I often think that if our kinship systems were still alive, I wouldn’t feel so alone.
“Then go make friends. Go make a chosen family.”
I think that’s great advice for people who are intuitive and/or relational. Those folks tend to stick to people who don’t love them and then need help and encouragement to redirect their relational gifts toward making friends and family with strangers.
But that’s never quite worked for me (especially as an Indigenous man). I like to think that if our kinship systems were still alive (before Canada dismantled them in hopes we’d assimilate and cease being nations i.e., the “Indian problem”) I wouldn’t feel so alone. You see kinship systems in every culture and its people. It’s a human necessity. But feelers and/or intuitives have a much easier time making friends compared to sensors and thinkers like me.
Truth is, I’m not meant to be hyper-relational, and that doesn’t make me broken or undeserving of love and belonging. Believe me, I’ve tested for all sorts of things, and nothing could give me the answer until I found Blackfoot philosophy. It taught me that my ancestors understood these differences within us. Someone like me would be viewed as a gift from iihtsipaitapiiyio’pa (the source of life) to help create structure where we were vulnerable as a people, to secure the fortress, and to ensure we were tangibly safe and sustainable. We were the ones who remembered the right paths each time, and who knew what it meant when something felt off in the physical environment. We were trackers. We were hunters.
We all have gifts. Some people prioritize human impact as the primary outcome, while others prioritize measurable results, efficiency, or objective criteria. Guess which one I am! (Hint: not the first one 😆).
If our kinship systems were still alive, I would have a place, a job, and the community care I need to thrive. Our nations would have real economic development because I was put here by the source of life to get to work. I’m a worker bee 🐝-- here to keep our people safe with tangible structure, rules, and systems.
I stand here on the other side of the apocalypse and see exactly what I lost, what I missed out on due to colonization, and what I continue to lose. And I just got here 32 years ago. Let’s just say white people don’t want me touching their systems unless I do it in a colonial way 😆 (though a decolonial way still requires discipline, sometimes even more).
But when I leave from work for the day, there’s only silence.
“Then go make friends. Go make a chosen family.”
Not only am I not designed to do that, but I also carry the intergenerational trauma that makes it even harder. I fix things and solve tangible problems, dammit! My brain functions to say: “This is what is. Here are the facts on the ground. This is what broke, and this is what’s missing.” And it’s so sad, and honestly kind of funny, how much that pisses people off, especially my family.
It makes me sad for all the great thinkers and sensors we’ve lost because they didn’t have their kinship systems. Where are our Blackfoot scientists? The colonial state knows that a fractured people means those like me, who could help re-establish a future, won’t be able to because of the rampant distrust in logical structure created by residential schools. And so we end up with Chiefs and Councils, not because they’re inherently corrupt, but because they don’t have the right builders in place. The right people in community aren’t being cared for or utilized properly.
For a sensor/thinker, connection traditionally happened through purpose, shared labor, and designated roles. Before the apocalypse, I wouldn’t have had to sell myself or navigate abstract social dynamics just to earn belonging. My role as a tracker, builder, or protector would have automatically anchored me in the community. White people do this all the time with their own. They know they need their Mark Carneys; look at how decorated and celebrated he is by his people. We didn’t even need to know him personally, just that he was a builder who could lead the nation. Do we have that kind of recognized roster in our First Nations? No. Maybe me, but that’s just because I’m loud and privileged with the Blackfoot ancestral knowledge that keeps me floating.
But sometimes that just isn’t enough.
For example, I don’t talk to my mom anymore because I remind her too much of my late grandma, who was a lot like me. And my grandma went to residential school. This is a side of colonization you won’t hear much about: because of that trauma, my people would sometimes rather I wasn’t in community. That I didn’t exist. And I don’t even blame them. My gifts represent oppression now, and with that goes the future success of our First Nations.
Unless...?