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		<title>Ribbon Skirts and Mutual Aid</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/ribbon-skirts-and-mutual-aid/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ribbon-skirts-and-mutual-aid</link>
		
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		<pubDate>Sat, 27 May 2023 14:08:03 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indigenous practices]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indigenous sovereignty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mutual aid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing tactics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Patty Krawec]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ribbon skirts]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Patty Krawec on vital Indigenous practices that defy colonial forces of assimilation and show us the power of mutual aid.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/ribbon-skirts-and-mutual-aid/">Ribbon Skirts and Mutual Aid</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default">Photo: Patty Krawec</h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">5. 27. 2023</h3><h1>Ribbon Skirts and Mutual Aid</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br />Patty Krawec</span></strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />For a few brief days in March of this year, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://www.thestar.com/life/2023/03/27/kate-spade-under-fire-for-cultural-appropriation-for-indigenous-ribbon-skirt-look-alike.html">a particular skirt</a> by American fashion company Kate Spade</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> New York (KSNY) was all over Native Twitter, along with accusations that KSNY had copied a particular stacked ribbon skirt by Dakota Navajo artist Noah Pino. Kate Spade had done stripes, along with polka dots, for a very long time, and when I first saw the contested striped organza skirt, I immediately recognized her aesthetic. On the other hand, the look and colour palette is similar to a skirt that Pino designed using satin ribbon of varying thicknesses. And Spade’s stripes, like Pino’s, do look like stacked ribbons, which is when the ribbons are sewn side by side to completely cover all or most of the fabric. But this essay isn’t really about the controversy of whether or not Kate Spade New York copied and profited from the work of a Dakota Navajo artist. It’s about ribbon skirts as Indigenous identity and presence, and the complicated history they represent for us.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><h2>Innovation and creativity amidst limiting circumstances<span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">First some history. Like most clothing, ribbon skirts are adaptations of style and design that are innovative and rooted in specific histories. Ribbons didn’t become a significant part of our clothing until after the French Revolution, when European fashionistas discarded silk ribbon along with other trappings of the upper classes. Large quantities of these now-unwanted pretties joined the usual trade goods bound for the colonies, where they became objects of exchange with Great Lakes tribes, traded for things that fashionable Europeans did want. The first recorded instance of Indigenous ribbonwork is a Menominee wedding dress from 1802, and paintings from the early 19</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">th</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> century onward document the addition of ribbons and silver along with other decorative touches on the clothing of Indigenous people. There are earlier dresses, strap dresses with removable sleeves: the clothing that the women of the Eastern Woodlands wore before the Europeans imposed their own ideas of how women should dress. These tunics, sleeves, leggings, and hoods – some of which are held in museum collections – were decorated with porcupine quills, dyes, fringe, and shells. Over time, because of various social pressures impacting what was available or interesting, we shifted from hide to textiles, and from quills and shells to beads and ribbon. When I look at these shifts, I see innovation and creativity in the midst of increasingly limited options. More, I see a direct link from pre-contact strap dresses to contemporary ribbon skirts. A direct link, but perhaps not a straight line.  </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That link was disrupted in the early 20</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">th</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> century, when assimilation progressed more aggressively, and although boy scouts were encouraged to dress up like Indians, those who were called Indians were not. Our cultural practices, religious beliefs, and even our languages were forbidden outside of our communities. Various </span><a href="https://circlesforreconciliation.ca/the-pass-system-gathering-theme/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">pass systems</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> prevented adults from leaving our communities, but children&#8230;beginning in the late 1800s, our children were taken from our communities and placed first into residential schools and then into foster homes, where they were taught how to dress and act like “good Canadians.” For several generations, these laws and policies attempted to disconnect us from our histories and relationships, they controlled our existence as Indigenous people, but in the ’50s and ’60s something curious happened. Those children, who were now adults, unable or unwilling to return to their reservations, had begun to drift into cities. Over generations, immigrant populations had created urban communities out of a shared desire to assimilate into the culture of their new home. But as we accumulated in these urban spaces, the communities that Indigenous people formed over generations were based in a shared </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">inability or unwillingness</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to assimilate.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><h2>Militant defence of space, community, connection</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Black Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s inspired and often included these urban Indigenous communities in their organizing, and two years after the Black Panther Party formed in Oakland, California, the American Indian Movement (AIM) emerged in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1968. Founded by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, Vernon Bellecourt, and Russell Means, AIM built community and confronted the broken promises that the Canadian and US governments never intended to keep. Just north of Minnesota, and about 50 years later, </span><a href="https://idlenomore.ca/about-the-movement/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the Idle No More movement</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> arose in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. </span><a href="https://idlenomore.ca/idle-no-more-is-founded-by-4-women-idle-no-more/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Founded</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon, and Sheelah McLean, Idle No More continued this work of building community and confronting broken promises. In addition to all their political action, both of these movements provoked a return to Indigenous visibility – but not the kind of visibility that Canadians and USians were used to. Visibility on our own terms.