Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 5 – Practice
*Part of the 5-Volume Set 2022 Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal Winner: Ecology & Environment and Special Honors as Best of Anthology
Volume 5 of the Kinship series revolves around the question of practice: What are the practical, everyday, and lifelong ways we become kin?
We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humans—and we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kin—and, for many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship.
Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. These five Kinship volumes—Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice—offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributors—including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie—invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. These diverse voices render a wide range of possibilities for becoming better kin.
From the perspective of kinship as a recognition of nonhuman personhood, of kincentric ethics, and of kinship as a verb involving active and ongoing participation, how are we to live? “Practice,” Volume 5 of the Kinship series, turns to the relations that we nurture and cultivate as part of our lived ethics. The essayists and poets in this volume explore how we make kin and strengthen kin relationships through respectful participation—from creative writer and dance teacher Maya Ward’s weave of landscape, story, song, and body, to Lakota peace activist Tiokasin Ghosthorse’s reflections on language as a key way of knowing and practicing kinship, to cultural geographer Amba Sepie’s wrestling with how to become kin when ancestral connections have frayed. The volume concludes with an amazing and spirited conversation between John Hausdoerffer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sharon Blackie, Enrique Salmon, Orrin Williams, and Maria Isabel Morales on the breadth and qualities of kinship practices.
Proceeds from sales of Kinship benefit the nonprofit, non-partisan Center for Humans and Nature, which partners with some of the brightest minds to explore human responsibilities to each other and the more-than-human world. The Center brings together philosophers, ecologists, artists, political scientists, anthropologists, poets and economists, among others, to think creatively about a resilient future for the whole community of life.
Gavin Van Horn is the Creative Director and Executive Editor for the Center for Humans and Nature. His writing is tangled up in the ongoing conversation between humans, our nonhuman kin, and the animate landscape. He is the co-editor (with John Hausdoerffer) of Wildness: Relations of People and Place, and (with Dave Aftandilian) City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, and the author of The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds. If he’s not up a tree or in a kayak, you can find Gavin slow-walking the footpaths, beaches, and forests of the Chicagoland area.
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, botanist, writer and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York and the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a student of the plant nations. Her writings include Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. As a writer and a scientist, her interests include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens domestic and wild.
John Hausdoerffer is author of Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature as well as co-author and co-editor of Wildness: Relations of People and Place and What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? John is the Dean of the School of Environment & Sustainability at Western Colorado University and co-founder of Coldharbour Institute, the Center for Mountain Transitions, and the Resilience Studies Consortium. John serves as a Fellow and Senior Scholar for the Center for Humans and Nature.