Thankful and Not-So-Thankful: Reckoning with Our North American Legacy

Imagine this: 

You are a young mother nearing her due date living just outside of Seattle, Washington, but you fear going out in public. You know that if you give birth in a hospital, the US Government will likely confiscate your newborn and put it up for adoption. You want your baby. You are prepared to love and nurture it in your family home on the land of your great grandparents.

Sound far-fetched? 

This happened with regularity in my lifetime, in the 1970s. I learned about this travesty by listening to a children's audio book as we traveled this summer. I Can Make This Promise, by Christine Day, is the story of a girl who discovers that her mother was put up for adoption at birth, even though her birth mother wanted her and was prepared to care for her. Simply being "Indian" and unmarried resulted in the confiscation of her child. Although this particular story is fictional, it is based on history.

Imagine this:

You are a young family in British Columbia, raising your children in the community where your parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents have always lived. One day, police arrive and take your children by force, citing the need to educate them properly. They are taken to a residential school run by the Church, where they are forced to  cut their hair, wear a uniform, and speak only English. They never return home -- not for holidays or funerals. You never hear from them again. You suspect that they are dead, but you are told nothing.

Sound far-fetched?

This happened with regularity in my Dad's lifetime, throughout the 1900s as late as the 1990s. I mention my Dad because he was born in the small town of Enderby, British Columbia to recent immigrants from Europe who spoke broken English. Just 90 minutes away was one of Canada's largest residential schools, which boasted 500 students in the 1950s and operated until after I was born. You might have seen the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the news this summer, when 215 unmarked graves were discovered there, most of them children.

Before her death, my grandmother told me a story about my Dad's birth, when the nurses whisked him away to perform an elective surgery without so much as asking for her consent. She had no intention of circumcising him because in Europe only Jews practiced circumcision (keep in mind that this is on the heels of WWII, when circumcision could be a matter of life or death). That was bad enough, but if she had been a Native American, she may never have have seen him again. My own father could have grown up in a residential school. 

Stories from these schools are nauseating -- regular beatings and repeated rape by residential school staff, starving children as punishment, and a stated policy to "kill the Indian in the child." This happened in North America. This happened in living memory.

Having recently moved from Canada to the US, my holidays are still feeling jumbled. Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, but Indigenous Peoples Day in the US. So today, on Canadian Thanksgiving, I'm reflecting on things that I am thankful and not-so-thankful for in relation to the history of indigenous peoples.

• I'm thankful for my students at Prairie College (Three Hills, Alberta) who studied the history of residential schools and presented their findings to our class. You can learn more about the important work of Canada's National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation on their website.
• As painful as it was, I am thankful to have had my eyes opened to the darker side of North American history, whose effects are still felt today.
• I'm thankful for growing awareness of this issue, which creates space to grieve together and imagine a different future.
• I'm not thankful for the role the church played in the confiscation of "Indian" children in the US and Canada. Mostly well-meaning folks perpetrated cultural genocide, seeing their own way of life as superior and failing to recognize how the gospel is good news for every culture, not just their own.
• I'm not thankful for how church leaders were able to abuse children with impunity for so long. Lack of accountability put thousands of children at risk, and the generational effects of that trauma on survivors are still being felt. 
• I'm not thankful for decades of cover up in white spaces that has continued to silence the voices of indigenous people as they cry out for justice.

Reckoning with our shared history is no easy task. Both the US and Canada have a legacy of violent oppression toward indigenous peoples. Most difficult to swallow is the church's role in that legacy. I am not equipped to outline all the ways this has been expressed, but these snapshots offer a glimpse of what I've learned in recent years.

I leave you with this new song by my friend, Brian Doerksen. Brian lives in British Columbia (and worked with me at Prairie College). In the wake of this summer's discovery of unmarked graves in Kamloops, Brian wrote this song. He recognized the need for us to sit with this hard news, to feel its sorrow, and to weep with those who have been weeping for generations. I'm thankful for his courage.