Familial Relationships:

Being a part of a family is both a privilege and can be difficult to navigate. The complexity of roles and relationships is always changing, according to moving contexts (historical, environmental, familial and individual, to name a few). This makes living together and being responsible to (not for) one another increasingly difficult. As we all grow into different people, with different lives and trajectories, it becomes challenging to “make everyone happy” and do life and family in a way that everyone agrees on. Especially when there is no agreement made or communicated.

Times change, surrounding cultural values change, priorities change, we try new things, or don’t want to try new things. Whatever the case may be, as individuals we grow in new and differing ways from and with each other. I think this is because each of us is our own little world and from that world everything looks and feels unique to the individual. And this can make it easy to fall back into prescribed and/or normalized roles and act/perform/be the way everyone knows (or knew) you to be; to fulfill the roles associated with you, whether that be gendered roles; relational roles such as grandparent, parent, sibling, cousin; or more character-type and behavioral roles such as being the larger group caretaker, bread-winner, comical relief, calming presence, agitator and/or provocateur, reckless mess, or the one who has it all together (seemingly). The patterned dynamic that has become established is oft times easier to fall back into than catching everyone up and changing the rhythm of relation. In talking to friends about this phenomenon, we have come to recognize a sort of reversion into past roles that occurs, as if by a spell, which can feel beyond control, constraining, and frustrating.

How and why do we find ourselves in particular roles, when we have personally out-grown them or intentionally worked to change? Why do we expect and place our people in static roles in the first place, and/or react with anger, offense, or hurt when they resist being “put back in place”? If we do not like being reduced and constrained in this way, why do impose expectations on others? Why is it so difficult to see and welcome change from others? I wonder, is it because individual change often happens elsewhere and so if we don’t see the process it's not recognizable to us? I think the underlying problem here is our expectations. We go into encounters and gatherings with expectations and then wait for them to be confirmed. 

I'm very fortunate to be a part of a family that has come to handle change and differing individual worlds well (from my view at least). We are inclusive and accepting, and we choose to love each other and work on things as best we can, and in our own ways. I think many of us are genuinely friends. However, this does not make us immune to tensions and disagreements as we work to stay connected. However, if we allow it, friction can even be creative—as anthropologist Anna Tsing and writer/poet Richard Wagamese propose. In her book on global connections and capital flows, Tsing explains that “cultures are continually co-produced in the interactions" which she calls friction: the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4). Wagamese also discusses worldly connections in the context of Indigenous spiritual and cultural practice. As Wagamese explains, “People cause flames to rise in our hearts and minds and spirits, and life would not be possible without them” (174). So, if we consider the possibilities for creativity out of friction, perhaps this will help us work through some of our “differences.” And if not, I think it is okay to not always be friends or even like one another all the time, while still having love for each other.

Frictions aside, family is fundamental to our shaping; it makes us who we are, in one way or another. I have come to see myself as an amalgamation of my encounters, and "family" extends far beyond biological categorizations and lines of descent. I like the way Donna Haraway (a techno-scientific anthropologist) uses the concept of “become with,” to elaborate what many Indigenous peoples know and practice: that we are all interconnected (people, animals and plants, histories, stories, ideas, technology, objects, etc.), and that we collectively shape one another and become who we are, together.  And, who we are (our identifications) is a moving subject, much more fluid than static, as we gather more influences and “others” into our web of being. We are shaped directly through social training from our family, friends, and our culture; we are influenced by our affinities with art, music, movies, books, figures; and we also "become" through disassociation and dis-identification, by rejecting various external examples that we don’t like or want to emulate. We all co-compose ourselves and each other, in relation.

Again, Haraway offers another way of thinking about family that resonates with how I have been taught to know family and how I'm exploring my familial interconnections in this project. That is, Haraway urges us to “make kin, not kind.” In other words, to turn our attention and efforts to creating family (kin), rather than reproducing biology (kind). Just as genetic inheritance does not make a person a parent (think of abusive/negligent parenting, or adoption and surrogacy for example), shared genes do not make a family. But, relationality does. And this is what my Kinship Collage is manifesting: our web of relationality. Though, unlike a spider’s web, I don’t want to catch anybody in it and it is not neat. 

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Messiness:

I often hear people say, life is messy and confusing, and we should honour (or normalize) this. Attempts to smooth things out, and present our different lives as clean, polished, and pristine, misses opportunities for empathy and collaboration. Further, I find in obscuring or disguising the processes we go through can inadvertently set ourselves up for disappointment. Expectations to keep up with perfection leads to resentment when things don’t work out the way we anticipate, or when you or someone else slips up and cracks the surface of that shinny mirror you were cleaning all day. What if instead we acknowledge and face the toils of life openly and share in each other’s journeys?

This is how I choose to relate. Continuing on, I promise to love and honour my family, to not take anything personally and to communicate my personal boundaries, to be honest, caring, and kind, and to see and honour your journeys, mess and all. Sticking with the metaphor of a web, this project begins in the middle. There is no logical order to the portraits, stories, conversations and reflections that I will be developing. It all emerges with inspiration and whatever resources are at hand. I like the idea of a web for this collage because webs are intricate and boundless; the various threads cross and connect and depart from one another, they can extend far and wide, and even link up with other webs, subjects and objects. They are delicate yet strong, and they can be rebuilt from disaster and damage. In this way, they are flexible and forgiving. They are also sticky; they attract, gather, accumulate all sorts of other things that can add to their beauty, complicate it and/or cause breaks, snares, and shifts in the balance. And finally, they are spun from within a wider ecology, and in this way are interconnected with the larger web of life.

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This Kinship Collage is composed of a web of people, animals, landscapes, plants, elements, oral histories, dreams and stories, cultures, traditions, ideas, beliefs, socio-political movements, books, movies, music, and objects, and will continue to grow and change. It is largely expressed from my personal perspective, but also in consultation and conversation with those entangled. Within this web we are great grandmothers-grandmothers-grandfathers-moms-dads-aunts-uncles-children-siblings-cousins-friends, living and dead (and infinite combinations of these). We intersect at many and multiple points, and we perceive from many and multiple positions as well.  

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