Since Tribal engagement is at the heart of Strategic Earth’s work, it is important for us to question: how do we authentically engage with Indigenous communities? How do we move beyond acknowledgment into a genuine relationship with Indigenous communities with the histories we carry? How do our personal stories and ancestral histories relate to our “kinship” with others?
That’s what led us to our third Strategic Earth Book Club pick: Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec.
Starting With Ourselves
Reading this book as a group required looking inward at our own teachings and learnings as well as being present and vulnerable with one another. Krawec’s core invitation is simple: kinship requires relationship, and relationship requires honesty about the histories we carry. As facilitators, that honesty starts with sitting with the realities of injustice within Indigenous communities and recognizing that even well-intentioned anti-racism work can leave colonial structures untouched if we don’t also examine our relationship to land and the people whose land we occupy. We often ask communities to sit with discomfort. This book asked us to do the same.
Unforgetting: More than Memory
One of the most powerful distinctions Krawec offers is the difference between remembering and unforgetting. Remembering, she suggests, is something we do together while unforgetting is actively surfacing what was deliberately buried: histories that were systematically erased, relationships that were severed by design, and ways of knowing the land that colonial structures worked to extinguish. In our work alongside Indigenous communities, particularly around marine resources and stewardship, it is easy to frame engagement as bringing people to a process. But, before we can build partnerships, we must first do the work of unforgetting: understanding what was broken, who broke it, and how those fractures still shape the rooms we work in today. Unforgetting is not an exercise in guilt; it is an act of respect and a step in showing up as empathetic partners rather than well-meaning outsiders.
Beyond Acknowledgment
A useful framework from the book is the distinction between acknowledging and acting. Krawec invites us to wrestle with “unwanted kin” people in our own communities whose worldviews cause harm — and rather than avoid that tension, to hold it. As facilitators, we’re often in rooms where that tension is already present, and this gave us the language to acknowledge it without shutting it down. We also reflected honestly on identity and responsibility: we are not responsible for what our ancestors did, but we are responsible for what we do now with what we know. Our ancestors are always our ancestors, but they may not be our community. We can, and must, build new relationships.
The Bonds of Kinship
We explored the bonds of kinship, including the relationship between humans, communities, and the natural world, and how colonial structures erode those bonds to justify continued harm to Indigenous and underserved communities. Understanding kinship, we found, is foundational to how we relate to one another. Krawec describes kinship in the Anishinaabe sense (Nii’kinaaganaa, meaning “all of my relations”) as an ongoing orientation toward the world: a way of being in relationship with people, communities, nature, and the land itself.
For Strategic Earth, this resonates both professionally and personally. Our work in Indigenous and Native spaces puts us in constant relationship with environments that Indigenous peoples have stewarded since time immemorial. As facilitators, that means asking whose knowledge, whose grief, and whose belonging are already embedded in the places where we work. It means making space for that history before we make space for our agenda. It means asking communities what they need from us, rather than leading with what we have to offer. We have always valued relationships rooted in trust, and this book confirmed that genuine relationships develop at the speed of trust, which is not ours to set.
Moving Forward Together
Becoming Kin gave our team a shared language for the work we are already doing and a challenge to do it more intentionally. Working with Indigenous communities cannot be rushed or one-sided. As facilitators, we must continue to examine the histories we’ve inherited, question the narratives we carry into rooms, and build trust before we ask others to. This internal work will also help us better support our clients in engaging with these communities.
We left this reading with a reinforced commitment to listen, learn, update, and engage at the speed of trust.
Up Next
Our next book club selection is There There by Tommy Orange. This debut novel weaves together the voices of twelve urban Native Americans, whose lives have been shaped by displacement, identity, and inherited trauma. Check out our Community of Practice page for more information about our Quarterly Indigenous Author Club, including upcoming books we’re reading. Join the conversation with us!
Preparation Notice
Claude.ai was used in a limited editorial capacity to support document organization, readability, and flow. All ideas and content were human-generated and reviewed, edited, and finalized by Strategic Earth.