Threading the Familial

The below text is an excerpt from the zine Assembling Time, published in October 2022. Buy a copy here.

Kincentricity is a way of relating to all lifeforms with a sense of familial respect and responsibility. It is a concept drawn from Indigenous Turtle Island/North American knowledge that describes a direct relationship with not only plants and animals, but the elemental forces of fire, water, wind and earth. It is a caretaking philosophy that treats all life as kin and earth as mother. It was first given a name by Indigenous restoration practitioner and ethnobiologist Dennis Martinez, who argues the necessity of such a worldview in sustaining the delicate balance of our ecosphere. We are not separate from ‘nature’ – we are it. And to move forward with care and responsibility, we need to stop othering the natural world.

It may be difficult to visualise, especially from a dualistic Global North perspective, but every part of our clothing was once a living being. Our woven fabrics were drawn from the divine chemistry of the silkworm’s cocoon, the dense waxy barrier of a sheep’s wool or a towering eucalyptus forest. Even our loathed fossil fuels were derived from ancient organisms long before they were processed into plastic buttons and zips.

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This embedded history of non-human life in our garments is just as worthy of the kind of respect we pay our human ancestors. It may seem a farfetched or excessively romantic concept, but consider two emotional responses we regularly apply to our clothes: sentiment and grief.

When a favourite piece of clothing is lost, left behind or stolen, we experience a kind of sorrow. Why is it that we grieve for some of our clothes but not for others? I don’t want to diminish the very real and acute pain of grieving a human life. But this now-absent garment has come to claim some degree of sentiment from us, either through its origin story, an interpersonal connection or some other narrative. We wanted it to last. We committed to protecting it and caring for it until it was damaged beyond repair. Sometimes, as with people, it is only when our clothes are taken from us in an untimely way that we notice our attachment to them.

If we can imagine a loss in the future, we can enact a devotion in the present. What we wear has a worth that goes beyond the material. It lies in the intangible, the sentimental – the familial.