Ojibwe graveyard

My brother Jack had passed away before I made it back to my people. I was 24 and all I learned about my brother was what I learned through my family’s stories and recollections.
That’s not a great way to enter what should be one of the most profound of human relationships. But I was hungry for any connection at all and I took what I could get. I’d never really had a brother and the idea of never having met him hurt a lot.
I found out where he’d been laid to rest. Jack had been my protector when I was a baby. This is one of the things I found out first. One day at the end of a long funk, when I was feeling very lonely, unsettled and afraid, I drove out to the cemetery to pay my respects, maybe say a few words to the wind and cry.
The cemetery was hard to find. There was no sign to mark it, and the graves were all unmarked and hard to see for the tall, brown unkempt grass blowing in the wind. That struck me as odd, just as the fact that the edges of that graveyard were marked by barbed wire stuck on posts that were broken and rotting. The grass was uncut and there were no flowers to be seen. It looked like a lonely, sad place to rest.
It seemed very odd to me. My people’s very idea of god sprang from the ground in which they were laid and yet there was nothing to proclaim this as a sanctuary or even as a resting place. If anything it seemed abandoned and uncared for. Even the wind felt lonely. I stood there and felt incredible sadness both for myself and my tragic loss and for the forgotten ones who lay here.
A few years later, as a practicing journalist, I was researching a story on a residential school that was soon to be bulldozed. I went there prior to the arrival of the heavy equipment to take pictures, talk to others who had gathered to witness the destruction of a building which was responsible for the destruction of lives. It was cloudy. There was a chill in the air. It seemed the day was filled with woe.
I explored the main buildings and spoke to former students and caretakers about the history of the place. The stories I heard from the survivors were harrowing. At that time I had never been at or near a residential school and the atmosphere I felt still chills me today. They told me that I should see the graveyards and I went to see them.
Across the road was the cemetery for the nuns and priest who’d died while working at the school. Their graves were marked by elaborate and ornate marble and granite headstones, carefully carved with names and dates and epitaphs. The grounds were carefully tended. There were bird baths, religious statuary, flower beds and a small reflecting pool surrounded by benches in the full shade of small oak trees.
On the other side of the road was what former students had called The Indian Yard. It was a burial ground. That’s all it was. There were no names, no epitaphs, no headstones, flowers or shaded reflecting pools. Instead, it was a dead thing and only the occasional stuffed toy beaten by rain, leaned on a rotted, broken cross evidenced any human presence for a long time.
I thought about what I had been taught of the Bible and religion in the homes I lived in. Suffer the children to come unto me. I remembered that. It was a bitter irony that the children who lay there were forgotten, cast aside by those who pretended to care for them, who had bade them come for shelter, learning and care. Suffer. It seemed the key word in the sentence.
I’d heard it said that we Indians never say goodbye. Standing there looking for the unmarked grave of a brother I had never met and the sad graveyard of Indian kids at that residential school I knew it was absolutely wrong. No people in their right minds or hearts would cling to the sad effigies of residential schools. Or to the outright lies of religious men and women who promised more but delivered nothing.
I cried for my brother that day. I cried for all of them who’d lived with the knowledge that someone once thought that they were less than human deserving nothing in the end but an unmarked, untended plot of earth. Keep your blessing for yourselves, I said to the ghosts of nuns and priests. In the end you’re the ones who need them. Oh, and, most importantly, goodbye.