Patty Krawec on Why We Are Both Oppressed and Oppressor

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

I contain multiple identities. On the one hand, I am a Black man whose ancestors were enslaved, then pushed into ghettos, and now exploited through the unjust prison labor system. On the other hand, I am living on the stolen land of the Duwamish people. I can’t escape the colonial history of the U.S. and its reverberating effects.

There are times when I try to convince myself that, because I am a Black person living in the U.S., it’s not my responsibility to wrestle with the legacy of colonialism and how I might be a beneficiary of that history. However, after my conversation with author and activist Patty Krawec, I am convinced that I need to view myself through a more complicated lens.

Krawec, who is Ojibwe Anishinaabe and Ukrainian and lives in Canada, told me during our interview that people want to ensure their personal escape from unjust systems, but they rarely consider what it would take to help others escape as well. Whether it’s through her writing on thousandworlds.ca, in Sojourners, or in her book Becoming Kin, Krawec invites all readers to consider the myriad of ways we benefit from and participate in exploitative systems.

But Krawec’s work doesn’t just stop with that invitation. Heavily influenced by the Hebrew Bible and Jewish thinkers, Krawec wants to help us recognize that although we cannot escape history, and that history often complicates our identities, we can still join with others to make positive changes on a local or national level. As I learned from my conversation with Krawec, these changes often begin by telling stories.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Tell me about your book Becoming Kin.

Patty Krawec: I heard a pastor preach a sermon on Galatians 3:28, about how we’re all — kind of theological colorblindness — we’re all the same. I got so angry. I vibrated with rage. I was angry because if people can’t show up as their authentic selves, I can’t show up as my authentic self.

[The church] doesn’t reckon with the fact that it is pushing people aside and that colorblindness is just a way of erasing people. It’s not a way to form connections. It treats the differences between us as if there’s something wrong with us.

After I wrote that piece [for Sojourners], an editor from Broadleaf reached out to me to see if I had ever thought of writing a book.

I like this idea of rethinking relationships, kinship, and what does it mean to be in good relation with each other? You can become something else. There are other options available to us. And so Becoming Kin is very much written for that Christian audience. What if you guys came here differently? What if you came here thinking about Abraham instead of the conquest? What if you read the story of the flood differently?

I always feel like “becoming kin” is a bit of a bait and switch. It sounds like, “Oh, let’s all be friends.” And then what you wind up getting is, “And here’s how to become the kind of people that we want to be.”

Why do you want to complicate biblical figures? Why do you want to resist narratives of purity?

There is this idea that Christians have developed around purity, this obsession around purity, and this idea that we have to have clean hearts and clean hands. And that’s just not possible. We are connected to everything. We’re on a computer, the minerals in it are probably connected to unfree labor.

I know Alexis Shotwell has this wonderful book, Against Purity, where she talks about how there’s no way around it.

[Thinking about] the story of Abraham in Genesis 18, [I apply Shotwell to help] us consider our relationship to people living in Sodom and Gomorrah.

I have to really give credit to Jewish thinkers like Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who had written that blog post about Noah that really made me start thinking. Also, Amy-Jill Levine. Also Jessica Price, who has an amazing blog, it’s called betterparables.com. It’s about just how to re-read these parables and think about them a little bit differently. Because that’s something that I have noticed in the Jewish community. They don’t mind looking at these complicated figures and saying, “Wow, he was a bad guy. And yet God can use complicated people.”

The same guy who could argue with God over Sodom and Gomorrah, did not argue about his own son (Genesis 21:8-19). He sometimes got it right. And then sometimes he got it wrong. But he’s still our ancestor. I find myself drawn to Jewish thinkers in terms of helping me think about these stories differently.

I just heard Rabbi Alissa Weiss talking about how we read the text again and again until we get to an ethical reading. I think Christians have spent so much time listening to Rome. They need to spend more time listening to the Jewish people that they claim they are descended from. And by Jewish people I don’t mean the state of Israel, I mean Jewish thinkers.

How can we think about identity in a different, more complex way?

To say “I’m Indigenous” is to describe my relationship to the state that’s built on top of me. But I’m also not living on Ojibwe Anishinaabe territory. I’m living on Haudenosaunee territory, Michi Saagig Nishnawbe territory. If I was to move someplace else, I would continue to be an Ojibwe Anishinaabe, but now I might be a migrant or a digital nomad, right?

My friend Troy Storfjell points out, sounding academic, that “Indigenous” is an analytic. It’s not an identity. Ojibwe is my identity. I’m Ojibwe Anishinaabe and I have the status card to prove it!

But that was the point that the Combahee River Collective was making when they were developing the idea around identity politics. We are shaped by many things at the same time. And there are times where we are both oppressed and oppressor.

There was a long time when I worked for child welfare. I thought I was helping. And then I realized that no matter how much harm I mitigated at the end of the day, I was still not helping. And by wearing the face of the oppressor and going into those places, I was actually extending their reach further into our communities than they otherwise would have had. And that broke me when I realized that. I also wrote Becoming Kin out of this internal wrestling with, “What have I done? What have I been part of?”

