OUR CABIN IS nestled in the mountains. At least, that’s how it feels. Living so close to the land, we hear stories in the whisper of the wind through the pines, tales in the patter of rain, legends in the snowfall that comes with the first sharp slice of winter. Mushrooms, ferns and open surges of granite become connections to a larger spirit. Wise and ancient voices reside in the most common of things.
Safe in the lap of all these stories, I marvel at how easily this was once taken away from me.
Debra and I were in Winnipeg recently. We’d been invited to a conference that dealt with survivors of the Sixties Scoop. Back in the 1960s, the Canadian government actively promoted a program that scooped Native kids from their homes. Many were adopted into non-Native families who lived hundreds or thousands of miles away, in Louisiana, Florida, Texas or distant cities and towns across Canada. There’s not much space devoted to this in our history books, but it’s a part of Canada’s history nonetheless.
The once-closed files of those adoption agencies are open now. People displaced as kids can ask for their records to find out where they originated. Of all the possible questions that uprooted generation has, the biggest one, and the most painful, may be why we were forcibly cut off from our roots. For the great majority of us, the homes we landed in saw no need to let us know where we came from. “Adopted,” in the parlance of the day, meant “no longer Indian.” Thousands of us were denied the fundamental right to know who we were created to be.
This sad chapter in our country’s history followed closely on the heels of the closure of the residential schools. To those affected, the Scoop felt like a continuation of the same genocidal policy. For me, it meant the door was effectively slammed shut on my identity. I stood stark and alone as a fencepost in a field of snow. That’s how it felt to me.
The conference I was invited to drew many people who share that legacy. It also drew a professional circle of people who deal with our demographic; social workers, teachers, government ministry workers and policy developers. We gathered in a place called Thunderbird House, named for those spiritual beings that bring messages from Creator. We opened in the ceremonial way most of us had had to fight to rediscover and reclaim. The prayer, the song and the reverberations of the drum felt like a homecoming.
It was my task to present the opening address, and I couldn’t sleep the night before. I tossed and turned and worried. There were a hundred avenues I could take in approaching the issue. As I looked back over my life and saw again the profound impact of the decision to remove me from my people, I was torn about how to express what that meant. There had been moments when the pain and the confusion were so intense I felt as though my skin was peeling off. There were beatings and martial discipline that scarred me. There was abandonment and neglect. There was a feeling of melancholy that I carried for years, a haunting I was at odds to explain. Even when I found my people again, there were feelings of inadequacy, cultural embarrassment, anger and fear to overcome. So it was hard to decide what I should say.
I ended up talking about baseball. I talked about encountering a game that was foreign to me but that every other kid took for granted. I spoke about what I felt in my belly as the laughter of my classmates rolled over me. Shame at not being able to do what they did so easily. Anger at being mocked and belittled. Fear that I might never measure up in this strange new world. Resentment that no one had let me know things would be so different. I described for the people at the conference how those bitter feelings ate at me. Loneliness can be such an onerous weight. But then I spoke about gritting my teet hand learning the game and ending the laughter of the others at the same time as I eased those feelings in my belly. I talked about the courage it takes to confront a foreign system, to inhabit it and make it your own. I shared how freeing that is, how healing.
I closed my talk with baseball’s central metaphor: all of us working together can help each other make it home. That’s what it’s really all about in the end for everyone, not just Indians. Taking away someone’s right to know who they are is a sin. But it’s also a sin when there’s no one around to help you. It’s incumbent on everyone who has ever felt the lash of displacement to be on the field when the new kid shows up with no idea how to play the game.
Now that those adoption files are open, there are going to be a lot of people in that position. They’ll walk into our powwows, our ceremonies and our events with no idea of how to present themselves. They’ll have no idea how to wear their skin. We need to be there when they show up. We need to extend a hand in welcome and make them feel at home.
When you survive something titanic, it makes you stronger. It can make you wise and gentle if you’ve learned the lessons well. In the end, you’re not a survivor anymore. You’ve become who you were created to be.