Grey Milk & Lost Kin Re-sounding, Re-visioning and Re-membering Trauma in the Scottish Nawkin Archives

Recent scholarship has begun to address the violence of colonial legacies that erase Indigenous and local knowledge systems, cultural heritage, and collective identity. Yet Scottish Nawkin communities from the southwest borderlands remain absent from these conversations. Situated in radical dissonance with Eurocentric epistemologies and systematically erased by the extractive logics of racial capitalism, Nawkin people remain among the most socioeconomically marginalised and culturally dispossessed groups within Britain’s racialised hierarchy. Many conceal their identities to evade the state’s Gypsy/Traveller designation and its regimes of stigma, ostracism, surveillance, and assimilation. The Scottish Government’s recent acknowledgment of cultural genocide affirms what Nawkin communities have long known: that state violence operates through epistemic theft, enforced forgetting, and the destruction of relational lifeways. Emerging from ancestral refusal, this practice-led research traces a radical ancestry not through linear recovery but through fugitive affiliation with encrypted and subjugated knowledge systems. As a descendant of Nawkin forebears who concealed our genealogy to survive capture, I approach this work as both reclamation and protection. Encrypted custodianship becomes a fugitive praxis—grounded in concealment, kinship, and the safeguarding of ancestral knowledge from extraction. At its core is a radical methodology animated by Nawkin poetic traditions—encrypted, mimetic, and rhythmically insurgent. These traditions transmit knowledge through gesture, cadence, and spectral presence, resisting archival legibility and institutional capture. Through kin(a)esthetic tinkering and writing along the film track, the thesis enacts an anarchival, anti-disciplinary praxis that reimagines research as ritual, poetics, and refusal. Framed as a potential history (Azoulay 2024), the research reimagines Nawkin cosmologies as cinesonic epistemology and living cultural force—summoning what continues to reverberate in embodied, encrypted, and insurgent form, and affirming relationality as a strategy of knowledge justice.