It is now October, when the veils between worlds become thin. In this issue, there are human worlds and more-than-human worlds, and the university worlds, world wars, and art worlds that cross between them. Tam Donner plumbs the world we live in. Have you heard the one where universities give out honorary hoods to painters and warmongers alike? Take a look at the class pictures. Andreas Petrossiants follows the lead of Mount Etna, Europe’s oldest active volcano, where Pasolini may have seen a stage—or a screen—on which to feature the volcano’s ability to communize time, showing “linear, European time for the cruel joke of modernity that it is.”

Let’s leave aside the easy target of white supremacists and the pretendians. Instead, let’s ask why, even for someone like me—who can write her ancestral relation to a place stretching back to the eleventh century rich with the fourth voice, the tragedies of dispossession and inheritance as the survivance of absence—we should not abstract the survivance and heritability of my pre-European, pre-national “nativity” into a historically undifferentiated Indigeneity. What forms of affiliation might emerge from a shared experience of survivance that locates its inheritance in the present, in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not others?

The animal who is your kin is called your warpiri. In the context of ngurlu, Daly Pulkara explained the meaning this way: warpiri is your “biggest sorry” (your greatest sorrow). In my words, warpiri is YOUR GRIEF. Your flesh and blood, flowing through the bodies of others who will be hunted, is your grief. You don’t have to grieve over everything; you couldn’t. But here, in this place of encounter with the necessary deaths of others, your grief may become extreme and so may your anger. If these deaths come about in defiance of Law, righteous anger is directed to those who have not managed death properly.

In terms of the future, my Anishinaabemowin language has a word, kobade—a very small word, but in reality an extremely sophisticated concept. The idea is that everything that’s in the past and the future is also in the now, but it’s not as simplistic as that. It’s more like there exists a spiral of intergenerational connections, so that even if you are in the present you have spirit persons at your side; they can be ancient spirits, considered to be from the past or from the future. Kobade is the recognition of all persons, not just human persons, and of all the intergenerational connections that we have, which are never linear, but spiral.