Becoming Kin

An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

By: Patty Krawec, Nick Estes - foreword

Narrated by: Patty Krawec

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 listeners 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.

©2022 Patty Krawec (P)2022 Tantor

Fantastic

The content in this book is important to heal ourselves, our nation, and more importantly return to what we threw away in human society.

Best book I’ve read this year!

As an Afro-indigenous person this book spoke to me on so many levels. This book is beneficial for Natives and non-natives alike to show how we can become each others kin and support each other. Beautifully written.

Eye Opening Book of Decolonization

A great book about the history of settlers colonialism and how to decolonize the land we are on.

Thank you for turning my world upside down!

Without the least bit of self righteousness Krawec remarkably takes the listener on a journey of self-examination and discovery related to what it means to become kin and how to get there. The first step? Stop and listen.
Throughout my AP senior English class fifty years ago, we discussed “man’s inhumanity to man” as exemplified in The Grapes of Wrath, never touching on the inhumanity in the Joad family’s sense of entitlement to the land “because grandpa had killed Indians for it.” I will do better in my listening for ways in which I can do better.

Beautifully written and thoroughly thought provoking

I had been waiting to read this for awhile and I was so engrossed in it I finished it in a couple days! Everyone should read this book!