This writer shares the right (and wrong) ways to honor Indigenous spirituality

I'm figuring out through this series that much of a person's spiritual identity — and by extension a person's spiritual community — has to do with a sense of belonging. Where do we feel welcome? Where do we feel recognized and understood?

Sometimes we find that belonging in the most unexpected places, in cultures or traditions that we are not born into, but that fill us up with a spirit of generosity and acceptance. Sometimes, we find it buried deep in our own histories — in our own family legacies.

That was the case for Patty Krawec. Her book is called Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future.

Krawec's mom's side of her family is German and Ukrainian. They migrated to the Niagara region in Canada in the early 1950s, and Krawec was raised in a white evangelical Christian church, while her father's family is Indigenous, from the Ojibwe people.

Her parents split up when she was really young and she didn't have a relationship with her dad growing up. Then, in her 20s, she heard that her father was working as a cab driver in a neighboring town.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

So I started calling cab companies and asking for my father by name.