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Back in the days of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Indigenous peoples took whatever visibility was available. The Indigenous people participating knew that they were being used, </span><a href="https://pattykrawec.substack.com/p/deer-woman-is-a-decorative-beast"><span style="font-weight: 400;">decorative beasts</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> whose presence sold tickets and thrilled white audiences, but it was the only time that they could wear and do the things that connected them with a past from which they were increasingly disconnected. That changed with AIM and Idle No More. Ribbon skirts, ribbon shirts, and beadwork were part of these resurgences, ways of being visible in urban spaces where we have so often blended in because we are so often blended people. Years ago, I walked with a friend from a late dinner to our hotel room, laughing together about what could possibly be safer than two Indigenous women on Yonge Street in Toronto at midnight. “Hey! Sisters,” a voice called out from a doorway. “Sisters!” We stopped. The ribbons on our skirts had reached out to an Anishinaabe man far from home and tied us together. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The drum circle, with its collective nature, is another important way that we preserve space and connection. While ribboned skirts, shirts, and beadwork let individuals assert belonging to Indigenous community, with drum circles we </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">practice</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> belonging. About eight years ago, a group of women began to gather at the Fort Erie Native Friendship Center to sing and drum. This was intended to be part of a program for young mothers and their children, so the children could see their mothers doing something positive that was rooted in their culture. As often happens with such things, this group evolved and has since become a loosely organized collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members. I hadn’t thought about this drum group as a site of organizing or mutual aid, but that is what it is now. If theory is what we believe, and praxis is what we do, then our drum group is praxis.   </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mutual aid is not charity. People often confuse it for charity; they donate to people or projects, good things happen, and that support gets called mutual aid. This isn’t necessarily bad; I run </span><a href="https://payyourrent.ca/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a foundation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that, in part, does precisely this. But mutual aid involves a reciprocity that charity or other kinds of support do not. Mutual aid is the working together to develop ways to meet each other’s needs while organizing against the system that created the need in the first place. That is the praxis of our drum group. We take the teachings and music of our ancestors and communities and translate that into action. Most of the time, that action is simply gathering together week after week, sharing meals and songs and stories and laughter and tears. It is the creation of a space where we can bring our authentic selves –  for some of us, perhaps, the only space where we can do that. We adopted non-gendered language to ensure that non-binary members could be authentic: the Strong Water Women became the Strong Water Singers. Ceremonies we organize do not require skirts. And we also practice another important organizing principle: working collectively with people we may not always like or get along with. Communities of mutual aid can and should be communities of care where we work together across differences for a common good. That would be enough…but when you create a space where people can bring their authentic selves and start to give voice to those selves, unexpected things happen.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Out of the fragments<span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Early on, we began to get requests to sing and perform at events. It’s reconciliation time in Canada, and every organization with a land acknowledgement wants to start their event by having Indigenous women singing and drumming in pretty skirts. Saying yes to many of these events meant we risked participating in the kind of tokenizing that took place in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. But times have changed, and we don’t need those kinds of activities in order to dress or act in ways that connect us with a past with which we’re now increasingly connected. Organizations quickly find out that we may not be the Indians they’re looking for.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Or maybe, for some of these organizations, we are.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It started with an event that played the national anthem, and after </span><a href="https://www.kaepernickpublishing.com/abolition-for-the-people"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Colin Kaepernick</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> encouraged us to embody a different world, we simply couldn’t celebrate a country that relies on the deliberate impoverishment of Black and Indigenous peoples through the ongoing theft of bodies and land via policing and extractive industry. So, as I introduced the drum group, I explained why we had stayed seated. Then, a few weeks later, we were invited to an opening of an art exhibit about water, and when I stood to introduce us, I saw the politicians in the front row. Politicians who were there to celebrate water while less than five kilometers away, a contested development site threatened fragile wetlands. Time and again, those moments of introduction became opportunities to speak truth to power, to remind politicians and other dignitaries that we weren’t their decorative beasts. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Organizations have continued to invite us – and, even better, they’ve paid us – so the drum group’s work has expanded to providing help for our community members in material ways: with rent and groceries, with clean water and other basic needs. Resistance must find such means to respond to the deliberate impoverishment of our communities; it is not enough only to speak truth to power. We became a collective that practices mutual aid: working together to develop ways to meet each other’s needs, while organizing against the system that created the need for that aid in the first place.  </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are living the relations that we want to see in the world. And I see that replicated in different ways across Turtle Island or Abya Yala or what are currently the Americas and beyond. I see women, understood in that broad expansive sense of all who carry creative energy, gathering together as we have always done. Building and rebuilding communities of mutual aid. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When I look at ribbon skirts and the drum group I belong to, I see people building communities out of the fragments that colonial society keeps generating, piecing ourselves back together with ribbons and beads, one song at a time. Kate Spade New York and those who buy its wares can have their maybe-it’s-a-knockoff-copycat-organza-striped-skirt-made-of-ticky-tacky, ‘cause they all look just the same. When I look at our communities, I see a field full of wildflowers, each skirt and shirt unique to its wearer, ranging from the very simple to the extraordinarily extra, calling out to others and tying us all together into communities of care and reciprocity.</span></p>						</div>
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							<p>Through writing and speaking, Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe/Ukranian) explores how we might live differently in the relationships we inherit. She is a co-founder of the <a href="https://payyourrent.ca/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://payyourrent.ca/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1685219878537000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3b0kuCxP1Zo6E3hiLZ1ExS">Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation,</a> and her book <a href="https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506478258/Becoming-Kin"><em>Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future</em></a> was published in September by Broadleaf Books. Her work centred on Indigenous identity and thought has also been published in <em>Sojourners</em>, <em>Rampant Magazine</em>, <em>Midnight Sun Magazine</em>, <em>Indiginews</em>, <em>Religion News Service</em>, and <em>Broadview</em> <em>Magazine</em>, and on the Yellowhead Institute website. She posts podcasts and essays with some regularity on multiple substacks. You can find her online at <a href="http://daanis.ca/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://daanis.ca/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1685219878537000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1eC5w_PHBc-1ArbQMmfZZI">daanis.ca</a> and you can find the Strong Water Singers on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/strongwatersingers/">@strongwatersingers</a>.</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/festivals-of-the-possible/"     class="crp_link post-4080"><span class="crp_title">Festivals of the Possible</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/ribbon-skirts-and-mutual-aid/">Ribbon Skirts and Mutual Aid</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>The Land With Whom</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-land-with-whom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-land-with-whom</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Apr 2022 10:34:51 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indigenous sovereignty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Land Back]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Migrant justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nationalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Patty Krawec]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Religious nationalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Settler colonialism]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=5151</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Patty Krawec on religious nationalisms, kinship versus citizenship, and Land Back as an alternative to the violence of colonial borders. </p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-land-with-whom/">The Land With Whom</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">4. 20. 2022</h3><h1>The Land With Whom</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><span style="color: #000000;"><a style="color: #000000;" href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/tag/patty-krawec/"><strong>Patty Krawec</strong></a></span></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />The Russian Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has given his blessing to Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. And although the US doesn’t have a national church or a single religious leader, evangelical royalty </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/07/us-preacher-franklin-graham-will-try-to-reverse-uk-tour-cancellations"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Franklin Graham</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> gave his blessing to Donald Trump. Both have made statements about these heads of state being great protectors of their faiths, a mantle that these political leaders have worn with pride. Such relationships may seem like they violate, or at least play fast and loose with, the separation of church and state, but this separation has never been anything but a myth. People insist that it means the state cannot impose a religion on its citizens, but from the moment the Europeans arrived on these shores with the intention of remaining, the governments that would become the US and Canada have done exactly that. From </span><a href="http://www.nativetech.org/Nipmuc/praytown.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">praying towns</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and missions to residential schools, plantation churches, and the public display of the ten commandments in US courthouses, these Western nations have positioned themselves as protectors of Christianity, and now Putin is positioning himself as the protector of Russian Orthodoxy. The historic relationship between church and state in Russia is complicated by the official atheism of the Soviet governments, but even Stalin knew enough to rally support for the Second World War by reinstating the Patriarchy of Moscow and All Russia when Hitler invaded.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It is never good news when a state makes itself the protector of a religion. It certainly isn’t good news for the people within those borders who have a different religion, and it isn’t good news for the members of that religion who live abroad. Consider how quickly Westerners first noticed and then turned against Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Writer and filmmaker Omar Mouallem’s book </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Praying to the West</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> documents the history of mosques in the Americas and notes that Muslims arrived here with the first slave ships. Muslims continued to arrive as immigrants and migrants, fanning out across the continents alongside other settlers. Consider how quickly their loyalty to Canada or the US came into question in the early 2000s, these USians and Canadians now viewed with suspicion, as if by virtue of being Muslim their loyalty was implicitly elsewhere despite decades, if not centuries, of relationship in this place.  