“I want us to consider our relationship with land - to think about it beyond squabbling over ownership and rights and to think about responsibilities and reciprocal relationship. To think of ourselves as a part of creation rather than apart from it. What if the land is a being in its own right?”
--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 Winter Quarter, we will be reading the short Interlude: Flood, a rumination on grief and loss in the context of settler colonialism, and Chapter 6: The Land: Our Ancestor. In this chapter, Krawec describes the land as a living being with which we are in constant relationship. She brings up movements such as the Land Back push to restore land to Indigenous tribes, and reminds us to ground our struggles for decolonization in real and concrete efforts to restore Indigenous land and sovereignty.
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.
For our Winter Quarter event, we are thrilled to partner with the Cascadia College Diversity and Equity Center. Join us in CC1-011 for conversation and crafting centered around Chapter 6: The Land: Our Ancestor. We will be thinking about our relationships with the land and discussing what true decolonization could look like on our campus and beyond. Whether you've read some, all, or none of the chapter, you are welcome!
Date: Wednesday, February 12
Time: 12:30-2:30 PM
Location: CC1-011
"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.
