Reckoning with Kinlessness

Operating at the intersection of Indigenous philosophy, environmental philosophy, and value theory, Andrew Frederick Smith defends reconceptualizing settler positionality as it appears through an Indigenous ecological lens. Smith argues that kinlessness better illuminates the profound forms of want, privation, and disconnection embodied in settler subjectivities and reproduced in everyday patterns of our lives. Kinlessness does not mean being without family or lacking care for others. It designates structural and lived conditions in which relationships—including with designated relatives, communities, lands and waters, and other-than-human beings—default to being transactional, possessive, hierarchical, and extractive. These orientations are so deeply normalized within settler colonial culture, particularly in the United States, that they typically remain ambient and unseen, registered more as diffuse and misdirected anxieties than as a recognizable locus of ethical and material concern. By contrast, many Indigenous philosophical traditions center kincentric ecologies—extended kinship arrangements in which humans, other-than-human beings, and spiritual and abiotic entities relate as moral equals within a sphere of responsibility based on mutual care and a wealth of multigenerational knowledge. These arrangements are not only ethically generative but evolutionarily stable. They have long sustained both human and planetary flourishing, supporting societal wellbeing, resilience, and adaptability in the face of both expected and unexpected change. And they are under unending assault within settler states. Kinlessness kills, reliably and by design. At both an individual level and with respect to matters of global concern, it is a defining feature driving the ongoing devastation of Indigenous lives and lifeways for power and profit. Resisting kinlessness, vigorously and relentlessly, must be regarded as a paramount responsibility for members of settler colonial culture. This requires concerted anticolonial work directed toward facilitating Indigenous futurity—creatively and cooperatively envisioning and striving to engender conditions free from settler colonial structures and norms. Kinlessness is not an immutable identity. It is instead a function both of confrontable structural impediments and transformable patterns of personal decision making that occur within an expansive network of malleable relationships. For members of settler colonial culture, kinlessness may exemplify our history and saturate our present. But it need not—and must not—define our legacy.