Three things I love about Kinship
During 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, from November 25 to December 10, we call on everyone to take action to end gender-based violence.
by: Danielle Boissoneau
So what even is kinship? I think it can be understood as a web of relationships that share characteristics, origins or even dreams of safer, more supported todays. It’s the chosen family, your pet, the place where you grow your favorite herbs and food. Your kin can include the land and water that sustain you. Knowing that balanced and reciprocal connections exist can make space for honouring those spaces with ourselves and other people, making it more possible.
Let’s face it – colonialism and capitalism have forced these ways of being out of our lives. These days (especially with the pandemic), we are isolated, fearful and unsupported. The trauma of displacement, not knowing who we are, and where we come from remains a common experience. And so the act of finding our place in this world, in balance with and for each other, is a defiantly energetic and creative process.
When I think about what kinship can mean, here are the first three things that came to mind:
Kinship as art: Sharing how these relationships with the land and water, myself, my family and community foster safe spaces to thrive within balance and beauty is a creative process. Other ways of sustaining ourselves and each other is possible. It often begins with a hope for something different and then accepting the inevitable interconnectedness of existence in this world. It’s imagination in action.
Kinship as reciprocity: accepting and giving, love and defense. Balanced relationships with non human life is such a core tenet of taking our places in this world. I remember as a kid playing along the shores of Lake Huron and the many hundreds of inland lakes that marked the places I call home. More often than not, diving in and swimming under the water till I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, then resting on the top and floating my worries away. These are the places where I came into a loving respectful kinship with the water.
Kinship as embodiment: living the freedom of having skills and tools that enable healthy relationships with community. Creating the world that we want starts with knowing what good loving relationships look like. Love makes space for the most powerful protection. When I embody the power of my kinship, I know it’s not just me defending all that I love, it’s all that I love defending me too.
Kinship reminds me that I deserve good things and so do my friends, family and community. We deserve to live in a world where we don’t have to seek these relationships, rather they are the fabric of our societies. A world that respects the power of the land and water seems so far away, a world without gender based violence, all seems so far away. Nearly impossible.
I remain excited about the possibility of reshaping our own futures and defining our paths forward. It starts small sometimes and that’s okay. It is possible to have safe space and sometimes we have to take it back. With fierce determination and ferocious protection, we love and defend ourselves, each other and the land and water that sustains us. Kinship as creative action, take it back, make it yours.
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