"What if we stayed in the margins? Instead of trying to build our own little nationalisms out on the edge, what actually comes together when we listen to and talk to each other?
And how can we bend together towards a common purpose? It's not about blood. Our ancestors matter. They absolutely matter. But they're not the only thing. We can bend together towards a common purpose."
Patty Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory and residing in Niagara Falls. She has served on the board of the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre and co-hosted the Medicine for the Resistance podcast. Patty is a founding director of the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation which challenges settlers to pay their rent for living on Indigenous land and then disburses those funds to Indigenous people, meeting immediate survival needs as well as supporting the organizing and community building needed to address the structural issues that create those needs.Patty has a background in social work, supporting victims of sexual and gendered violence as well as child abuse. A strong believer in the power of collective organizing, Patty was an active union member throughout her career as a social worker.
Her current work and writing focuses on how Anishinaabe belonging and thought can inform faith and social justice practices and has been published in Sojourners, Rampant Magazine, Midnight Sun, Yellowhead Institute, Indiginews, Religion News Service, and Broadview.
Her first book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future was published in 2022 by Broadleaf Books. Her second book, Bad Indians Book Club: Reading At The Edge of a Thousand Worlds, is about the ways that marginalized writing and storytelling can help us reimagine that future will be published in the fall of 2025. She lives on the bluesky @daanis.ca and you can find her online at daanis.ca
Transcript
Patty Krawec Part 1
[00:00:00] Amy: If you want to support the Missing Witches Project, join the coven. Find out how@missingwitches.com. Or buy our books, new Moon Magic and Missing Witches. And check out The Missing Witches Deck of Oracles.
[00:00:13] Risa: Oh, I'm so excited to meet you.
[00:00:16] Patty: Oh yeah. Oh, this is fun. This, this is going to be fun. Cause although I know you contacted me about becoming kin this also feels like my first interview about Bad Indians book club. So,
I
know. I got really lucky there. I didn't even know in the pipe.
did.
You did. And I, yeah, and anyway, yeah, I'm just really, it's kind of interesting to me that my very first conversation about becoming kin was with a religious studies teacher at the University of Winnipeg. And then my first conversation about Bad Indians Book Club is on a Missing Wishes pod.
And. That just kind of demonstrates the trajectory of my life over the last couple of years.
Yeah, I was so excited, like, I went looking for writing about kinship. We do a kinship series, and I just wanted to get, like, more educated about that, and I was so excited to find your book, it's so beautiful. And then getting to read about Indians Book Club, and becoming kin, and then seeing like Sylvia Federici in there, seeing Marian Gibson in there, I was like, Oh, we have, and, and, and so many other writers that you introduced me to, and that I loved.
So yeah, I'm really excited.
Yeah, a friend of mine recommended the history of witchcraft and 13 trials. She recommended that to me. I don't know, a while ago. And then when I was traveling, I was doing a thing in Massachusetts. I was at Bridgewater State and, and I decided to take a trip down to Providence.
Because HP Lovecraft. And I'm obsessed with the Tanis podcast. I don't know if you've ever listened to it. I've listened to it like five times. It's not even like amazingly good. It actually moves very slow and there's parts of it that are annoying. But I just like the story and the characters so I just keep listening to it.
And it's
[00:02:13] Risa: gosh, I want to write that
[00:02:14] Patty: kind of Lovecraft. It's very, it's Lovecraftian. Lovecraft story. So I went down and I went into the Lovecraft store and there her book was. So it's like, well, I guess I gotta pick this up. And it was just like. So, it gives such a different perspective on the witch trials, on what they, you know, along with Federici, what they were, what they were not.
And kind of the way popular narrative shapes the way we think about those things.
I like that she brings up Stormy Daniels because it shapes also how we think about contemporary politics. And kind of the way we make fun of Trump supporters, characterizing them as, you know, dumb and this and that.
Some of them are, but so are some leftists, right? There are some leftists, you know, liberals. They're also kind of dumb at times. So it's, yeah, we really do people a disservice, but I can see how that narrative makes us feel good.
[00:03:06] Risa: Yeah, totally. I got to meet her, she came on the podcast and Marian Gibson and she, she was really like kind and thoughtful about the way her own thinking about contemporary witchcraft has changed. Like she sort of used to be in like the camp of like this stuff is based on nonsense. Like, you know, like this research Was like poorly done and you know there isn't evidence of some organized goddess worship in the 1600s or whatever and then she's like but now I understand that it's partially about how we're inventing a practice for ourselves to try to reach past colonization did to our relationship to the land to our relationship to our narratives and I can see why It has, like, magic and value in the act of creation, and it was really nice to hear her, like, have her discover that in looking back through these, these histories.
