Generations lost

I’ve been reconnected with my people for over thirty years now. I made it home when I was twenty-four. From the time I was a toddler until I was a grown man, I was removed from anything Ojibwa in my foster homes and adopted home. Coming back to my people and our cultural and traditional way was hard. There’s a lot of shame involved in not knowing anything about who you are and it was a tough struggle to overcome that.
Still, the journey has been a great adventure. I’ve traveled most of this country and been privileged to sit with teachers from a lot of First Nations cultures. My life since 1979 has been centered around writing and storytelling and learning the ways of my people. I’ve been to ceremonies and celebrations, traditional camps and teaching lodges, powwows, feasts and
Sun Dances. Everything felt like a reconnection experience and it still does.
But one of the great conceits we carry as human beings is that once we’re exposed to something we start to think we know it all. We believe that things are inherently simple and that we’re savvy enough to get things automatically. We believe that our minds allow us to turn a little into a lot in a hurry. While that may be true for some people, it wasn’t true for me.
When I confronted the issue of residential schools for the first time I was shocked. I’d grown up in white Canada and the history I’d been fed was a white interpretation. The schools were never mentioned in history books and the pitiable amount regarding First Nations people in curriculum at that time gave me no sense of my own people or their struggles. I never knew the legacy of pain and abuse those schools left on the generations of our people who attended them.
When I learned it I felt as though I suffered too. My first introduction came in the early 1980s as a radio broadcaster in Saskatchewan. I did a profile piece on a traditional healer who spoke of his journey and what residential schools had nearly cost him. It was a powerful and wrenching story and I began to look at my own people in a different light. But it wasn’t their pain that stunned me. I started to see a people who had within them a great dignity, strength and humanity that the entire country could benefit from if they knew it.
I saw a people who struggled with their pain – and for some it was enormous – and who managed to rise above that and create vibrant communities and retain their cultural and spiritual ways. I saw a people bent and bruised but not broken. I saw nations of warriors who fought with their hearts and I was honoured to be one of them. I saw young adults embrace the traditional teaching of their Elders and begin to revitalize the old ways and I saw their children and the tremendous impact that reclamation made on their young lives.
But as much as I want I can’t bring back generations lost to us even though I ache to. I can’t return loved ones to anybody’s arms and I can’t reduce the impact of the horror of those schools. But what I can do is continue the spiritual line – I can dance and sing and drum and pray and do ceremony in honour to all those lost ones. I can do my part in the reinvigoration of communities by embracing the teachings and living my life as an example of their spiritual power. I can stand proud and be an example of a people’s resilience and fortitude.
See, if I become as strong in my cultural and spiritual and ceremonial way as possible, all that suffering will not have been in vain. If I encourage someone I meet on my path to do the same, I double the impact. If we all do that the residual effect will speak for itself. Everywhere another heart will have risen above the effects of history and we as a whole will have reclaimed more of ourselves. That’s what my own people have shown me and taught me by their examples.
An old adage says that ‘you can’t give away what you don’t have.’ In these days of truth and reconciliation that’s very true. When we can face the true nature of our hurts and find reconciliation within our own hearts and heal and walk again we have something powerful to say to one another, and to a country.
If you’re going to break, break going forward not away. That’s what residential school survivors have to teach us. The reward at the end is the journey itself. I’m made more from learning our history and working to create a new one.