The land and the spirits of these children are speaking and so we choose to listen and we refuse to forget. We remember our teachings, that those who have passed will be reborn, that we are connected to one another in ways that have not and cannot be broken even by the most brutal violence. These memories live in our blood and our bones. As you said, as Indigenous people, we have all been impacted. We hold those young ones who are here close and remind them of who they are. We hold our elders close and let them grieve. We let ourselves grieve, and we remember that the land knows, that the land does not forget, and that the land can hold us, does hold us, through it all. We touch the soil, the water, the grasses, we sing, we dance, we breathe.
Speaking of the Bodhisattva vow, a popular interpretation at the Zen center where I practice is that the vow is about saving all beings *from yourself,* which is not exactly surrender. e.g. I can't change the murderous scumbags at large but I can save anyone I come across from the wrath of my own murderous rage (that is possibly caused by the murderous scumbags at large). And I can make the choice to do the right thing day after day after day after day despite how inconvenient or difficult or painful it might be. And maybe that has a ripple effect.
Call me a dreamer but I do think we are living in an age of awakening. It's cold comfort in the face of the horrors of uncovering mass graves, but it is something that we are acknowledging and bringing them to light. Sending love to you, Chris.
That is the big question, isn’t it? What part is each of us willing to play?
Look, I’m another of those privileged old white guys with decades of culpability for it all. Every suburban advantage of economic and emotional security growing up. So I won’t pretend to know the suffering of generations of those who came up in extremely compromising conditions. Yet…I was also one of those true believer Catholic boys who was violated by the parish priest. Whatever the environmental or psychic scars, we all have to transcend them to grow.
The thoughts of retribution, punishment, guilt: yes, all exhausting. And self-defeating. All I can do is encounter each day with as much kindness and benefit of the doubt as I can muster. For the longest time it was a big enough task just to hold that stance towards myself. Slowly I train myself (like an aspiring bodhisattva) to act in the same way toward others. Yes, even the neighbors flying the Fox inspired flags in their yards. Sometimes you have to walk on, bite your tongue. But you can’t hope to change anyone with disdain or intolerance.
As you’ve so clearly laid out, this is the challenge we meet (or not), figuring “out a way to love and care for each other, make amends for all our cruelties, enjoy ritual and celebrate and be spiritual”.
Keep the faith, and frequent with others who do. By that I mean (for one) pursuing a creative path, as you so clearly have done with your writing. A means of expressing your love for life. And recreate/fortify yourself in nature’s presence. My hikes along the bike trails in the woods with my dog are life-saving, as are the special times when I can kayak through pineland streams. Practice ritual daily, despite the anger, boredom, or disillusionment. For me, meditation has become an integral part of my life, and a means for unwinding the guilt, violence and yes, making amends for all the times I’ve been an asshole.
We implicitly know these things already, we just need to be reminded now and then. No, you are an aspiring Bodhisattva! Thanks for the reminders, and keep lighting the fire. I always look forward to your writings.
When I worked as a Nurse in Browning in the mid 80s, I heard and withstood the anger of so many, blaming me for what happened to the Blackfoot Ancestors. At the time, I felt utterly confused, wondering why I was being counted in on what (maybe) my own ancestors might have done wrong generations beforehand. I remember feeling quite saddened, also, because I really couldn’t do anything at the time to correct what was done in the long-ago past. My only offense at the time was being White, or so I thought. Fast forward ten years, and I was again a Nurse, this time working with Alaska Natives. One striking memory was when I stood at the fifth-floor window of ANH (“the old” Alaska Native Hospital, no longer standing) with a kindhearted man who pointed out at no particular mountain, sadly saying to me “that’s where the White Man took so many of us kids from our families and put us in a Home…..” There was no way at the time for me to correct anything done way back then, so I simply relaxed into my job at hand, being the best and kindest Nurse I could possibly be, often communicating only with hand signals or with families and Native staff translating.
