Reclaiming "bad kin": The power of writing toward settler-ancestors
Zoë Fay-Stindt and Geneva Toland
Only through actively beginning from our understanding of our complicity in ongoing brutality can white settlers participate in the project of remaking the world.
– Alexis Shotwell, “Claiming Bad Kin”
In fall 2023, we joined Re-Calling Our Ancestors (ROA) in a monthlong ritual, and lifelong prayer, led by white anti-racist activists Darcy Ottey, Sharon Shay Sloan and Shula Pesach. The course gently and firmly guided us into the practice of reclaiming our ancestral lineages – the beautiful, connected and revolutionary, alongside the complicit, violent and suppressed. In community with other settler descendants, we reached into the past to reckon with inherited harm and to recall our own land-based cultures. We did so to "participate in the project of remaking the world," grounded in the truth of who we are and how we came to be here, now.
While ROA offered many rituals and resources for ongoing practice, as poets we took ancestral reclamation to the page — writing into the void of whiteness, cultural assimilation, and erasure, surrendering to what we did not yet know, and claiming lineage within questions. Through our writing, we found the voices of long-past ancestors, language to process guilt and shame, and connection to ancestral homelands, cultures and stories.
To share this writing practice with the ROA community, we developed and co-hosted a writing workshop with the ROA team this past November, during Indigenous Peoples' month and in the week before Thankstaking, called “Reclaiming 'Bad Kin’: Writing Toward Settler Ancestors.”
We began with journaling into the questions: What have we inherited as descendants of settlers? Who are those in our lineages we consider “bad kin?” Complicated inheritances flooded the Zoom chat: oil money, perfectionism, family homes, cars, diseases, racist beliefs and prejudices, compassion, green thumbs, and creativity. From there, we invited participants to write epistolary poems to one of the “bad kin” they claim or who claim them. What emerged were powerful pieces addressed to slave-owning family members, cancer, history textbooks and confederate soldier ancestors, to name only a few. On the page, we found a place to speak with those we cannot, or choose not to, reach.
Witnessing each participant move toward the hurt reminded us that ancestral reclamation is best done together. When we risk ourselves collectively, we find strength in all that we share: grief, joy, confusion, guilt, shame, pain, humor, exhaustion. Our lineages and lives are inextricably connected — pulling on one thread tugs at them all.
This is the power of poetry as anti-racist ritual. Poetry, we found, could hold the wideness of inheritance and the ever-evolving nature of ancestral reclamation. Work that requires struggle; work that requires nuance. Like ancestral reclamation, poetry requires a surrender to what is not yet known, or may never be known. Poetry held all of our questions, offering breadcrumbs through this needful dark – the daily mystery – of rethreading our belonging to the stories and real people we come from. Of taking up the messy many, the multitude, of our lineages: The choices our ancestors made, the domino-spill displacements and genocides they took part in through colonial expansion, and the harm and love they seeded forth in our living bodies today.
There is power in turning toward, rather than away from, our ancestors whose choices we disagree with or are ashamed of. If shame thrives in the dark, in isolation, then we must bring it to the page and let it be refracted by the light of collective witness. Relational recovery is possible. Especially when practiced together, in ritual, in poetry.
Towards this collective work, we offer two poems from our own practice as prayer.
We Built a Prayer to Thank Them
by Zoë Fay-Stindt
With our misremembered tongues,
licked the prayer’s downy fur until
a kind of glue came, then rose: first the bones
we grew from their mineral, flaking, caked
with islands of our dried flesh, soil
stained and glistening
with mica. Then the water: poured fresh
from the land as the land would give her:
always more. Cold to our funny tongues’
lapping. When the prayer had her fill,
we kept drinking, broke
in the afternoon’s clotted middle
to starfish in its liquid hold.
In our resting, we bloomed
an old enoughness: enough
to continue our good work.Air-dried,
we scrubbed many wide sheds
of birch flank, willow tangle, cypress frond,
and the prayer
took them gladly, fastened loosely
the new coat to her water-bone home
with our spilled spit-glue. Then the jewels:
poplar’s orange tulip tongues. Shed teeth,
coral with their moony divots, rattle’s papery
ghostskin. Tiny imitation strawberries
dried and hung like bells.
When we finished for the day,
in the hour’s setting chill,
we stepped back in the mouth
of twilight to look upon our labor
with merry sweat: wept
to see her plenty. Slept
swaddled in the remembering
only a many-made thing can grow.
In the morning, the return
was slow and dew-pawed.
We summoned it
waterside, careful, touching
our soil-skin to her soil-skin, and started
again
to build the prayer
in that mewling morning.
I am not healing ancestral trauma, I am finding ways to reach each other
by Geneva Toland
When I call in my ancestors, I keep them at arm's length.
They are not well. Not all of them. Very few, I bet.
Beyond death, they are still human. Which means they love me.
They want to rub my face free of dirt. They tell me to tie my shoes.
The Italians fret when I go outside with damp hair. They bicker
over the best path forward. Some tell me to date someone
from a good family. Meaning white. Meaning man. Meaning
not poor. Some don’t want me to date at all. Some wish
I would marry already and give them great-grandkids. Some pray I never mother.
It is hard to distinguish hate from wisdom when it comes from behind.
Even ghosts worry selfish, greedy, careful thoughts. Of course, they carry pain.
Soldier pain. Buried child pain. A heart gone bad that aches and aches.
They ask me to hold it for them. The pain. I say, wait by the door.
When I need to speak with them (and I do), I invite them in one by one.
This pauses them. Only the most ready step forward. Place their hands
at my back, but not on my back. This is my life, I say. They trust me.
They are so very proud of me. They do not fear shame. They whisper,
you must heal what is broken. What we broke. It does not feel like too much
to carry. With their hands at my back, I know death is close. I hold my life
as a child. Which means despite the wreckage, despite the wake,
I love where I come from. Which means my ancestors
watch my chest rise and fall as I sleep. We reach
towards whatever is in our power to reach, feel for threads
reaching back. From this place, we move together.
This piece was adapted from our reflections in the Winter Solstice 2025 Re-Calling Our Ancestors newsletter.