we are related
Our paths merged in 2021, when Cristina Sánchez-Martín became a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Washington, Seattle, where Suhanthie Motha (Su) had been working for over 10 years. They both teach classes in the MATESOL Program that Su directs. During the past few years, they have been building on meaningful collaborations within and beyond the university to promote more reciprocal relations with everything that surrounds us. Based on the teachings of the Coast Salish peoples in the Pacific Northwest and other Indigenous communities, we believe that anticolonial language work must be grounded in ethical relations to other people and communities, land, the the more-than-human world. We are grateful to our communities, the sun, the air, the water, students, our families. We become “kin with” them (Krawec, 2022) through these relationships that keep us connected as we think about our responsibilities to one another and what language justice means in today’s complex and unequal world.