What can I do now, I ask. Read every published hard word. Feel the ache and sadness deep in my heart. Cry some. Cry much. Be kind. Hold good thoughts. Put one foot in front of the other and do the next right thing.
Tell me, Chris: what else can I do? I am open to hearing your honest words.
In his "Endgame," Derrick Jensen has a thing about how, depending on what the issues are you care most about--I think in this case he was talking about Weyerhauser--you don't have to blow up dams and can instead do some safer activism or advocacy, but if you truly care about the issue you don't get to condemn people who do the dam-blowing. (It made more sense the way he phrased it.)
I wish I had ready answers or any answers. I am constantly reminded of something I read in the last couple years about how all ideology eventually leads to eugenics. It's not a pretty thought but I know what they meant.
The "schools" (I can't even grace them with that title) is so appalling that my mind barely knows where to start with that immediate and intergenerational trauma. And I remember reading in High Country News maybe about the difficulty of repatriating remains, too, because the people who committed these atrocities didn't even mark the graves, so many tribes know their children died at, say, Carlisle, but nobody knows whose remains are whose. (Typing that whole sentence makes me want to jump off a cliff.)
I lucked out as a Catholic kid, and was brought up by radical nuns and social justice Jesuits. But that moment has long passed. I left decades ago (I took the Virgin of Guadalupe with me. We're doing just fine out here together.)
I think what we do now is we find every last grave. We repatriate all the bones in all the museums. We relentlessly pursue the dead who were taken. Haaland announced this week a parallel effort in the US (and her origin story includes being radicalized by a grandparents who met at Carlisle).
And we teach history. Even if the schools won't teach it, we just refuse to fucking shut up. How many decades have I spent with white men telling me to shut the fuck up? Well I'm about to be an old woman who is done even being polite about it ... we keep writing about this stuff, and getting it out into the world, and then I think we probably also need to plan some breaks. Solstice and equinox bonfires (well maybe not a summer bonfire, not anymore). Big drinks and food and singing and crying and laughing to shore ourselves up before going back out there once more to be the people who Will Not Shut Up about the things no one wants to hear about.
I take some comfort from Ireland. If the fucking Irish can throw off the shackles of the Church, then maybe the rest of us can too. It's irrelevant there now. No goes to Mass. No one respects those bastards who enslaved women in trouble (with the collusion of the govt) for profit, who starved them, sold the pretty children and threw the other children in dank holes. The discovery of which was the last straw. There's value in digging up the past, in shoving their noses in it.
Most US whites are so hypnotized by the myths of superiority fed to them minute by minute, and/ or demoralized and drained by the endless cycle of wage labor and pressure to consume, that they can't wake up. And it's that group that most needs to wake up for existing power structures to be rooted out and replaced entirely. "Radical" comes from the word "root."
There may be a double-edged sword hidden in the rubble once what we know as Western civilization falls down into its cracked, cheapass foundations on mainly stolen land. The fall will happen. It scares me too: I'm older, autistic, without family or loved ones. But like my first AA sponsor used to say, sometimes it takes a whack upside the head with a 2 x 4 for people to wake up. And if there's the glimmer of hope of awakening on a large scale...
I believe Bodhisattva means "awakened one" but I'm on my phone so it's awkward to check. Core to Buddhism is the metaphor of awakening, that much I do know. Maybe it's not really a metaphor.
Chris, sending love. I'm thinking of you and your family close and distant.
Sickened by the news. So sickened. It's probably traumatic to hear about it, but (forgive me if I overshoot here), is it something that at last these atrocities are being held up and recognized for what they are? The reckoning is finally here? That instead of silence and denial, the ugly truths are boiling out? A terrible progress, but the denial stage is past. Like forcing German citizens to walk through death camps to see what happened there, white Americans/Canadians owe their attention, their open eyes, to take in what has been done in our name, laid waste so that we could take whatever we wanted. I am here to listen, to witness you and your words. My ancestors drove out the Creek and Choctaw in Georgia and Alabama (to put slaves in the fields there). I've gained in a generational sense from similar such losses. I'm listening, and not turning away.
