***Warning: this post contains reference to Truth about residential schools. And swearing.***
I’m trying to come up with an intro, but I can’t get the reveal of the mass grave of 215 children at the Kamloops residential school out of my head.
When I was in grade 2 my teacher was Miss Hathorne. She was a screamer. She didn’t scream at me, but she screamed at other kids. That’s how she dealt with students that were troublesome. Now I have only vague memories of this but I know it was a huge setback for a kid with huge social anxiety, who had made great strides in grade 1 because of a teacher who knew I could sing and used that to help me gain confidence. Anyway in grade 2 I started getting stomach aches, and so began a great long series of doctor visits and specialist appointments, which determined that they were caused by stress and anxiety. I sorta learned how to deal with them, but they never completely went away and in fact they got worse, and I still get them on occasion. You’ve heard of migraine headaches, and how debilitating those are, well these are migraine stomach aches.
Now I got stress and anxiety-related stomach aches as a kid who lived with a loving mum and dad, in a nice house and went to a good school and had good friends. I have a pretty good imagination, but I’m sure that if I try to imagine what it would have been like to be taken away from my loving mum and dad, and my nice house, and placed in a school with a bunch of other children and told I couldn’t speak my language, and nobody loved me and they probably didn’t even know my name… If I imagine what that might have felt like, I’m sure I’m way off. Like way. the. fuck. off.
And I as a mum look at my children and I know that never once did I ever have to worry that some person was going to come and take them away from me, abuse them, neglect them, not take them to the doctor if they had stomach aches. As it turns out not take them to the doctor if they had TB, or any other nasty illness, or injury. And if they died? Stick them in a grave without even making note of their name or their gender, and forget about them, never mind sending them home to me.
And that is why I can’t get the discovery of the mass grave of 215 children at the Kamloops residential school out of my head. And that’s a good thing. It shouldn’t be so easy for me to dismiss this story, as easy it was for those children to be dismissed by the people who were supposed to be caring for them. Well, in truth the people who were supposed to be caring for them were their parents, but since that option was denied them…
Please take a moment of silence for those 215 children, for the thousands of others found in other graves across Canada, and for the families who are still dealing with the consequences of those inexcusable choices.
Thank you.