Kinship is not a metaphor

Indigenous oral histories say that Treaty No. 6 (1876) was not only a legal transaction but rather a ceremony of adoption whereby incoming settler peoples became relatives. With Indigenous theories of relationality now informing many disciplines, how do white settler peoples take up the framework of kinship without using it only as a metaphor—and thereby as yet another tool of settler-colonial displacement? This essay examines this risk by considering the figurative use of kinship terms by Commissioner Alexander Morris at the negotiations for Treaty No. 6, in what is now Saskatchewan, Canada.Morris’s reliance on a borrowed vocabulary of kinship was, like his participation in the ceremony of the sacred pipestem, an invocation of relationality as a rhetorical device aimed at securing the ‘surrender’ of the lands. While metaphor is a figure that can mislead, coerce, or yoke, however, it can also make relationships, make things akin. In light of the continued relevance of the Indigenous legal framework known as treaty, this discussion takes up the possibility of kinship metaphors as not only figurative but also as literal, binding, and central to the possibility of good relations in the prairies today.