[00:04:06] Patty: Yeah, and really, there's this book about early Christianity called Why This New Race, and it shapes kind of the same thing, how Christianity invented itself. You know, invented this new practice in order to incorporate, you know, beliefs from different places towards a different end. And I found that so interesting because like we always have these ideas that these things landed fully formed and they really didn't it's like, oh, that's an invented holiday.
Yeah, they all are,
That's an invented belief. Well, yeah, they all are.
[00:04:37] Risa: Yeah. I mean, that's what we've done for thousands and thousands and thousands
[00:04:42] Patty: We've tried to sense of the world around us and we create stories in order to do that and then those stories start to take on the weight of truth.
[00:04:49] Risa: Yeah, and, allowing that they're created and co created and that they can be, can kind of take some of the violence out of them, you know, like they, we don't have to see these as fossilized truths that we have to defend with all our armor up.
[00:05:05] Patty: And that's something that I really like about Anishinaabe stories, because right now I'm where my blog I don't know if you if you read it, A
Yes! I love your blog!
And I'm kind of going through this old, these Ojibwe texts that were documented in 1906. And I have a couple that were documented more early, you know, books that are documented more recently. And the stories are so variable, right? Like it changes like the one I just put out about the flood narrative. It's much different from the first way I heard it. Different storytellers include different details, and that's okay. Nobody's saying this is the one true story, because there doesn't have to be.
There just has to be a story, and these stories take us to different places. And they emphasize different things I'm careful in the blog to say, this is not an authoritative interpretation of these stories. This is what they make me think in this particular moment in time, 15 years from now they're going to make people think different things right now they're going to make people think different things.
[00:06:05] Risa: Right, I find that really exciting, reading your blog, you sort of trace, like, I'll tell you what I see, and you, and you do such a fun job of relating it to like popular culture and contemporary politics too.
[00:06:18] Patty: And the underlying message of every one of them seems to be we need to get our shit together.
[00:06:22] Risa: Oh, come on, everybody! What the fuck?
I'm gonna, like, pull back for three seconds and welcome you. And welcome the folks who've arrived. And uh, I'll just also say like this is only my second podcast interview back since getting diagnosed and going through the rabbit hole that this last six months has been. I love. I'm so rusty. But also all of my maybe masks or performances have been ripped away a little bit chemo and surgery.
So I think that in some ways makes a better interview. I hope so.
[00:07:11] Patty: All right, well we bring, we bring up everything forward with us right.
[00:07:15] Risa: Yeah, exactly.
[00:07:16] Patty: Crisis has a way of stripping away, stripping away things,
in new things,
you I
[00:07:24] Risa: hope so. Yeah, I hope so. Given how the world feels these days, too, you know.
[00:07:29] Patty: Yeah, yeah, the world is in one big prolonged crisis right now.
Yeah.
to me how in Canada we're rejecting one nationalism and leaning into another. It's like, no, Canada's not going to save us. Behind Canadian is not going to save us.
[00:07:44] Risa: Right, right. It feels reassuring for 40 seconds and then you realize it's sort of perpetuating the same erasure. I wonder if you could talk about becoming kin first. What was your own journey to finding kinship or to finding this idea of being kin,
[00:08:04] Patty: yeah, there's a few stories there. I mean, the story of the book itself came from getting really mad in a church sermon that started off by taking shots at trans people. It was one of those, we're all the same in Jesus sermons, and Billie Jean King had just gotten in a lot of trouble for saying that trans athletes should not be competing in their lived gender, which I think she has walked back I'm not sure about that, but I seem to recall that she, that she walked that back.
Anyway, the story was basically started there as like, oh, you know, if a gay rights icon like Billie Jean King can be taken out by the woke mob then identity politics is out of control. And people laughed, and I started to get really angry.
Because we're not all the same, right? Like whatever your, whatever your religious or political conceptions are, we do not become the same. We don't leave behind our identities when we join a new movement or a new social group or a religion. We stay who we are and we bring that into that new religion or social movement or whatever.
And. Anyway, so I, I, I should post it on Facebook all afternoon that did not make me feel any better. So, so I decided to write an article for Sojourners Magazine about how indigenous, the church found home in a way that pushed indigenous people aside, rendered us homeless, made it, you know, they made home at our expense.