Although Muslims had long been a</span><a href="https://meridian-magazine.com/its-time-to-talk-about-arab-and-middle-eastern-representation-in-american-film-tv/"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> staple Hollywood villain</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, in this intensified scrutiny, screenwriters quickly replaced Cold War-era Russians with Muslims as Hollywood’s sleeper cell villain, their loyalty and patriotism a cover for their “true intentions.” The persistent stoking of these anti-Islamic fires led to the </span><a href="https://immigrationhistory.org/item/muslim-travel-ban/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Muslim Travel Ban</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> early in Trump’s presidency, and while the proposed Islamophobic hotline for reporting “</span><a href="https://parli.ca/barbaric-cultural-practices-hotline/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">barbaric cultural practices</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">” in Canada arguably contributed to the failure of former prime minister Stephen Harper’s re-election bid in 2015, two years later the Qu</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">é</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">bec government passed a law banning face coverings in the name of public safety. Muslims are not safe in Christian countries. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the anthology </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">On Antisemitism,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the Black queer physicist and cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s essay “Black and Palestinian Lives Matter: Black and Jewish America in the Twenty-First Century” argues, in part, that as a Jewish state Israel reproduces an ideology of religious supremacy (that is, the supremacy of its Jewish over its non-Jewish residents) that echoes the white Christian supremacy of Canada and the US. Because rights are tied to Jewish identity in the Israeli state, the ability to legitimately claim Jewish identity is legally controlled, and violence against Palestinians and others is rationalized in the name of safety. This is a kind of “safety” that makes others profoundly unsafe. Not only does it create an internal hierarchy of whose cultural needs are met and whose are treated as unimportant, but it also allows for what church historian Vince Bantu describes as “holy violence” in his book </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Multitude of All Peoples</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Bantu is writing there about the early Church in Rome and the shift that took place when Rome went from persecuting Christians to protecting them. To paraphrase the radical educator Paulo Freire, rather than taking this moment to seek liberation for everyone who had lived under Rome’s power, these now protected and powerful Christians became the oppressors and wielded the violence of the state, including murder and the destruction of pagan idols, against others. This “holy violence” was present in the founding of the US and Canada, and it remains present today. Native sweat lodges are still destroyed by those who call them pagan; synagogues and mosques are still vandalized and threatened. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ethnonationalisms are no better. In his book </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Blood and Soil,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> historian Ben Kiernan takes an ambitious look at a world history of genocide – in which a belief in some kind of ethnic purity combines with imperial ambitions and a cult of antiquity, producing the violence of ethnic cleansing in pursuit of land. Religion can provide that cult of antiquity: what better legitimacy for an ambitious state than a pedigree infused with religious authority going back centuries, if not all the way back to creation itself? And whether it is religion or ethnicity or political beliefs that are used to legitimate the state, it all comes down to purity: how we define it and how we maintain it. Nationalisms draw lines around our purity and give us a geography as well as an ideology to protect. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I read these books as an Ojibwe-Anishinaabekwe, with the hashtag #LandBack embedded in my thinking. Like the historical narratives discussed there, our claims to place rest on ancient beliefs. The Anishinaabe creation story puts the place of our creation in what is now northwestern Ontario, near where an imaginary line separates it from Manitoba. This is our place, Manito Gitigan. The place where creator lowered down the first man. The place where Nanaboozhoo left to walk the land and see what and who else was there. I know the archaic stories of migration and movement, how we all left Africa and then went back and then left again, travelling through Berengia and then by boat down the western coast of what was not yet North America. I know the stories revealed in the breadcrumbs left by our ancestors through genetics, linguistics, and the archeological record. I know that like maize we are the result of generations of migration and hybridization, of travel and being rooted and uprooted and finding home again and again. But I also know that we are manomin, we are wild rice that grows unchanged where and how the creator planted us at the beginning of all things. I know that somehow the Anishinaabe emerged as a people in a particular place and our creation story ties us to it. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So I read these books and more and I think about Land Back and resisting colonial encroachment on our lands, I think about asserting our presence on our lands from coast to coast to coast, and I ask myself what is different about Land Back in comparison to these religious or ethnic nationalisms? </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The borders.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The borders are different. Not in the sense that they would be drawn in different places in the context of Land Back, but in the sense of how and if they would even exist. Because if national borders form the limits of a nation’s authority, what does that mean for Indigenous peoples who existed before the colonists taught us to draw lines around what was ours and who we were? If we have no hard lines drawn around us, then our authority doesn’t come to an abrupt end at the Great Lakes or along the 49</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">th</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> parallel. Our authority rests in a centre and then diffuses outward into overlapping layers of claim. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I am Ojibwe Anishinaabe. That is a claim to a place, a very specific place where nearby layers of claim overlapping with the Cree have resulted in Oji-Cree, a language and a people that are both and neither. I live in Niagara where the Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg and the Haudenosaunee learned to live in a shared territory through the Dish With One Spoon Treaty. Elements of our creation story shift as you move westward across Anishinaabe homelands, reflecting relationship with other peoples. And I think that blending, that comfort with multiplicity is a key difference, in comparison to settler nationalisms that tend towards systems of absolute power. Rather than hard boundaries, we have what </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Anishinaabe legal scholar </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aaron Mills, in </span><a href="http://hdl.handle.net/1828/10985"><span style="font-weight: 400;">his dissertation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> “Miinigowiziwin: all that has been given for living well together: one vision of Anishinaabe constitutionalism,” calls “a steady gradient in the thickness of lived relationships.” Nations and citizenship tend to be static, with boundaries drawn around them, and with ideas about religious or cultural purity that require constant protecting and defending. Communities, by contrast, are pliable and elastic, bending and stretching in relationship with human and greater-than-human relatives. Kinship is open and expansive in a way that citizenship is not. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I recently had a conversation with a friend about ancestries. She is Somali-Cree, with an Irish grandfather. And after doing some research in her family tree, she found Assiniboine, Saulteaux, and Métis relations as well as settlers, which would make sense given the geography of this portion of her maternal relatives. I suspect that if she were able to take a similar dive into her paternal family, she would find a similar multitude of relatives from the horn of Africa. This doesn’t mean that she has the lived experiences of all these ancestors (as another friend has said, sometimes our ancestors’ communities are not our communities), but they are still part of her, and they represent places on a map where relatives came together. We are all like this. Ideas about purity are nonsense, but they are also powerful, and when connected to land – and to beliefs that land is a thing to be possessed – these ideas become dangerous.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mills reminds us that land is a person with whom we stand in relation. He cites Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear, who says, “To us land, as part of creation, is animate. It has spirit. Place is for the interrelational network of all creation. When we talk of Blackfoot territory, Cree territory, or Ojibway territory, we are really talking about the place where the interrelational network occurs.” When I talk about the place of the Ojibwe Anishinaabe, that place is a relative as surely as my cousins are. It is, in the words of K</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ā</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">naka Maoli geneticist Keolu Fox, my ancestor. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Land Back is the only way forward. I joked one time on Twitter that there were no problems facing our society today that could not be resolved by restoring the land to Indigenous peoples.  Twitter users presented various social problems, from abolition and inequity to climate change and war, all of which I was able to address with pithy remarks about Land Back, because that framework is not simply a change in ownership. It is a reimagining of how our society is structured. It is a return to those centres that diffuse outward into steady gradients in the thickness of our lived relationships. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The centre is created by the act of revolving around it. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When I was a child, we had a round swimming pool. And one of the games that we played was to create a whirlpool. Together we all ran in a circle, creating a current that swirled around in one direction, and then when it was strong enough we either floated with the current or we turned and tried to push against it. It took only one or two of us to create the current, but it was more difficult to reverse it. To reverse it required more of us pushing against the water. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We can do this. We can create new centres to diffuse out from, but these new centres we revolve around must be the Indigenous peoples restored to the land with whom they are in relationship. Without that restoration, we’re left with just another form of settler colonialism. More inclusive and just, perhaps, but still built on Indigenous displacement. We can challenge the various bordering regimes that enclose us, that promise safety but in fact make us profoundly unsafe. Whether they’re the borders between states, or the internal borders of prisons and class, these lines and the violence that goes into preserving our false notions of purity are neither inevitable nor inescapable. There is a Māori proverb: ka mua, ka muri. Walking backwards into the future. Land Back holds the promise of an old way to structure new relationships and build a future rooted in kinship. </span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span class="il">Patty</span> Krawec is an Anishinaabe and Ukrainian writer and speaker from Lac Seul First Nation. She is active in the Fort Erie Native Friendship Center and is a member of the Strong Water Singers. She is the cohost of the <a href="http://medicinefortheresistance.substack.com/"><i>Medicine for the Resistance</i></a> podcast and cofounder of the <a href="https://payyourrent.ca/">Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation</a>, which collects funds and disperses them to Indigenous people and organizations. Her work has been published in <i>Sojourners </i>and <i>Canadian Living. </i>Krawec is a member of Chippawa Presbyterian Church and lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario.</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/life-making-or-death-making/"     class="crp_link post-3623"><span class="crp_title">Life-making or Death-making?</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Susan Ferguson on how the pandemic has laid bare the social reproduction labour that keeps capitalism churning, the fundamental violence of the capitalist system itself, and emerging possibilities for fighting back.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-land-with-whom/">The Land With Whom</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>To Be Good Kin</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/to-be-good-kin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-be-good-kin</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Feb 2022 07:07:13 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom Convoy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indigenous sovereignty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Patty Krawec]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Settler colonialism]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=4465</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer Patty Krawec on settlers who seek belonging through “becoming Native,” and how claiming unwanted kin can help settlers move towards real solidarity with Indigenous peoples.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/to-be-good-kin/">To Be Good Kin</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/mkwaboogit/" target="_blank">Beadwork: Giniw Paradis</a></h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">2. 14. 2022</h3><h1>To Be Good Kin</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><br /><span style="color: #000000;"><a style="color: #000000;" href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/tag/patty-krawec/">Patty Krawec</a><br /><br /></span></strong></h3>						</div>
