What becomes possible with a model in which love and relationships are not scarce resources to be hoarded and protected, but instead proliferate beyond the confines of the socially constituted couple and nuclear family?
This is one of the many questions Professor Kim TallBear seeks to answer in her essay Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family. She argues that while everyone knows the script for sex, few understand how to break free from settler norms surrounding it. People know how to create families, but the making of kin—non-blood connections—has become erased wisdom. While most belong to a family, few view family as a tool for emancipation from entrenched colonial-capitalist structures. Decolonization, TallBear suggests, is crucial as a project that disrupts the nuclear family by exposing how love, affection, and natality have been appropriated to serve settler colonialism. Decoloniality, however, she asserts, is not an individual choice or action but a web of relations that critically unmake colonial society through a continuum of past, present, and future.
Kim TallBear, a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in present-day South Dakota and eligible for citizenship in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes through her maternal grandfather, was raised on the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe reservation and in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her upbringing by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, alongside many female relatives, profoundly informs her perspective. Drawing from her community’s experiences of dispossession and value erosion, TallBear’s essay examines how the nuclear family has been instrumentalized to affirm the supremacy of America’s colonial system. By “making settler population”, the nuclear family supported U.S. nation-building efforts, substituting Indigenous populations and their relational constellations. This model, enshrined as the Nation-State’s smallest social unit and reinforced by Christianity, created spaces where middle-class values and economics could thrive—spaces that parasitized the land and pre-existing Indigenous communities. Efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples into the national body saw both church and state evangelize marriage, the nuclear family, and monogamy, promoting these as aspirational models while curtailing Indigenous societies.
TallBear examines these historical gaps rigorously, arguing that they dismantled the relational culture of Indigenous communities, particularly her Dakota ancestors, whose social structures encompassed extended kin groups, plural marriages, and support networks beyond blood relations. The well-being that consensual, non-monogamous relationships brought to Indigenous communities starkly contrasts with Western-centric, nation-based societies. TallBear reflects on her upbringing in a pro-kinship, non-natalist community, where kinship and natality didn’t equate to reproducing the middle-class, settler family structure. Her experience prompts a critique of the nuclear family’s hierarchical nature beyond gender or sexuality, as this unit upholds a project of governability and self-regulating, abundance-loving webs of relations. She invites the reader to explore how to disentangle procreation from reproducing the heteronormative, patriarchal colonial status quo.
Published as part of Donna Haraway’s Making Kin Not Population collection, TallBear’s essay mourns the extended kinship social model, acknowledging that it has been supplanted by definitions that objectify relationships and genders. Even polyamory and queerness, the relational and gender models closest to the pre-colonial abundance, are still shaped by settler sexuality norms and fail to capture the multiple forms of love, solidarity, respect, and rituals Indigenous communities nurtured. TallBear calls for collective resistance to the imposed system of compulsory settler sexuality and family, which continues to replace Indigenous kinship systems with "making population." Ultimately, she asserts that recognizing possibilities for other kinds of intimacies, focused on caretaking and kinship rather than biological reproduction, is the first step toward unsettling settler family and sexuality structures.
This essay extends an invitation to view sexuality through the lenses of spirituality and nature, examining how intersubjective relationships in these realms foster mutual connectivity, shared responsibility, and holistic well-being. TallBear challenges us to resist the objectification of intersubjective forces and broaden our focus to include non-human relationships that exist outside of settler capitalism. This reconstitution of de-objectified relations—nurturing, healing exchanges of power, and exploring open, intentional non-monogamy—could pave the way for more just intimacies, including those with non-human kin. Readers who embrace this invitation to disorder and disaggregate established norms may find joy in embracing kinship and caretaking rather than reproduction alone.
TallBear contributes a decolonial perspective to a broader discourse that includes works like bell hooks' All About Love: New Visions, Sophie Lewis' Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Jessica Fern’s Polysecure, all of which advocate for abolishing the dominance of heteronormative family structures. Her work invites readers to think beyond the instrumentalization of family as a source of stability amid capitalism’s crises, a mechanism to control the means of life itself. As I write this in Italy, a country where technologies challenging “natural” pregnancy, like surrogate motherhood, are universally forbidden, and where anti-choice advocates operate within gynecological clinics, reproduction is rigidly regulated. Worldwide, governments that draw labor from women’s bodies often have more agency over those bodies than the women themselves. For those who’ve begun reimagining relationships, whether through relationship anarchy or polyamory, building rich, nonhierarchical connections often encounters capitalism’s persistent scarcity of time. This desire—to nurture relationships before codifying them—reveals a surprising anti-capitalist impetus: making our relationships ungovernable.
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COVER:
Zwei Akrobaten und ihr Pferdeführer, KÔ SÛKOKU (1730-1804)
Edo-Zeit, 18. Jahrhundert
Copyright & Courtesy: Sammlung Viktor & Marianne Langen