Because I was thinking very much about home at that time and what home means and the different kinds of homes and whose homes are valued and whose homes are not valued. Which also means whose relationships are valued and whose relationships are not valued. And so then an editor from Broadleaf actually reached out to me on Twitter, which is the only dead name I will ever use, and asked me if I had ever thought of writing a book.
And I said, I showed it to a few friends, because I was like, am I going to be out 5, 000 and have a book nobody wants? Is this a scam? What's going on? Because it felt very discovered in a malt shop. And they said, no, no, no, she's legit. She's like, this is legit. So I messaged her back saying, well, I am now.
And she told me that she was looking for a book about how, cause she's an acquisitions editor and she was looking for somebody to write a book about indigenous kinship and how indigenous kinship could save us. And I was like, well, it's not our responsibility to save you, but I do like this idea about kinship.
Because, like I said, at that time I was thinking about home and whose homes are valued, whose relations are valued, and to what end, right, to what end are these relations and homes valued, and to what end are other homes and relations not valued. Because I also worked for child welfare at the time. Which dismantles some homes and builds other homes.
And I was starting to realize that I was not one of the good guys that I was, in fact, one of the bad guys, and that's a really tough, tough place to be when you think you've been helping. Right? Because I did this job for 16 years. I thought I was helping. Towards the end, I started to realize that I was not in fact helping.
That even the harms I was able to mitigate, in no way altered or made up for the harms I had caused. And, you know, and so all of this kind of landed right around the same time. And so becoming Kin was also very much my own process about unpacking these things. And. You know, reviewing history. It turns out that 16 years of social work, particularly in child welfare, is really good training in reviewing history and then developing service plans to address that history.
You know, reviewing history, looking for patterns. Did the bad thing happen? Why did the bad thing happen? What can we do to make sure that the bad thing doesn't keep happening? So I applied that lens to Canada and the U. S. Let's review history. Let's look at these threads. Let's look and see how all of these things are connected.
Because we tend to say, oh, you know, that episode was really bad, and that episode was really bad, and that, and the government apologizes for each of these things as if they happened in a silo, right? You know, they're very sorry about residential schools, and yet there's more children in white foster homes now than there ever were in residential schools.
So they're apologizing for strategy but not outcome. Yeah, So Becoming Kin was written very much in a time when I was doing that analysis on myself as well. And so in that regard, I'm not really asking anybody to do anything that I haven't already done. Particularly in terms of realizing that I was in fact, the bad guy.
I thought I was helping and realizing that I was not. So Becoming Kin is also deeply personal in that way. How can I Be good kin to my own relatives in the context of my own history. And how can I reconceptualize home and relatives? In a way that's more in line with my Anishinaabe community and the teachings that I was getting at that time.
So it's very much about kind of onboarding myself Valerie's question actually provoked that direction.
One of the things that we had talked about early on was the fact that she was a white woman editing a native woman. And how did that look? And then at one point I was talking about the transition politically and socially from residential schools to child welfare,
and I said after this period of, I think I called it, you know, upheaval, and she, she highlighted it and said this phrase really doesn't do justice. To what you've just described, because I've talked about the removals, the trails of tears, the reservations, I've talked about all of these things.
So I was like, fine, after this period of genocide and ethnic cleansing, so she kind of allowed me. To pull that forward into an audience that maybe doesn't want to hear it that way. And so that's why that language is threaded throughout the book wasn't because I wasn't already thinking it, but because of the way, I mean, I'm sure you feel this to the way we, you know, we kind of.
You know, we code switch, you know, we kind of control how we talk and she allowed me to kind of unleash that. So yeah, becoming kin was very much my own process as well and kind of trying to understand coming from one viewpoint and moving us towards a more liberatory viewpoint and really trying to shed the idea that there are right and wrong ways to read stories.
There are the ways that we read stories and then there are the ends. to which a particular reading will take us. Do I want to get there or do I want to go here? What can I emphasize? Where else can this story take me? Right? Because I grew up in the evangelical church. So there's one univocal, reliable narrator for the whole Bible.
And now I'm like, no, there isn't. There's a whole bunch of unreliable narrators with their own ideas and their own beliefs. Their own nation building, their own looking backwards and trying to create a narrative out of what may have been isolated incidents. And that's okay!
That doesn't have to make the text itself unreliable. That means we can still go to it to help us understand how we fit into the world. It allows for a much more expansive reading of the text. And I think that's a little more consistent with Jewish readers themselves.