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							<p style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Midnight Sun </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">is honoured to present an excerpt from Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer Patty Krawec’s forthcoming book </span><a href="https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506478258/Becoming-Kin"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future</span></i></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">(Broadleaf Books, September 2022) – introduced here by the author, writing as the far-right “Freedom Convoy” movement plagues Ottawa and several other cities across so-called Canada. <br /><br /><span data-offset-key="368s6-0-0">Featuring beadwork by Giniw Paradis, </span><span data-offset-key="368s6-1-0">photographed</span><span data-offset-key="368s6-2-0"> by Jenessa Galenkamp.</span></span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />It feels like watching a gathering storm, </span><a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/canada-freedom-convoy-conservative-right-wing-anti-worker-anti-vaccine"><span style="font-weight: 400;">this collection of truckers and their supporters</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> who want an end to mask and vaccine mandates, an end to the infringement of their “freedoms,” and a disturbing trend is the legitimacy they seek through </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ARCCollective/status/1489049525553545220"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the indigenization of convoy organizer Pat King</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and some others. King has </span><a href="https://twitter.com/edmontonagainst/status/1446863749499875330"><span style="font-weight: 400;">claimed</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that everyone who is born in North America is indigenous to this place, and as ridiculous as King may seem to be, this claim is not unique to him. The Anishinabek Solutrean Métis Indigenous Nation </span><a href="https://twitter.com/DarrylLeroux/status/1364212383288279041?s=20&amp;t=jx0Z7XosET6ZxS6eWXdhWw"><span style="font-weight: 400;">says this</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> as well. The West is filled with people insisting they are Native because they are from here, even if their ancestors may have come from somewhere else. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I do believe that we can become kin. Our creation stories, yours and mine, all point to some common beginning from which we all branched off in our separate directions. The Anishinaabeg and other Indigenous peoples remembered our old stories and that there were other humans we did not know, even if the early settlers had forgotten and were therefore baffled by our existence. So, we are related, we are kin. But what does it mean to be </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">good</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> kin? And what do we do with unwanted kin, with those ancestors we would rather not claim?  </span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As we think about what it means to become kin, it is important to think about what it </span><i>isn’t</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. We saw in </span><i>The Last of the Mohicans</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and then later in </span><i>The Grapes of Wrath</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> how settlers tried to find belonging by appealing to their relationship with land, a relationship that either replaced or simply ignored Indigenous presence. These books are fiction, but fiction describes how we live and think. In </span><i>Not “A Nation of Immigrants</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz unpacks similar claims sometimes made by settlers in Appalachia. She observes that J. D. Vance’s memoir </span><i>Hillbilly Elegy</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> describes Scots-Irish settlers finding belonging in the mountains that reminded them of home – and the way this belonging exists without Indigenous people, who were moved off of these mountains, and without Black people, whose labor made these states possible. Vance identifies with a white ethnicity that works to separate itself from the elite but doesn’t recognize its own participation in the erasure of others. Calling his people </span><i>hillbillies</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> allows them to take on the role of a downtrodden minority without taking responsibility for their role in colonization. Dunbar-Ortiz also describes ranchers in the West making claims to the land by virtue of working on it, living and dying on it. She contrasts the federal government’s treatment of the Cliven Bundy family’s occupation of Bureau of Land Management lands in eastern Oregon with the state’s response to the Oceti Sakowin at Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Bundys were handled carefully, while the Natives faced attack dogs and water cannons. This is not inconsistency; this is settler colonialism at work. This is not kinship with the land or with people; this is erasure.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Becoming good relatives, for settlers, is also not about becoming Native. Some white settlers seek belonging by looking for Native ancestry, which is another form of erasure. </span><i>Race shifting</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> refers to the act of people claiming Native identity based on an insubstantial, imagined, or invented connection to Native communities. They </span><i>shift</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> their racial understanding of themselves from white to Native. As DNA testing gains popularity, many scour their family tree for that one ancestor – that one of eight or sixteen or thirty-two or sixty-four grandparents, depending on how far back they need to go – who will make them Native, even though they have no familial relationship with an existing community. Maybe they heard a myth of a great-grandparent who was an Indian and wouldn’t talk about it, or somebody remarked on their cheekbones or some other physical trait that “looked Indian.” So like Elizabeth Warren was goaded into doing, they pay for an ancestry DNA test to tell them if the myths are true.