We want to have clean hands [and sometimes I think we claim] Indigenous identity or [say], “I’m a refugee” or “I’m part of the Jewish diaspora” or “I’m part of the Black diaspora,” and it’s as if [that means we] can’t behave badly. I want people to analyze their roles in these systems.

We are all compromised by capitalism and settler colonialism. But there’s still an opportunity to do good, right?

This foundation that I run, the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation [focuses on raising] money from settlers who feel bad about living on Indigenous land and then we distribute it to Native people. We help meet people’s survival needs: rent, buying groceries, etc. But we’re also supporting organizers because that’s the principle of mutual aid, which is to meet people’s material needs and work against the systems that are creating those needs in the first place.

It’s not, “I’m going to try to get out of this system and now I have clean hands.” It’s, “We’re all implicated in various systems. How can we help those who are trapped in them?”

I feel like I keep wanting to walk away from the church and then something happens that draws me back into conversation. Because I think that churches have the potential to be such amazing spots of liberation. Like they could tell the stories differently and they can pull people together. I think of the Debt Collective. What if churches become chapters of the Debt Collective and help their congregations become debt free? Because when you’re debt free, that sets you free in a lot of ways.

How do we balance the individual and systemic? On the one hand, you have to personally decide that you are going to get involved in the struggle for social justice. And on the other hand, it can’t just be an individual “I’m inviting social justice into my heart” thing, right?

I think we’re all organized somewhere. None of us exist as individuals. In my dreams I do, because I don’t really like people all that much. I heard Mariame Kaba at The Socialism Conference a couple of years ago. She was on a call, talking about her new book with Kelly Hayes and at one point, she says, “We live in a society, you assholes.”

I have to make my individual choice in terms of how I’m going to live in this world. Where are my stories taking me? People like when you talk about systems, because we operate within them, but the systems are operated by people.

[For example], people are all up in arms about banned books. If you care about banned books, then get involved in the places where they’re being banned. Get on the library board. Go to those meetings. Go to the [parent-teacher association] meetings. Support independent bookstores. Don’t just carry around that little tote bag that says, “I read banned books.”

We can worry our heads off about who’s going to be president, who’s going to be the prime minister. But what about local politics? Like [U.S. citizens] have a lot of opportunity for down ballot voting in terms of who your local judges are. Get involved that way. We get captured by electoral politics at the federal level, but there are so many things that we can do.

I belonged to a drum group for several years. We actually changed our name because I noticed we had a non-binary member, and “Strong Water Women” was not a very inviting name for a group that included a non-binary person. Are we going to follow our own Nishnawbe teachings around gender fluidity?

Instead of just moaning about unethical policies, get on the health and safety committee at work. Workplaces have all kinds of committees. They’re always screaming for members. Get on one of those committees. I always say [bring a friend] because you need somebody to back you up. Find that person that you can disrupt with.

Yes, as an individual, you have to ask social justice into your heart. But at some point, you also have to join with others to make that happen.

Can you tell me the Anishinaabe story about the deer?

A long time ago, the deer abandoned the Anishinaabe.

We had been behaving badly. We had forgotten all of our teachings around balance and living together in a good way. And we were just being foolish and not wanting to wear last year’s hides or whatever it was we were doing. And so the deer was like, “I know we promised to take care of you, but we can’t take care of you if we’re all dead. So we’re out.”

And at first the Anishinaabe were just sitting around like, “Where’d they all go?” And then we were like, “That’s okay, ’cause we have raccoons and beavers and other things to eat.” If I was a raccoon at that moment, I would’ve peaced out, that’s for sure.

But over the course of the winter, we did what we always do. We listened to stories. Netflix, Disney+ ... And after a while, we started to think, “Wait a minute, am I a bad guy here?” And so by the time spring came, the Anishinaabe had gotten their heads back on. They returned to themselves.

We sent out runners and eventually found a deer and the deer said, “Yeah, we’ll listen. We’ll talk to you again, but you have to listen.” And that was the trick. It wasn’t just that they got back together and the Anishinaabe said, “Sorry.” We had to listen. And this is the part that’s really hard. Because we had to listen for as long as the deer wanted to talk. And nobody wants to do that. Because everybody’s just “really sorry.” And we want to get to the reconciliation part. But first you gotta get to the truth part.

I’ve had times where I’ve had to make multiple apologies because I wasn’t really sorry for the thing that happened. Like I was really sorry, but I wasn’t naming it in a way that it needed to be named.

They had to listen and then they put their relationship back together and they came back together as equals. So by the time the deer were willing to be found, it wasn’t like the Anishinaabe found them and stormed the gates and said, “We’re going to be friends now!” ’cause we try to do that sometimes. We had to listen until the deer were finished talking, until we knew the deer had been hurt.

When we don’t come together as equals, then those who have been oppressed wind up accepting half-assed apologies that don’t come with real change. Because we think that’s the only thing available to us.

Editors’ note: This interview was updated on Oct. 9 to include the name of Krawec's blog instead of her Substack and to reflect that Krawec isn't citing Shotwell's work directly, but rather applying Shotwell's work to the story of Abraham. It was also updated to correct several transcription errors, including Krawec's quote about "unfree labor," the name of the Michi Saagig Nishnawbe territory on which Krawec lives, and Kaba's quote about living in society.