Re-member

To re-member is to take back what was broken. For people descended from European settlers to Turtle Island, re-membering is essential for coming into right relationship with the Living World and with the Original People of Turtle Island. Our European ancestors experienced centuries of internal violence which disrupted their land-based connections and traditions, destroyed their communities and governance systems, and marginalized their local languages and ontologies. Unaddressed and unhealed, our European fore-bearers perpetrated these same harms against the people of this continent through settler colonialism.

Indigenous elders and leaders call on us to remember that history with honesty and humility in order to stop, and to repair, harms caused colonization. They ask us to re-member our connections with each other and with the Living World and to become good relatives to the land and all living beings. They ask us to embrace the reality that we are deeply interdependent, living “in layers of relationships, among ancestors and descendants in a web that stretches far beyond our senses”.

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Quote by Patty Krawec from Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. Broadleaf Books, 2022.