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But the tests are flawed because, as Kim TallBear says in her book </span><i>Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, they rely on ideas about racial purity that have their roots in medieval Spain and the </span><i>limpeza de sangre</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, a belief that intermarriage with non-Christians, or new converts, could taint the pure blood of those who had been Christian for many generations. This belief in pure blood eventually became racial purity, and TallBear questions how that purity gets measured from a genetic standpoint. For example, who are the “pure” tribal members who get sampled in order to determine the markers that will identify Anishinaabe or Cherokee or any tribal group? There is, TallBear writes, no such thing as Native American DNA.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">DNA is very good at identifying family relationships. It will tell you if somebody is a parent or a sibling, and it can even identify cousins and other relationships. But it is not good at identifying race because race is not biological; it is not encoded in our DNA. When geneticists look at our DNA, they see patterns or markers. Then they compare those with people in a particular area and see what patterns or markers are common in the people who were tested and also live in that area. If you have enough markers, these tests claim, then you are probably from a particular area. Probably, but not definitely. This is a precarious and self-interested identity that lacks the solid grounding of relationship.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I know that my great-grandfather was Irish, so a DNA test would probably prove that I have markers consistent with Ireland. But I have no connection to any Irish community, let alone the one in County Clones, where his family was most likely from. It would be absurd for me to decide that, based on Isaiah, I am Irish.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A few years ago, an initiative sought to draw the Irish diaspora back to Ireland for a series of events. It seemed like a beautiful, affirming thing to me, and I said as much to a friend who is Irish. No, she said; it is marketing. This large-scale tourism push would actually displace the poorest Irish people, while people like me with family stories but no lived connection to Ireland – no connection to the political struggles and social realities of Ireland – came home and played at being Irish for a week or two. I thought about how they would certainly be welcomed everywhere they went, welcomed by those whose jobs or businesses relied on tourist dollars and the goodwill of those who are from away. And I remembered my own years working in the tourist sector. I remembered waiting tables and selling T-shirts, trading smiles and welcome for good tips. I also remembered being a tourist and how different cities look when you go one block away from the shining lights.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As Native peoples, we exist both as political and social entities. We have tribal citizenship rules that are set by governments and determine legal belonging. But we also have social relationships: family to whom we are connected or disconnected and the belonging those connections create. Those two ways of belonging overlap, but they are not the same. Belonging involves a reciprocity of claiming and being claimed, of responsibility to the community and community’s responsibility to me. Of seeing and being seen. An individual race-based identity built on a long-ago ancestor or family lore is not that kinship-based relationship that is central to Indigenous belonging. It is a move to innocence – a way of not being a settler. A way of trying to be one of the oppressed rather than the oppressor.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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, like Metoaka, they didn’t return to live among the colonists. Matt, a white Twitter user who goes by @Witch_of_SoCo, wrote about himself and his family tree: “Choices were made that put us on the side of the colonizer and we have to sit with that instead of pretending it didn’t happen.” He had found out that he had Native ancestry and “went through a phase” where he thought that made him Indigenous. But over time, he realized that although he had made friends within the Native community, he lacked that web of family relationships that connect generations. “Your ancestors are always your ancestors,” he wrote, “but their communities may not be your communities.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In a similar vein, a coworker once started a conversation with me by saying that her great-grandfather was Native – possibly Mohawk, but she wasn’t sure. Nobody in the family had any relationship with a Mohawk community. As I braced myself for the self-Indigenizing that often follows these statements, she said that she tries to be a good ally to Indigenous people by supporting actions that restore them to land or return children to families. She said that she felt this was the best way she could honor him and his experiences. I agree with her and with Matt. Our ancestors’ communities are not always our communities, but we can build relationship with each other and honor our ancestors in that way.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This self-Indigenizing is not the same thing as the emotionally difficult journeys home taken by those who were adopted or stolen in child welfare scoops. For these children, now adults, their lived relationship is that deliberate policy of disruption. Their parents had relationships with others in the community, and their grandparents had relationships. There is an entire web connecting them with successive generations that they can reach out to. This is much different than scanning the horizon for a single relative many generations past.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My mother made a choice to raise me among settlers and apart from my Ojibwe relatives. Her decision wasn’t malicious, but the harm was real, and I have to sit with that. I can’t pretend it didn’t happen or that it didn’t insulate me from some things even as it failed to insulate me from others. Because of the way that others saw me – as the Brown child in a white family – I had identity without relationships. That combination – identity with no community – impoverished me. That impoverishment was a constant hum in the background of my life. My face told a story that the rest of me couldn’t articulate except as loss and absence.