Kinship

 Chapter 6 of  We are the Middle of Forever is by Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte, a Potawatomi Tribal member and it is about Kinship.  I recognize as I read this that Robin Wells Kimmerer also spoke about this and about reciprocal relationship with Earth and the creatures of Earth, but she does not so much use the word kinship.

Dr. Whyte says: But kinship refers to relationships of mutual responsibility, where we care for each other, and we create bonds with each other that make it so that, regardless of what the law says, and regardless of how severe a problem is, or regardless of what our rights are, we have an abiding sense that we need to care for others.  We need to be responsible for each other, and that's not just confined to the human to human context, but depending o the culture, to all living beings and nonliving entities and systems."  He goes onto to talk about the ways in which colonialism has erased or disrespected kinship.

When I think about a people that were living on the land for centuries and centuries feeling that the animals and the plants were their brothers and sisters, taking but only with respect - with honorable harvest guidelines and gratitude, and where conscious attention was paid to the needs of an eco system and oral stories passed down the knowledge of the properties of different plants, and the way to care for the ecosystem......I can only think what a rude shock it must have been to see settlers come and do things like chop down a whole forest or replant a whole field in a monocrop, or kill all of one animal, or pollute a water source, or extract and lay waste a landscape.....They must simply have regarded us as both crazy and "savage".  

The tragedy of genocide and destruction of college is an obvious tragedy.  But this destruction of and removal from their reciprocal relationship with the land is a deep and less obvious trauma both for tribes, but also for the land itself.   I think of Robin's report about a graduate student of hers that was studying where sweetgrass grew and did not grow and discovered that it was more abundant and healthy were tribes had harvested it - that their actions were in fact part of that ecosystems balance.  Just as it is now becoming clear that many tries did controlled burns and kept health the forests they were in relationship with.  For anyone of us that have tended a garden for years and then moved away only to discover that the next owner allowed it all to go to weeds...can understand the sort of sorrow this is.

Dr. Whyte also talk quite a bit about time - about linear time (that practiced by western culture) and deep time - a sense by Native people of a longer slower more circular or non-linear time.   He emphasizes the rushed nature of linear time especially in regards to crisis - and he talks about how the stories that pass down from generation to generation are a kind of guidance from outside time.    He states:  "For Indigenous people, we think of our deep time, where we're thinking about the stories that we still keep today.  We're thinking, 'wait a minute, we need to go back.  Is there guidance within those stories that can help us understand the challenges that we're facing today?"...You should never presuppose that anything that's happening today is the first time.  Maybe it is, but you should never presuppose that.  You should always go back into that deep time."   He goes on to say that Kinship is one of the ways to enter deep time.

He adds: "When we panic, we realize that because we don't know the conditions that made our normal possible, we're going to do whatever quick fix we can to return to normalcy, even if that just means a sense of normalcy. This idea of normality, or the assumption of what's normal, is a key problem with clock time."  And when I think of the dumb solutions to climate change or environmental problems I have heard - the ones that don't work but are just greenwashing or ill conceived - they indeed are as he says a quick fix attempt to return to normalcy.   He also goes on to point out that caregiving work is not valued in western culture and not seen as a pathway for change - because kinship is not valued.

As a white person considering this idea of Kinship it is very evident to me that not only was it never held out to me that I was in relationship with the life forms and entities around me - but those who held beliefs along those lines were made fun of.  It means huge blind spots about the interconnectedness of things around me, about the implications of my actions and even the importance of the human relationships I choose. 

Dr Whyte says:  "We need to think about what type of team we want to be part of.  We want to figure out who the collective of people are that are meaningful to us, that are responsive to change, and think about what it means to build that kinship network.  What's interesting about kinship is it is slow, because we have to be patient with the development of the relationship."  That gives me a lot to think about in terms of how I do my activism.