I'm working on a story right now with the (unrecognized) Nisenan who are also reeling from boarding school, loss of culture, disease, addiction and poverty, here in stolen Nisenan land (Grass Valley, CA). Helping to bring publicity to their art gallery and ongoing battle for recognition for what is theirs. Seeing how I can be of service here in stolen land.
Chris, you've eloquently articulated my lifelong struggle - How to live in this world as it is when I yearn for it to be so much better. How to resist hating when our society continuously pushes us to hate anyone who is the "other." Cliche aside, I'm convinced that love is the only way out of this ongoing nightmare. Loving the victims of all that hatefulness and, somehow, some way, loving also the damaged monsters who perpetrated violence against them. I don't know if that scope of love is even possible for us flawed human beings. Nevertheless, that, too, is my lifelong struggle. I try, fail, weep, and try again.
If folks here aren't familiar with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, you may be interested to learn more about the great work they are doing: https://boardingschoolhealing.org/
I don’t know what’s next. Or how not to live in constant hate. I just wanted to tell you that you’ve expressed eloquently what I feel every day living in this country—growing since 2001. Like you, I was baptized Catholic. I’ve since converted to Judaism. I’m white and live with a sense of nausea about the history that brought me here. I just want to leave. I lived outside the US in a small Pacific island nation for two years, and the sense of relief not to be complicit every day felt like there was more air to breathe. Back “home,” I’ve been working my ass off to try and change things politically. Watching Montana’s last election—indescribable. I don’t want to disengage. But I can’t stop feeling such rage. And living with rage (like you I am never going to hurt anyone, except myself by choking on this bile…) I wish I could move to Norway. Or back to the Pacific. I have no answers, only commiseration. And gratitude for your writing.
Don't know what is next other than making a beginning by walking the spirits of the children home, to paraphrase the words of the Adams Lake Indian Band. Don't know today how to make the needed changes. Willing to believe that the world can be other than what it has always been and knowing that whatever I/we do, though small, matters. Willing to believe in what seems impossible and to walk in community, sustained by beliefs that come from hard-won experience.
I think a good starting place would be a Truth and Reconciliation movement within government here as there has been in Canada. The calls to action laid out by the committee in Canada could apply here as well to both the government and the religious institutions. But any kind of national dialogue at this moment in politics seems likely to be painted as “liberal” and part of the “critical race theory” discussion which immediately shuts down any dialogue with “people who watch Fox News”. At the very least in Canada it is a discussion- here it all gets swept under the rug. I’m going to try to post the committee document here but idk if it will work. http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1v1CLTtDlrz8ht7hxdDzYpGsK0wjjbpioS-1wwFhgI1zdC9ncoq2rjamQ
It seems to be far easier to decide a human being is essentially a savage and needs to be civilized or saved or fixed or destroyed when they don't look or smell or think or believe like you. Such vanity.
Shouldn't there be accountability, perhaps in reparations, for these deaths? More than just solemn apologies? I hesitate to ask because it isn't my personal pain (as a white person) and it seems presumptuous to suggest that money is any salve for such heartbreak, loss, and anger.
"Tell me what is next. Tell me how we make the world anything other than what it has always been. Tell me what part you are willing to play. I’m all ears."
Damn good question, Chris. And I wish I had an answer. Like you, I know I'm culpable. I don't know what to do about that. Other than to fight the assholes who so sanctimoniously believe that they are god's gift to the universe and that not they, nor their elders, nor their progeny could possibly do wrong. Don't these "Christians" fear judgement day? Or do they, like me, simply not believe in all that Christian mumble jumble?
That must be it. They hide behind the words but they don't believe.
