"Grief is about remembering, or unforgetting, the future and a history that could have been."
"Our language does not divide into male and female the way European languages do. It divides into animate and inanimate. The world is alive with beings that are other than humans, and we are all related, with responsibilities to each other."
"Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants come to a place and become part of the existing political system."
"The land itself and the conditions of that land, like altitude and climate, impact our genome just as our human ancestors do."
"These relationships I have inherited, relationships with the United States and Canada and the peoples within these borders, relationships with the church, and relationships that stretch across oceans."
"He sees Christianity as it exists broadly across the Western world - a faith disconnected from land and strangers, ideas imposed by white Europeans who arrived as guests but almost immediately began to act as autocratic hosts."
"But what does it mean to be good relatives - to not only recognize our kinship but to be good kin? Because, for Indigenous peoples, kinship is not simply a matter of being like a brother or a sister to somebody. It carries specific responsibilities depending on the kind of relationship we agree upon. An aunt has different responsibilities than a brother. If we are going to be kin, then we must accept that these relationships come with responsibility."
"Americans admire this desire to boldly go and then bravely defend themselves from those who resent discovery. Discovery, after all, has never been good for those it has discovered. It inevitably leads to exploitation and death."
"Christians are unmoored, landless people. Maybe that disconnection from land is what has led to other disconnections."
"Instead of listening to what the land might have to say for itself, you listen only for what God might be saying through it, reducing it to an empty vessel. It diminishes our investment in the world around us and disconnects us from everything, including people, because we don't listen to them either."
"Our creation stories situate us in a particular place, with particular relationships. Creation stories, whether Christian or Hebrew, Anishinaabe or Hopi, aren't meant to be histories - not in the sense that the Western world has invented the idea of history as an unbiased set of facts. They are meant to explain who we are and create a communal sense of self."
"Our worlds and our stories hold this knowledge. Our origin story is valuable because it not only tells us who we are; it tells us who we can become."
"Multiple creation stories, emerging from multiple gardens, describe the relationships of multiple peoples. There is not a single story to which we must all be reconciled. Not a single story with a single message. Not a single narrative that provides its bearer with authority and power to control the lives of others."
"Land acknowledgments are a moment to pause and reflect on the relationships that exists between the current residents and those who were displaced. What does it mean to live on stolen land? You may not be guilty of the act of dispossession, but it is a relationship that you have inherited."
"Put simply, immigrants come to a place and join with the existing political order. Settlers come to a place and impose a political order. Those who came here by force - such as African people who were enslaved - or those who come through desperation - such as economic or climate refugees or those fleeing war - are welcomed by that political order only according to their usefulness."
"Christians are identified by their beliefs, not their place. But when I say that I am Anishinaabe, I am not only making a claim to who I am; I am making a claim to a place. I am claiming a land that claims be back."
"A relentless ethnic cleansing that began on the East Coast and moved westward as big brother's hunger for land and resources grew ever more demanding."
"To be a 'person' in the United States and Canada is to be a particular kind of person; somebody who is white and Christian, owns property, holds European values. We may think that this is no longer true today. But 98 percent of private property, 856 million acres of it, in the United States is still owned by white Americans."
"We looked at the large spaces that had been dormitory rooms, where children had slept, divided by age and gender. These divisions separated siblings and cousins, further isolating the children from their relatives."
"Slavery was abolished, but the beliefs that justified it were not."
"When you move people off the land, they need to go somewhere, and people without land go to cities."
"But chosen solitude is much different from forced isolation. Solitary confinement is now recognized by many as tortuous in its own right, but at the time, it was conceived as reform."
"Floods are destructive, and grief is part of our great flood stories: grief for what is lost, grief because even what is restored will always be tinged with that loss. Many ancestors were overcome by the waters, and many lives were ended before they had the opportunity to become ancestors."
"Because for Indigenous peoples, kinship means responsibility."
"Land is our first relationship, and it is the first relationship that we need to restore."
"We can't always go home. The reality is that because of fractured relationships, displacement, forced and unforced migrations, we may not know where home is."
"So we name the land, claiming relationship to it. And what if the land also claims us?"
"At one of them, my husband brought me a stone he had picked up on a beach covered in round stones. When I held it in my hand, it felt like mine. Not mine like a thing that was now in my possession but mine like my children are mine and like my parents are mine. We belonged to each other."
"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."
"So we cannot talk about restoring our relationship to land without talking about restoring the land to relationship with the people from whom it was taken."
"The land and the waters have absorbed the blood and sweat of generations, watched babies become old men and women and return to them. We are part of each other."
"I don't know if the land is alive, not in the way that I know my dogs are alive. But it might be. And I've stopped bringing home rocks that don't belong to me."
"We have begun to unravel the history we have been taught, unforgetting our relationships with this place and each other. We are challenging the myths that we were told about ourselves and each other, and we are learning the language to transform and confront settler colonialism. But there is no magic bullet. No single book you can read, no one podcast to listen to, no perfect Twitterati to follow, no percentage you can donate, and no amount of time you can spend outside in nature will put things right. We have to build relationships."
"Helping feels good, but it is paternal; without relationship, it embeds hierarchy."
"Aanikoobijian is the Ojibwe word for 'great-grandparent' or 'ancestor.' But it is also the word for 'great-grandchild' or 'descendant.' The word I would use to describe the person three generations before me and the person three generations after me is the same word and it connects seven generations."
"Thinking in cyclical rather than linear time, we see more clearly the ways that generations are linked."
"Think of something precious in your bundle, one of those things you would take with you if you had to flee. Look carefully at it and consider everyone whom that object connects you with. Sit with it in your hand and let this object speak to you of relationships and time."
"Belonging involves a reciprocity of claiming and being claimed, of responsibility to the community and the community's responsibility to me. Of seeing and being seen."
"'Your ancestors are always your ancestors.' he wrote, ; but their communities may not be your communities.'"
"Colonialism works in all of us, to destroy and replace: destroying relationships and replacing them with isolated identities we can move around the country."
"Returning to yourself means understanding how your ancestors were used, wittingly or not, to displace and replace, and then working with us to ensure that we are safe from further displacement."
"Migrants fleeing the violence that the colonial West outsources to protect itself did not choose to abandon their homelands. But however you arrived, we must all choose how we will live here."
"Returning to yourself means picking up those threads and working through what it means to find home in the place you were removed to."
"To make a timeline or visual history of your family, take a moment to sketch out a family tree, the names, dates, and places as best as you can remember them."
"And it was the work I did ahead of time that allowed me to hear and understand the things they were telling me without becoming defensive. That allowed me to move toward solidarity with them and becoming kin."
"Doing the work of picking up your own bundle, of returning to yourself, will help you move from being a settler to becoming kin. You'll see what you have to offer - because you do have things to offer."