[00:15:28] Risa: Oh, I love it. I have 75 follow up questions. I want to read this piece because it really jumped out at me when I was reading Becoming Kin. And I think it, It ties into what you're saying about your own god fucking heartbreaking journey working in social services, you wrote, Contemporary theorists see iniquity as a lack of access to social resources.
They talk about racism in our social structures rather than analyzing land ownership itself. And that's interesting to me because disconnecting iniquity from access to land Any social justice action that we take reinforces settler colonialism. We're simply making settler colonialism fairer and more just, which means that our movements are built on indigenous erasure.
Just thanks, first of all, for, putting that so clearly, right, that, when we make access to services and to systems easier which I don't think we've made them very easy, but that we're still hiding the underlying injustice, the underlying genocide.
And I think it's so exciting to sort of rip that off and say, let's talk honestly about what Land Back means. How does it work? How can it be fertile and future forming instead of something that maybe feels really like too scary to talk about if you are a settler colonizer descendant,
[00:16:56] Patty: well, for me, I mean, in Canada, 92 percent of land is publicly held anyway. Right? So releasing all of that land. Back to native people, like most people wouldn't even notice. Extraction industries would notice. Native people would now be like, no, you can't actually pull diamonds out of the ground for free.
But that's also just a change in ownership. Right. And that's I think where people get hung up on land back is what about my house. Am I going to lose my house? And it's really, on a good day we're 6 percent of the population, what are we going to do with 15 houses each if we take everybody's house and send them back to wherever?
And so it really isn't that. It's shifting our relationship to land. because we could do so much about inequity if we just abolish land ownership. If people could just live places. And have access to land and thinking about my own relatives, in northwestern Ontario, who have to have a job as a hunting guide in order to access their own traditional lands that they're I don't even want to say like ancestors, which puts it like so far back in the ancient past, but that their grandparents and great grandparents accessed without any barrier.
This really hasn't been around for that long, you know, the way that we conceptualize land ownership now, and when the Europeans got here, they didn't think about land the way we think about it now either. The enclosure process was just getting started. You know, so these ideas about the way we treat land right now is just so recent and so devastating.
[00:18:28] Patty: W. E. Du Bois talks about this as well. That's just before the quote that you mentioned, I talk about Du Bois, who connects access to land with racism, and we can see that, and so Land Back, it's really about shifting our relationship to land, and that's something that we can do long before we get the government to abolish it, and if we think that that's never going to happen, slavery got abolished.
And that was billions of dollars that just evaporated from the economy when enslaved people were set free. So, we can do this too. In the meantime, we can live as if. And a change in ownership is not necessarily a bad thing. If the churches gave back the land that they're sitting on.
To the tribes from which it was taken, that would be immensely helpful. And also would profoundly change the way they operate right now. If you're afraid of being evicted because you've just given your land back, you know, to the Mohawk, right? The Catholic Church in Montreal, gives their land back to the Mohawk, but they want to keep operating their churches.
And so now they've signed lease agreements. They're going to behave differently because they want that lease to be renewed. And so it really is also about thinking who's got authority over the land that you're occupying. Because if we acted as if Indigenous people had authority over our land, then we're going to be submitting building permits to them as well, and land use.
Plans to them as well, and they may have an opinion on that, and there are examples of churches that have done this, that have wanted to expand, and the tribe did offer other alternatives because of, waterways that had been covered, which is why the ground keeps flooding, because water will keep moving,
so they did offer other things and it created a really good relationship. And so while we work towards, just like while abolitionists work towards the abolition of slavery, they adopted different relations, you know, with enslaved people, including teaching them how to read.
You know, because reading changes our lives. You know, including doing other things. We can do that too. We can think about the way that we use land and for native people. That makes me think of our obligation of generosity and our willingness to take that risk to and make our spaces available to people who need it to people who are unsafe in other places.
They should be able to find safety in our land, but Scarcity, right? You know, we worry that we don't have enough even for ourselves and we don't. There's a reason for that. And it's not the immigrants fault. It's the government's fault. So internally ourselves, we also need to think about who are we really fearing and who are we really working against and who is our obligation of generosity? Who should that be directed towards?
[00:21:24] Risa: Yeah. For us it was important to bake in reparations, from the beginning so that there's a, a month of all of our earnings that goes to reparations, so we don't have to think about it. It's sort of like churches, you know, the idea of tithing,
just bake it in, and then as you grow, you can grow that, that reparations, that repair, and it can kind of help ease the path, like ease the wait a little bit, you know,
[00:21:52] Patty: the fact is that we live in a world where things cost money.
[00:21:55] Risa: Yeah.