The land and the spirits of these children are speaking and so we choose to listen and we refuse to forget. We remember our teachings, that those who have passed will be reborn, that we are connected to one another in ways that have not and cannot be broken even by the most brutal violence. These memories live in our blood and our bones. As you said, as Indigenous people, we have all been impacted. We hold those young ones who are here close and remind them of who they are. We hold our elders close and let them grieve. We let ourselves grieve, and we remember that the land knows, that the land does not forget, and that the land can hold us, does hold us, through it all. We touch the soil, the water, the grasses, we sing, we dance, we breathe.
Speaking of the Bodhisattva vow, a popular interpretation at the Zen center where I practice is that the vow is about saving all beings *from yourself,* which is not exactly surrender. e.g. I can't change the murderous scumbags at large but I can save anyone I come across from the wrath of my own murderous rage (that is possibly caused by the murderous scumbags at large). And I can make the choice to do the right thing day after day after day after day despite how inconvenient or difficult or painful it might be. And maybe that has a ripple effect.
Call me a dreamer but I do think we are living in an age of awakening. It's cold comfort in the face of the horrors of uncovering mass graves, but it is something that we are acknowledging and bringing them to light. Sending love to you, Chris.
Chris,
That is the big question, isn’t it? What part is each of us willing to play?
Look, I’m another of those privileged old white guys with decades of culpability for it all. Every suburban advantage of economic and emotional security growing up. So I won’t pretend to know the suffering of generations of those who came up in extremely compromising conditions. Yet…I was also one of those true believer Catholic boys who was violated by the parish priest. Whatever the environmental or psychic scars, we all have to transcend them to grow.
The thoughts of retribution, punishment, guilt: yes, all exhausting. And self-defeating. All I can do is encounter each day with as much kindness and benefit of the doubt as I can muster. For the longest time it was a big enough task just to hold that stance towards myself. Slowly I train myself (like an aspiring bodhisattva) to act in the same way toward others. Yes, even the neighbors flying the Fox inspired flags in their yards. Sometimes you have to walk on, bite your tongue. But you can’t hope to change anyone with disdain or intolerance.
As you’ve so clearly laid out, this is the challenge we meet (or not), figuring “out a way to love and care for each other, make amends for all our cruelties, enjoy ritual and celebrate and be spiritual”.
Keep the faith, and frequent with others who do. By that I mean (for one) pursuing a creative path, as you so clearly have done with your writing. A means of expressing your love for life. And recreate/fortify yourself in nature’s presence. My hikes along the bike trails in the woods with my dog are life-saving, as are the special times when I can kayak through pineland streams. Practice ritual daily, despite the anger, boredom, or disillusionment. For me, meditation has become an integral part of my life, and a means for unwinding the guilt, violence and yes, making amends for all the times I’ve been an asshole.
We implicitly know these things already, we just need to be reminded now and then. No, you are an aspiring Bodhisattva! Thanks for the reminders, and keep lighting the fire. I always look forward to your writings.
When I worked as a Nurse in Browning in the mid 80s, I heard and withstood the anger of so many, blaming me for what happened to the Blackfoot Ancestors. At the time, I felt utterly confused, wondering why I was being counted in on what (maybe) my own ancestors might have done wrong generations beforehand. I remember feeling quite saddened, also, because I really couldn’t do anything at the time to correct what was done in the long-ago past. My only offense at the time was being White, or so I thought. Fast forward ten years, and I was again a Nurse, this time working with Alaska Natives. One striking memory was when I stood at the fifth-floor window of ANH (“the old” Alaska Native Hospital, no longer standing) with a kindhearted man who pointed out at no particular mountain, sadly saying to me “that’s where the White Man took so many of us kids from our families and put us in a Home…..” There was no way at the time for me to correct anything done way back then, so I simply relaxed into my job at hand, being the best and kindest Nurse I could possibly be, often communicating only with hand signals or with families and Native staff translating.
