Buried Sins & Northern Streams
Americans love a good Holocaust novel. We drink our moderately-priced wine, cover ourselves in the weight of a down comforter, and dive into what we think is an entirely different world. Aghast in our beds, we try to wrap our minds around those evil Germans. We shake our heads and shed our tears laced with a hint of relief that our past is not in these pages, forgetting the trail of atrocities this country was built upon. Someone else’s crimes always overshadow our own.
The unmarked graves of 215 children were recently discovered in Kamloops, British Columbia on the grounds of a former boarding school for Canada’s Indigenous children. 751 remains were found in Saskatchewan at the Marieval Indian Residential School shortly thereafter. Given the 130 such schools in Canada, it may be safe to assume these will not be the only sins coming to the surface, and with America’s eerily similar deculturation of Native peoples, our reckoning cannot be far behind.
Yet, stateside this news has barely made headlines. Canada’s history with their First Nations people mirrors America’s dealings with our own Indigenous populations. From wars to compulsory residential schools to reservations to the current numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women – through whatever means necessary – European settlers have worked to exterminate those who were here before. But we’ve been sold on religious freedom and savages in need of saving, so they were just doing what their blue-eyed Jesus would do, right?
Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, America’s first Indigenous person to serve as a cabinet secretary, doesn’t think so. She recently called for an investigation into America’s Indian Residential Schools, much like the efforts underway in Canada. Haaland is organizing “a full accounting of these schools and their legacy” within the coming year, she told James Hohmann on his podcast “Please, Go On.” “We just want to give the public an opportunity to know and understand…what happened to the people that they loved, the ancestors who were lost.”
As the adoptive mother to a son of American Indian descent, I am reminded that it is necessary to look beyond the undeniable joy he brings this home. I must also look at the long line of stolen children who came before him. Regrettably, I must also wonder at how stolen this child might be when one stops to listen to the longer story buried in his blood. But these stories are seldom told, and those who knew them first-hand, many of their bodies have been given back to the Earth or sprinkled in a northern stream like my grandfather’s.
My grandpa and his siblings spent their youth inside one of Michigan’s three Indian Schools, Holy Childhood School of Jesus in Harbor Springs. These types of school didn’t just recolor the Canadian landscape; they stripped American land of its beauty, as well. Intended to force assimilation, the Indian Residential School Program required Native youth to abandon their language and traditions, denying this country’s original people of their heritage. The schools were known to be places of extreme abuse, yet stood in operation for years. Holy Childhood instructed children for nearly a century, not closing its doors until 1983.
These crimes against children and American Indian culture at large did not occur so long ago, and still, these stories largely go untold. Little is known of my grandfather’s childhood, but given his silence regarding his time within the Catholic-run, government-funded school, one assumes it was a far cry from “holy.”
But some Americans don’t want to hear any of that. By the droves, they have rallied against the calls for a more inclusive (and accurate) account of this nation’s history. They’d rather stick to the books that assure such hateful things only exist in other lands, far across a choppy sea. This side of the pond has evolved past all that.
We have evolved, but the way in which society continues to snuff out anything that doesn’t smell white or Christian enough is still evident. The little boy in my home is proof of this. His presence signifies all that has been lost along the way. American Indian children enter the system at disproportionately high numbers. The taking of these children from their homes is not a thing of the past. Doors are being knocked on as I type this. Termination documents are being signed and cultural ties dissolved.
Of course, the knocks at the door are not unprompted, but the conditions under which Indigenous populations have been surviving for centuries now, can also not be ignored. The sometimes swift, sometimes slow path toward the complete erasure of this land’s original inhabitants is both cruel and cunning. The poverty and generational trauma many American Indian communities have been left with is hardly the framework upon which to build a family.
My hope is that the coming investigation into America’s Indian Residential Schools will help people see that burying our history does not save us from it. Haaland explained this in her Washington Post op-ed, “Though it is uncomfortable to learn that the country you love is capable of committing such acts, the first step to justice is acknowledging these painful truths and gaining a full understanding of their impacts so that we can unravel the threads of trauma and injustice that linger.” Only then, says Haaland, can we “work together for a future that we will all be proud to embrace.”
Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage