Patty Krawec

From “Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future” by Patty Krawec  Being confronted with racist ideas or behavior – our own or in the systems we’re part of – is hard, but it is not the worst thing. The worst thing is being unwilling to listen, unwilling to do […]

From “Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future” by Patty Krawec Becoming kin often begins with having difficult conversations, and being willing to listen to the things marginalized people, the ones we are so used to helping, have to say can be difficult. It is one thing to help

From “Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future” by Patty Krawec – Broadleaf Books The US National Park system has been displacing Indigenous people for more than one hundred years. Just like governments use the language of safety, conservationists use the language of environmentalism to push aside the original

From “Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future” by Patty Krawec We can’t talk about restoring relationship to land without talking about restoring it to the people from whm it was taken. As a phrase, Land Back started with a tweet, which became a hashtag, which became a rallying

From “Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future” by Patty Krawec – Broadleaf Books The sterilization of Native women in the United States and Canada goes back to the early twentieth century, when concerns about population control combined with eugenics. Policies began to target women who were seen to

Removal of Indigenous children from their families was so widespread that in Canada, it was given the name Sixties Scoop: the scooping of Indigenous children from their homes with little investigation before reaction. The Indigenous children scooped from their homes were adopted out to families as far away as Europe and New Zealand, echoing the

Just as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Dawes Act of 1887 were used to strip Native tribes of their land and force massive migrations that cleared the way for white land ownership, Reconstruction in the United States ensured that land remained in white hands. Immediately after the Civil War, some of the

Military aggression took many forms. Two examples, separated by about thirty years, capture and in some ways bookend the ethnic cleansing of the West. Remember that earlier in the nineteenth century, the area west of the Mississippi was considered Indian Country. This was where the tribes had been relocated to, with the promise that they

Indian boarding schools were an attempt by the governments of the United States and Canada to change the language, religion, and social structure of Indigenous societies and homogenize everyone into the same way of thinking and living. Although these schools predate the UN Genocide Convention by over fifty years, they meet the criteria of that

By the late 1800s, most Indians, those whose tribes were recognized by state or federal governments, had disappeared from the American landscape into their reservations. It would not be long before their children would disappear too – taken from those reservations into federally funded and mandated boarding schools. In 1891, a new law allowed US

Through various proclamations, treaties, and removals, we disappeared from the land and into towns and Indian Country and finally reservations. We disappeared in fiction and film, becoming two-dimensional characters, populating shows from the Lone Ranger to the X Files, who either threaten white settlement or, like Tonto, exist only to help the white man. We