“Each one of us is surrounded by webs of relationship and connection. [...] These webs of connection stretch out, reaching to other webs, and collectively we hold the world together.”
--Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin
For the 2024-2025 academic year, Community Reads will center our programming around the book Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Guide to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining the Future by Patty Krawec, in support of our overall theme of decolonization. In the university today, the word decolonization is regularly used to describe a general change in mind or theoretical approach, but it is essential that we also engage with the material impacts of the theft of Indigenous land and disappearance of Indigenous people. As a team composed of settlers on Indigenous lands, working in a university system built on those foundations, we have chosen to spend this year reckoning with the topic of decolonization. What does it mean? What can we actually do about it? And how can we push to be in better relationship with the land and everyone around us?
Each quarter, we will focus on a different chapter of this book, looking at both the settler-colonial history of the US and Canada and Indigenous futures from a relational perspective. We will engage with our own understandings of decolonization while also using the book’s structured calls to action as a way to move forward and reexamine the history and stories that dominate our culture.
For Spring Quarter, we will be reading Chapter 7 (The People: We are Related). In this chapter, Krawec focuses on relationships - interpersonal and communal - as the ties that bind us together across generations and societies. She encourages us to take responsibility for ourselves and those we are connected to, acknowledging the roles of race, politics, and colonialism in our relationships but seeking genuine community and solidarity as a way of learning about and redressing historical wrongs. We hope this chapter will prompt conversation about the relationships that connect us to one another both on and off campus, and about how those relationships might help us make real change.
Becoming Kin: an Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by
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.
We will have two events in Spring Quarter to discuss Chapter 7, one in person and one over Zoom! You may attend one or both of these events, depending on your capacity, interest, and accessibility needs!
Date: Wednesday, May 7
Time: 1:00-2:30 PM
Location: LB1-205
Date: Tuesday, May 13
Time: 1:00-2:00 PM
Registration link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/_3_Yyw0CSouUv8xXhASCyA
"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."
"Through writing and podcasting Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe/Ukranian) explores how we might live differently in the relationships we inherit. She is a co-founder of the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation and her book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future will be published in September by Broadleaf Books. Krawec lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario and on Twitter @gindaanis. Find her online at daanis.ca." (source)
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Land Acknowledgment:The University of Washington Bothell & Cascadia College Campus Library occupies Land that has been inhabited by Indigenous Peoples since time immemorial. Specifically, this campus is located on Sammamish Land from which settler colonists forcibly removed Coast Salish Peoples to reservations in the mid-19th century. Today, descendants of the Sammamish are members of several Coast Salish communities.
