My dad doesn’t like to talk about his childhood much but every so often he drops new spontaneous factoids.
In honour of national truth and reconciliation day I want to share one of these spontaneous truth bombs. This one came out in his kitchen and I don’t really remember the exact thing I said but it was related to my grandmother being a residential school survivor.
He said “Your uncle S want to residential school too, they took him because he was the darkest.”
S was my fathers older brother, my dad is the baby and over 20 years younger then S, he wasn’t there when S was taken. So I know that someone who was there must have told him this.
It’s horrifying to imagine what my grandmother went through, she escaped a residential school at 16 and spent her life trying to blend in only to have her son taken.
It horrifying to imagine how hard she must have been trying to protect her children. This is a woman who quit drinking cold turkey when my father told her as a child he would move out if she didn’t, this is a woman who burst into a crowded bar with a baseball bat to confront the man who knocked up her teenage daughter. She may not have been the nicest person but she would do anything for her children but she couldn’t stop them taking her son.
It’s horrifying to imagine what S went through, what his brothers who weren’t taken went through. It’s also horrifying that my who ever told my father that truly believed that if they could be paler they wouldn’t be taken.
It’s also horrifying that they were probably right.
Today is a hard day, every day we find more bodies is a hard day. I can’t describe my grief for family and other families like mine.
What hits me hard today is that among my siblings I am the darkest and these schools were still open when I was born. If they were still open when I was old enough to attend school would it have been me?
I also would ask if my sister would be the ones afraid of admitting their ancestry but this already happens. My sister attends a university in a very white province and has called me afraid about what could happen if she tells locals about her heritage after hearing what they say.
Yes things are better but we still have a long way to go. Canadians have a habit of looking at the States and then patting themselves on the back for being better. What we must remember is that truth, reconciliation, and defeating racism is not a race. You don’t beat the other team, then give up and get a trophy. You need to keep improving and you have to keep going for the rest of your life.