[00:21:56] Patty: I run a foundation, the Nikana Gana Foundation, payyourrent. ca. And just last year we got a lovely donation from International Jewish Voices, who has a very similar practice to yours. Every year they'd give, I think it's 1 percent of their operating budget.
To a native organization and last year it was us and that was wonderful because we then turn around and we spend it on native people and on native organizers because that's mutual aid, right? You deal with people's material survival needs, but you also deal with the reasons for those needs.
And so we also support organizers like there's two in Montreal, actually, the Black Indigenous Harm Reduction Network we support them, and we also support Resilience Montreal and some of the work that they do,
[00:22:43] Risa: we'll make sure that your organization and those ones are featured when we do our reparations fundraiser in May when we direct folks to make their donation and then we do our raffle to augment what we donate. I want to talk about your new book, Bad Indians Book Club. First of all, what a great title.
I told my husband I was talking to you today and the title of your new book. He's like, oh, that's fucking badass
[00:23:08] Patty: that an amazing kind of title? Yeah.
[00:23:10] Risa: Can you first talk about, yeah, this idea. What is it to be a bad Indian? And how do we learn from this to become more ungovernable?
[00:23:21] Patty: More on, yeah, so I've always thought of bad Indians kind of internally, right, as, you know, We got called Indians and there are good Indians who kind of align with the political system sometimes it allowed them to keep their language and to keep other practices by kind of behaving well public facing.
And so I don't want to drag them too much like that. Good Indians are not like the good minorities, but they're not necessarily. Terrible people. They can be, but they're not necessarily terrible people. Because surviving and protecting things is also valuable, and they did do that. But bad Indians just reject that altogether.
And sometimes we're also just not very good at being Indians. We don't speak our language, we don't get ceremony, you know, so sometimes we're also just not very good at it. But bad Indian kind of leans into that idea of being Indian. And an elder of mine You know, my local community, one of the elders here had said that there was also the lower eye Indian, which is the derogatory term, but then the uppercase Indian, which is when we take it on ourselves as a collective identity, and I thought that was really interesting way of thinking about it as well.
So it can be read as a thing of defiance. I'm going to be a bad Indian. I'm not, I'm not going to go along with your nonsense. But then my editor was like, you know what, I love this title, but also Southeast Asians may not be thrilled with it. So I messaged a handful of friends to say, Are you not thrilled with this?
Like, is there, is there something I'm missing that I should be aware of and we can come up with a different title? And what I learned was that they didn't think of themselves as Indians either, right, that Indian even applied to them was something that happened by Europeans who got there in the 14th century and named them the people of the Indus Valley.
That's not what they call themselves. So Indian has always been the local people who we can't be bothered to get to know, right? Whether it was the people of the Indus Valley or, you know, Africans or people in the so called Americas or South America or anywhere. That seems to be the general usage of it.
By the colonial powers, even as far back as the 14th century is the local people. We can't be bothered to get to know, but we're the boss of them now. And so that makes it a very broad term. And so this book is also about you know, there's black authors, Jewish, Palestinian, you know, queer and two spirit and all kinds of people.
So for me. Understanding that kind of global use of colonizers of the term Indian, we are all pushed to the margins. So instead of trying to just rehabilitate whatever state we're part of and find that inclusion into a system that's built on Indigenous erasure.
What if we just stayed in the margin? I use the motif of the swamp partly because that's what's in my backyard. But also because swamps are just teeming with life. They're a place of layered life, right? It's not exactly dry land, it's not exactly water, it's a place of layered boundaries and I love that image so much of layered boundaries where we all live together.
Aaron Mills talks about that. And I talked endlessly about his dissertation, which is way more interesting than the title sounds about Anishinaabe governance. And so for me, that that's what bad Indians are. It's when we've all been shoved to the edges. And instead of trying to make our way back in, we decide, you know what, fine.
We're going to stay here and we're going to build something ourselves and no, you can't play. You've got your spot. You can keep it. We're going to build something else here. And so then it's very much about building those relations with others who have also been pushed. So instead of trying to build our own little nationalisms out on the edge, what actually comes together when we listen to and talk to each other.
And how can we bend together towards a common purpose? Instead of, you know, and that's the two epigraphs, right? It's not about blood. Our ancestors matter. They absolutely matter. But they're not the only thing. We can bend together towards a common purpose.
[00:27:34] Risa: I felt a thrill when you said, what if we stay in the margins? What if we stay in the margins together? I think definitely the witches in our coven would feel very electrified by that too. As you know, so often people from chronic illness, neurodiversity, trans, queer, just being the fucking weirdo in their family, you know, ,
[00:27:54] Patty: being a weirdo in their family.