What can I do now, I ask. Read every published hard word. Feel the ache and sadness deep in my heart. Cry some. Cry much. Be kind. Hold good thoughts. Put one foot in front of the other and do the next right thing.
Tell me, Chris: what else can I do? I am open to hearing your honest words.
In his "Endgame," Derrick Jensen has a thing about how, depending on what the issues are you care most about--I think in this case he was talking about Weyerhauser--you don't have to blow up dams and can instead do some safer activism or advocacy, but if you truly care about the issue you don't get to condemn people who do the dam-blowing. (It made more sense the way he phrased it.)
I wish I had ready answers or any answers. I am constantly reminded of something I read in the last couple years about how all ideology eventually leads to eugenics. It's not a pretty thought but I know what they meant.
The "schools" (I can't even grace them with that title) is so appalling that my mind barely knows where to start with that immediate and intergenerational trauma. And I remember reading in High Country News maybe about the difficulty of repatriating remains, too, because the people who committed these atrocities didn't even mark the graves, so many tribes know their children died at, say, Carlisle, but nobody knows whose remains are whose. (Typing that whole sentence makes me want to jump off a cliff.)
I lucked out as a Catholic kid, and was brought up by radical nuns and social justice Jesuits. But that moment has long passed. I left decades ago (I took the Virgin of Guadalupe with me. We're doing just fine out here together.)
I think what we do now is we find every last grave. We repatriate all the bones in all the museums. We relentlessly pursue the dead who were taken. Haaland announced this week a parallel effort in the US (and her origin story includes being radicalized by a grandparents who met at Carlisle).
And we teach history. Even if the schools won't teach it, we just refuse to fucking shut up. How many decades have I spent with white men telling me to shut the fuck up? Well I'm about to be an old woman who is done even being polite about it ... we keep writing about this stuff, and getting it out into the world, and then I think we probably also need to plan some breaks. Solstice and equinox bonfires (well maybe not a summer bonfire, not anymore). Big drinks and food and singing and crying and laughing to shore ourselves up before going back out there once more to be the people who Will Not Shut Up about the things no one wants to hear about.
I take some comfort from Ireland. If the fucking Irish can throw off the shackles of the Church, then maybe the rest of us can too. It's irrelevant there now. No goes to Mass. No one respects those bastards who enslaved women in trouble (with the collusion of the govt) for profit, who starved them, sold the pretty children and threw the other children in dank holes. The discovery of which was the last straw. There's value in digging up the past, in shoving their noses in it.
But we need to take care of each other too ...
Most US whites are so hypnotized by the myths of superiority fed to them minute by minute, and/ or demoralized and drained by the endless cycle of wage labor and pressure to consume, that they can't wake up. And it's that group that most needs to wake up for existing power structures to be rooted out and replaced entirely. "Radical" comes from the word "root."
There may be a double-edged sword hidden in the rubble once what we know as Western civilization falls down into its cracked, cheapass foundations on mainly stolen land. The fall will happen. It scares me too: I'm older, autistic, without family or loved ones. But like my first AA sponsor used to say, sometimes it takes a whack upside the head with a 2 x 4 for people to wake up. And if there's the glimmer of hope of awakening on a large scale...
I believe Bodhisattva means "awakened one" but I'm on my phone so it's awkward to check. Core to Buddhism is the metaphor of awakening, that much I do know. Maybe it's not really a metaphor.
Chris, sending love. I'm thinking of you and your family close and distant.
Sickened by the news. So sickened. It's probably traumatic to hear about it, but (forgive me if I overshoot here), is it something that at last these atrocities are being held up and recognized for what they are? The reckoning is finally here? That instead of silence and denial, the ugly truths are boiling out? A terrible progress, but the denial stage is past. Like forcing German citizens to walk through death camps to see what happened there, white Americans/Canadians owe their attention, their open eyes, to take in what has been done in our name, laid waste so that we could take whatever we wanted. I am here to listen, to witness you and your words. My ancestors drove out the Creek and Choctaw in Georgia and Alabama (to put slaves in the fields there). I've gained in a generational sense from similar such losses. I'm listening, and not turning away.
