We must make kin to get free: reflections on #nobanonstolenland in Turtle Island

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I ask, how can we draw from acts and forms of kinship to strengthen our dreams of being free? Looking at a specific example of Indigenous political intervention that occurred in January 2017 during the airport protests against President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, I explore the political and analytical possibilities of feminist relationality, particularly relations of care, reciprocity, and abundance, for articulating a practice of accountability that is often erased or elided in comfort feminism. These relations of caretaking are at the center of abolitionist and decolonial projects, particularly those espoused by radical Black and Indigenous feminists. I bring Indigenous and Black feminist traditions of relationality together to explore how politicized kinship unsettles comfort feminism and draw from the decolonial and abolition geographies of these two traditions to chart a different path of relationality, one not overdetermined by relations of abandonment, harm, and scarcity that drive the carceral regimes of capitalism and colonialism.