotwell, and it stopped me up short. This isn’t to say that as individuals we can simply create a new world but collectively. Collectively we can refuse the center that we have been told to plod around like ponies in a state fair. Collectively we can find another center and provide people with other choices about how to relate to each other and exist together. And although I hadn’t set out to do this, that’s exactly what I did in this book. That’s what changed me.

For years I’ve said that Christians (and Americans and Canadians because like me these countries grew up in the church even if they don’t go anymore) needed to analyze their own histories to find the root of their imperial theology, to find a new way of thinking about old texts. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has said that it is a Jewish truism that each generation brings themselves to Torah anew. The idea that Christians, anyone really, should follow a system of belief entrenched over 200 years ago is ridiculous but that is the center that we all revolve around. How often to Americans throw out founding fathers and their intentions as if that should guide our lives today? I don’t want to live in their world, do you? Really? A world of slavery and genocide?

But we do live in that world don’t we. Unfree labour underpins everything we do. The computers we use to build a revolution, the food we eat, the gold we wear. Everything we touch has in some way come to us through the hands of the unfree and it just seems too big and overwhelming.

So we start by looking at what it is that we revolve around. At the stories we were told about how we came to be. And we find another center to revolve around, maybe with just one other person. In the early years of Idle No More we held rounddances in intersections and shopping malls. Fragmented circles that went around whatever center the drummers designated and as the song progressed more people joined until the circles were made whole. I have danced in those circles and drummed with others in the center and I can promise you that is how we build something new.

with fragmented circles revolving around a new center.

aambe.