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So when people seek identity without relations, I find it baffling. Why would anyone seek that impoverishment? White people longing to discover a long-lost Indigenous ancestor likely don’t </span><i>feel</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that isolated identity like impoverishment, however, because their impoverishment comes from the systems around them. Colonialism works in all of us, to destroy and replace: destroying relationships and replacing them with isolated identities we can move around the country. It tells us to be one thing or another and never gives any of us time to be at home with ourselves. It tells us to be ourselves but then clearly lets us know which selves are welcome and which selves are not. Whatever we are is not enough, so we grasp for something else, as if that will imbue us with meaning. And it’s empty because it isn’t truly ours.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When I and other Native writers talk about being good relatives, we don’t mean that you are distant cousins who somehow need to claim your indigeneity. Being good relatives means claiming your own ancestors – all of them. When you know who you are, when you are comfortable with who you are, you can enter into relationship </span><i>with</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> us rather than </span><i>as</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> us.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">You can transform those ancestors who give you heartache, the ones who owned slaves or stole land, the ones who taught in residential schools or were members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Aurora Levins Morales writes often about rejecting family mythologies in favor of telling her ancestors’ true stories. Her great-great grandparents owned slaves, and the family mythology is that they were good to their slaves—kind slave owners. Aurora challenges this as there is no kindness in slavery. She is an abolitionist, and her parents were both activists. This, she says, is how you transform these legacies you would rather not think about. You transform them by fighting against the things they, and you, benefited from, the legacy they gave you, not by transforming them into somebody they are not. She describes that possibility as truly transformative and profoundly hopeful, one that frees us all to act in ways that liberate everyone.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aanikoobijigan:</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">ancestors and descendants.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nii’kinaaganaa: I am my relatives, </span><i>all</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of them.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thinking more broadly of relationships, I want to turn to settler colonialism – that process that destroys in order to replace – and consider it as something that shapes and controls our relationships to each other, to the land, and to our history. Settler colonialism is the structure that has forced our histories into silos, that pulled us apart and created gaps so that we do not see the things that were happening at the same time. It also forces our identities into silos so that we don’t see each other. It offers us identity without relationship.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So we read </span><i>The Grapes of Wrath,</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> but we don’t understand how the earlier settlers pulled out the prairie grasses and replaced them with thirsty and shallow-rooted wheat and corn the same way that Indigenous people were removed and replaced with tenant farmers. We don’t realize that the displacement of the grasses and the people actually created the circumstances that displaced the Joads. We read the book or watch the movie </span><i>Hillbilly Elegy</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and don’t think about the Cherokee and Creek, who were pushed out of the mountains so that these Scots-Irish could find belonging and roots. We forget that Grampa killed Indians so he could have land. Settler colonialism betrays relationship by atomizing our communities into individuals, constantly making us into strangers by the divisions and constant relocations in our society.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sara Ahmed writes about this in </span><i>Living a Feminist Life</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, in which she reflects on how strangers are those who are “made strange” by the structures and assumptions around them. To be identified as a “stranger” is to be identified as not from here. A stranger is somebody who endangers those who </span><i>are</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> from here; strangers are being made dangerous because they are made strange. Made strange because you are made a stranger.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ahmed’s writing plays with words, using their multiple meanings to get at her point. Anyone who is racially marginalized has had the experience of being asked where they are from. If I say I am from Niagara Falls, the follow-up question is inevitably “Yeah, but where are you </span><i>from</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">?” I usually respond with “Thunder Bay,” because that’s where I was born. Often the questioner, who has read my ambiguously darker skin as meaning I’m not from “here” – not from Canada – gets increasingly frustrated. No, but where are you </span><i>from</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">? My darker skin makes me a stranger, not from here, possibly dangerous. People whose skin color or religion marks them as migrants, whether they are Black or Muslim, Asian or Mexican, often have a similar experience – but where are you </span><i>from</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">? – even though many in these diasporic communities have been “from here” for hundreds of years. Even though many Native people are also Black, or Muslim, or Asian, or Mexican and have been “from here” for a very long time.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At what point did light skin become an indicator of being “from here” and the skin of the original people become an indicator of strangeness?<br /><br /></span></p><p><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-4474" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/cover-scaled.jpg" alt="The book cover of Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec, with the same beadwork design as in the article's banner image." width="500" height="773" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/cover-scaled.jpg 1656w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/cover-194x300.jpg 194w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/cover-663x1024.jpg 663w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/cover-768x1187.jpg 768w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/cover-994x1536.jpg 994w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/cover-1325x2048.jpg 1325w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></p>						</div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/to-be-good-kin/">To Be Good Kin</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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