The Re-Membering: Six Turns Back to the Part of You That Never Forgot

You have not been broken. You have been living.

This book was written for the part of you that suspects it used to know something and cannot find it now. Not the dramatic version. The ordinary one. The version that shows up as competence with nobody home behind it. A life that runs well and feels slightly far away. Being loved by people who seem to be describing somebody else.

Most of what gets offered to that part of you is a system. Steps. Practices. A better morning. The Re-Membering is not a system. The part of you that has gone quiet did not go quiet for lack of one.

It went quiet because that is what the Forgetting does. And the Forgetting is older than you are, older than your parents, older than anyone who could have warned you. In the end it is not your enemy.

Here is how it works. The Forgetting set the parts of you down in separate rooms, gently, one at a time. The body over here. The stories handed to somebody else. The lineage gone quiet in the hands. All of it still in the house.

So there are no steps in this book. What there is instead is a walk through the six rooms: the body, the story you were handed, the people who came before you, the land, the sacred, and the one in you who has been watching the whole time. It begins with the body, because the body is the only part of you that did not forget. In each room, the same question gets asked. Then the asking does what asking does.

Miskwa Kimiwan writes from inside the work. A hospital bed with restraints on it. A pharmacy counter, and what was said across it. An unfinished bridge on a farm. The night shift beside their mother's bed. The schools that were built to make their people forget. None of it is dwelt on. All of it is told plainly, because it happened, and because you have things of your own that happened.

Never from above you. Never as someone who has finished.

The book is short. You can read it in an afternoon, or take one room at a time and let each one sit for a week. It does not have to be read in order. It says so itself.

Before you are inside it, there is a page that tells you what is in here, and where to find a person if the reading opens something you cannot hold alone. Crisis lines that were confirmed, not copied. Permission to stop. Permission to wait for a better season in your life and come back to it then. This book will not ambush you.

Nothing in these pages asks to be believed. Check every line against your own breath. Keep what is yours. Leave the rest where you found it.

For readers of Indigenous memoir and contemplative nonfiction. For anyone carrying what their family could not say out loud. For the ones who have done the workshops and the worksheets and still feel like they are standing outside their own life with their face to the glass.

You can drink the water without owing me the well.

Go gently.

Miskwa Kimiwan is the author of Red Rain: A Soul Shattered, The Book of Questions, and The Signal. A survivor of deep intergenerational trauma, they have spent decades in sacred alchemy, hypnosis, energy healing, and consciousness work, and have sat with thousands of people reclaiming lost parts of themselves. They live and write in the Traditional Unceded Algonquin Territory of their People, in the Ottawa Valley, Ontario, where they are the steward of Dark Horse Healing Lodge.