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

Included in the Lakota People's Law Project Decolonized Reading List for 2025

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.

Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe Ukrainian) is author of Becoming Kin and Bad Indians Book Club and cofounder of the Nii'kinaaganaa Foundation. An activist and former social worker, she belongs to Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory and resides in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Krawec has served on the board of the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre and cohosted the Medicine for the Resistance podcast.