In Flourishing Kin, Indigenous scholar Dr. Yuria Celidwen gives us a word for a relationship that many modern cultures have largely forgotten: kinship.

Celidwen, who is of Indigenous Nahua and Maya descent, begins from a different understanding of what it means to be human. We are not separate individuals who happen to depend upon other people and the natural world. We come into being through relationships—with one another, with other forms of life, with the places we inhabit, and with those who came before and will come after us.

She calls this kin relationality. The distinction matters. Interdependence tells us that everything is connected. Kinship asks us to experience those connections as relationships. A river is no longer simply a source of water. A forest is more than timber, carbon storage, or even habitat. These are members of a larger community of life to which we also belong.

From that starting point, reciprocity becomes more than an ethical ideal. Attention becomes more than mindfulness. Caring for the living world becomes less about protecting something outside ourselves and more about tending relationships upon which our shared flourishing depends.

Celidwen draws upon Indigenous traditions, but she isn’t asking us to return to some earlier way of life. She is asking what these ways of knowing might contribute to the world we inhabit now.

This is not simply a philosophical book. Celidwen organizes it around seven principles, including Kin Relationality, Ecological Belonging, and Collective Well-Being, then offers practices for putting them to work in our own lives. Storytelling, reflection, ritual, music, movement, and art become ways of strengthening our relationships with one another and with the living world.

In a world that can seem increasingly abstract and disconnected from our everyday lives, her answer is refreshingly simple: stop thinking of ourselves as separate. Begin with the relationships right in front of us.

We are kin.

BOOK: Flourishing Kin. Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being‍

ARTICLE: Yuria Celidwen on Applying Indigenous Wisdom Traditions to Modern Challenges