[00:27:57] Risa: just been out here on the
margins.
Yeah, exactly. And we want to, you know, declare our allegiance to the people we meet there in the margins. In Bad Indians Book Club, there's so much like deep reading, I had to stop every paragraph to write down things I wanted to read. But you also alternate with a story. And I felt like I knew her. I had like a, an experience in a meditation before I started Missing Witches where I saw a woman with deer antlers and I didn't know who that was, but it was really part of me wanting, going down the road of doing this work and I never really understood it and I still don't.
It's not. But when I started reading about Kwe, I was like, oh shit, I need to know, I want to know her story so much. And I felt like yeah, I just felt like you treated her with such love. Can you tell us more about her and why, how she works in that book?
[00:28:59] Patty: Yeah. So this is confession time. Originally the book was supposed to be primarily about Dear Woman and not just as she exists in Ojibwe culture, but as she exists kind of broadly in other cultures including around the world because there's. Shapeshifters and, you know, cryptids, whatever you want to call them all around the world.
And so that's what it was supposed to be. Unfortunately, I don't like doing research and that would have required a lot of research.
[00:29:29] Risa: I have trouble believing you because your book is very deeply researched.
[00:29:33] Patty: no, what it is, it's a reflection of what I'm reading. What I love is kind of following rabbit trails. all kinds of ways, but the discipline required to research a specific thing I don't like, which is why I deeply admire all of my friends who go to graduate school. I don't want to be that person. I deeply respect them.
I love the knowledge that they're creating and the questions that they're developing, the questions that they're asking. But as you can tell from the book, I ping pong around. Into all kinds of different topics and interests. But dear woman was still really important to me as, as a figure, as you just said, like she showed up in your meditation, she shows up for me.
Kinds of ways, which I mentioned a little bit in the book, and you look at the medicine that shows up and you say, okay, so I don't like doing that kind of intense research. I still want her to be part of the book. And I thought, well, what if I just made her up? What if I imagined my own story based on the things that I do know?
And based on conversations and, some reading and stuff, I didn't like completely make everything up. But I did kind of make things up. You know, the little interlude on Prince Edward Island was written while I was on Prince Edward Island, the interlude in Belize.
I had been to Belize, you know, so I kind of allowed her to follow my own path as well. But I wanted to think about who she was because when we write anything, because Bad Indians looks at history, science, you know, gender, memoir, fiction, it's all about trying to figure out how we fit into the world.
What our places in the world? And we're telling different stories about these different things from different perspectives, trying to figure it out. And that's what she's doing as well. I always say that I never read enough fiction, so I wanted to try writing it. And I love her. I want to do something more with her.
You know, thinking about how I was going to move her from one place to another. The incident where she unleashes violence for the first time. I had to rewrite it. comes before the chapter on gender. So I was also thinking about each chapter. How did each chapter kind of fit into her life?
You know, like she sits with stones and learns from them for a very long time. I, I tried to convey the idea that she sat there for thousands of years with them, you know, learning and being a stone, except the raccoons knew she knew that she wasn't, knew that there was something different about her because raccoons are smart.
But the original story, the way I had written the story about her violence was Maude was the one being burned at the stake. Because Maude had developed this relationship, Maude the midwife had developed this relationship and I'm sure that happened, right, you know, white women developing relationships with Native women and then that resulting in their death.
But halfway through writing that chapter on gender, I realized that I had tagged the emergence of Kwe's violence to the protection of white women. And I was like, Oh, look at me doing exactly. Exactly what I'm writing against. And so I went back and I changed it. Her violence is unleashed because of what's happening to her own people.
And the betrayal of Maude and her friends. As they look at her, and now they don't want anything to do with her anymore. All the ways that white feminism betrays us. I really enjoyed writing Kwei and then when the voice shifts and we realize she's been talking about herself, because that's what memoir is, and then imagining her in the future and what the rebellion that she's leading is, you know, the rebellion to stay here, you know, to invest here and that comes from Adrienne Marie Brown's a short story that she tells in Fables and Spells.
Kwe is very much me. She's very much Indigenous women broadly. And it was a lot of fun getting to know her, you always hear authors talk like that and it sounds really weird until you're the author who writes that way and you say, yeah, I actually was kind of getting to know her.
Because there were some things that I tried and it just didn't fit. She was like, absolutely not. That's not a thing I would do.
