#patty krawec

[songsofbloodandwater]

Settlers and newcomers, Black and Indigenous: the history we learn in elementary school is rooted in explorers and settlers. We learn about brave colonists fighting for freedom. [...] We all learn about how these countries were the ones that ended slavery. Somehow in this history, the very people who created the problem are transformed into the ones who saved us. Together we learn about immigrants and refugees who came here in search of something better and built a great country. The United States and Canada are positioned as communities of safety and refuge for newcomers leaving behind or sublimating their old identities and becoming American or Canadian. These histories become central truths, and when other histories are told or when somebody makes a racist remark, Americans say with surprise, “That’s not who we are!” Your collective memory is filled with stories about cooperation and communities, brave people banding together to defend their home and working together to create something for everyone. Our collective memory is filled with other stories. Other centers. [Our collective memories contain stories of displacement and disruption, occupation and domination. Even when we try to fit in, when we try to assimilate, we aren’t truly accepted.] Sometimes the center is created simply through the act of revolving around it. What if the things you have been told are not who you are?

— Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (2022) by Patty Krawec

[osmiumpenguin]

It's the solstice tonight, and a good time to reflect on my favourite books from the past year.

I'm making very little attempt to rank these titles. They're simply the books that I enjoyed most, and they're presented in the order I read them. • "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet," by Becky Chambers (2014) • "The Galaxy, and the Ground Within," by Becky Chambers (2021) • "Locklands," by Robert Jackson Bennett (2022) • "Beloved," by Toni Morrison (1987) • "Exhalation," by Ted Chiang (2019) • "Fugitive Telemetry," by Martha Wells (2021) • "Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future," by Patty Krawec (2022) • "The Vanished Birds," by Simon Jimenez (2020) • "The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family," by Joshua Cohen (2021) • "Utopia Avenue," by by David Mitchell (2020) • "The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery," by Amitav Ghosh (1995) • "Moon of the Crusted Snow," by Waubgeshig Rice (2018) • "Bea Wolf," by Zach Weinersmith; illustrated by Boulet (2023) • "Fighting the Moon," by Julie McGalliard (2021) • "The Empress of Salt and Fortune," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Glass Hotel," by Emily St. John Mandel (2020) • "New York 2140," by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017) • "When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Omnibus," by Ryan North et al; illustrated by Erica Henderson & Derek Charm & Jacob Chabot & Naomi Franquiz & Tom Fowler & Rico Renzi et al (2022) • "Buffalo Is the New Buffalo: Stories," by Chelsea Vowel (2022) • "Greenwood: A Novel," by Michael Christie (2019) • "The House of Rust," by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (2021) • "Children of Memory," by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2022) • "Jade Legacy," by Fonda Lee (2021) • "A Deadly Education: A Novel: Lesson One of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2020) • "The Last Graduate: A Novel: Lesson Two of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2021) • "The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2022) • "To Be Taught if Fortunate," by Becky Chambers (2019) • "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution," by Carlo Rovelli (2020), translated by Erica Segre & Simon Carnell (2021) • "A Psalm for the Wild-Built," by Becky Chambers (2021) Ah, but I said I'd make "very little attempt" to rank them, not "no attempt." So here is that attempt: my favourite five books from the last solar orbit — the five I enjoyed even more than those other thirty — also presented in the order I read them.

• "Nona the Ninth," by Tamsyn Muir (2022) • "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands," by Kate Beaton (2022) • "Record of a Spaceborn Few," by Becky Chambers (2018) • "Briar Rose," by Jane Yolen (1992) • "Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution," by R.F. Kuang (2022)

[protoslacker]

Paul Pena, Tuva Farewell

yingiho

Genghis Blues is a beautiful film. I was reminded of it after reading an article is adapted from Krawec’s Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimaging Our Future by way of a link Shrinkrants posted. The article in The Christian Century is titled Can these stones live?. Krawec encourages us to consider how there is an alivness in land. In the film Genghis Blues Tuva is a live being, something that Paul Pena captures in his song.

[songsofbloodandwater]

These stories—about Western settlement, and Indians who simply vanished, about well-intentioned white folks in the North standing up to slavery—are created and maintained on purpose to protect a particular way of life and a particular social class. Remember: all historians have a point of view, and storytelling is not neutral. These myths are packaged and sold to newcomers and working-class white people so that they will chase promises that were never meant for them. The stories are like isolated snapshots of the American dream, with important context cropped out of the image. Isolated stories are told in part so that the whole picture cannot be seen. The creation story we have been taught is incomplete. It is incomplete, but it is not inaccessible, and nothing stays buried forever. These histories are emerging, and the stories are being told. What would happen if you listened? What would happen if you, the churches and countries who settled upon us, listened to our histories and heard the good news that we have for you? Biskaabiiyang: returning to ourselves.

— Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (2022) by Patty Krawec

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Bad Indians Book Club: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds

By Patty Krawec.

[r3albatman]

"Just as a Hebrew mourner would fast and pour dust over their head and body, so, too, the land expressed her grief by fasting and covering herself in dust."

-Patty Krawec Becoming Kin

[r3albatman]

"Stones are ancient, older than water, older than time. Bones of the earth. They've been through so many worlds, so many floods, and they hold all the memory and knowledge that comes with it. Eternity sits in my hand, and it ties me to home."

-Patty Krawec Becoming Kin

[twoq24]

Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future a book by Patty Krawec and Nick Estes

We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, b