I'm working on a story right now with the (unrecognized) Nisenan who are also reeling from boarding school, loss of culture, disease, addiction and poverty, here in stolen Nisenan land (Grass Valley, CA). Helping to bring publicity to their art gallery and ongoing battle for recognition for what is theirs. Seeing how I can be of service here in stolen land.
Chris, you've eloquently articulated my lifelong struggle - How to live in this world as it is when I yearn for it to be so much better. How to resist hating when our society continuously pushes us to hate anyone who is the "other." Cliche aside, I'm convinced that love is the only way out of this ongoing nightmare. Loving the victims of all that hatefulness and, somehow, some way, loving also the damaged monsters who perpetrated violence against them. I don't know if that scope of love is even possible for us flawed human beings. Nevertheless, that, too, is my lifelong struggle. I try, fail, weep, and try again.
If folks here aren't familiar with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, you may be interested to learn more about the great work they are doing: https://boardingschoolhealing.org/
I don’t know what’s next. Or how not to live in constant hate. I just wanted to tell you that you’ve expressed eloquently what I feel every day living in this country—growing since 2001. Like you, I was baptized Catholic. I’ve since converted to Judaism. I’m white and live with a sense of nausea about the history that brought me here. I just want to leave. I lived outside the US in a small Pacific island nation for two years, and the sense of relief not to be complicit every day felt like there was more air to breathe. Back “home,” I’ve been working my ass off to try and change things politically. Watching Montana’s last election—indescribable. I don’t want to disengage. But I can’t stop feeling such rage. And living with rage (like you I am never going to hurt anyone, except myself by choking on this bile…) I wish I could move to Norway. Or back to the Pacific. I have no answers, only commiseration. And gratitude for your writing.
We can pay attention. We can give what we can. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Don't know what is next other than making a beginning by walking the spirits of the children home, to paraphrase the words of the Adams Lake Indian Band. Don't know today how to make the needed changes. Willing to believe that the world can be other than what it has always been and knowing that whatever I/we do, though small, matters. Willing to believe in what seems impossible and to walk in community, sustained by beliefs that come from hard-won experience.
I think a good starting place would be a Truth and Reconciliation movement within government here as there has been in Canada. The calls to action laid out by the committee in Canada could apply here as well to both the government and the religious institutions. But any kind of national dialogue at this moment in politics seems likely to be painted as “liberal” and part of the “critical race theory” discussion which immediately shuts down any dialogue with “people who watch Fox News”. At the very least in Canada it is a discussion- here it all gets swept under the rug. I’m going to try to post the committee document here but idk if it will work. http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1v1CLTtDlrz8ht7hxdDzYpGsK0wjjbpioS-1wwFhgI1zdC9ncoq2rjamQ
It seems to be far easier to decide a human being is essentially a savage and needs to be civilized or saved or fixed or destroyed when they don't look or smell or think or believe like you. Such vanity.
Shouldn't there be accountability, perhaps in reparations, for these deaths? More than just solemn apologies? I hesitate to ask because it isn't my personal pain (as a white person) and it seems presumptuous to suggest that money is any salve for such heartbreak, loss, and anger.
"Tell me what is next. Tell me how we make the world anything other than what it has always been. Tell me what part you are willing to play. I’m all ears."
Damn good question, Chris. And I wish I had an answer. Like you, I know I'm culpable. I don't know what to do about that. Other than to fight the assholes who so sanctimoniously believe that they are god's gift to the universe and that not they, nor their elders, nor their progeny could possibly do wrong. Don't these "Christians" fear judgement day? Or do they, like me, simply not believe in all that Christian mumble jumble?
That must be it. They hide behind the words but they don't believe.