The Sacred Fire: Healing a Nation
Rod, Toronto, Canada, August 2024.
"I remember my auntie Kate. She was just a child when the Canadian authorities took her away to residential school. My father and the older uncles, though, had a different fate—they were given a 'choice.' They told them: 'Go to residential school or join the army and fight in World War II.' These weren’t choices at all. They were traumas wrapped in uniforms or school desks, and they had to pick one.
My father and uncles chose war over residential school. When they came home, they still weren’t citizens of Canada, because we were not recognized as a people. They fought for Canada and fought for a lie that their country was in danger. Why do I say a lie? Because Turtle Island, how we refer to North America, was here for thousands of years before Canada, it never was in danger. On top that they were fighting for a country that didn’t grant them any rights and was trying to assimilate them and erase their culture.
They took away a mother's love.
My aunties and my younger uncles who weren't able to go to war had to go to residential schools, where they were traumatized. Their hair was cut off. They were beaten and abused. The authorities were trying to erase our identity. This didn’t affect only my family but all indigenous families. We were persecuted. There was a story about a young girl who scratched with her nails what they had done to her into the brick walls in the school. Four Letters.
My mother ended up in the in residential school in Thunder Bay. She suffered a lot. When you had a sibling that went to the same residential school and you tried to show them love. You would get beaten for that, if you got caught. Even if you were caught speaking your language. Today a lot of people don't speak their language because of that. When my mom came back from residential school, she didn’t know how to love anymore. Soon after she got married to my father, yet neither of them knew how to love anymore. They took away a mother's love.
My tragedy was residential school.
Unlike my father I didn’t have a choice. My tragedy was residential school. People thought I was lucky, because I got to go home every day, but the abuse in all its forms followed you wherever you went, because this is what was taught to us. As a result our family was chaotic, because we didn't know how to love. One day my younger brother came home in a white box. He was five and I was seven. They put him on his bed as if he was sleeping. Two days later I started shaking him on the bed. “Get up, you slept long enough”, I shouted in vain and they just pulled me off. No one explained to me what had happened or what death was. I would always run away, from school or home and go to his grave, because I didn’t understand what was happening around me - in my family and community.
Then …
I lost my older sister when I was 18.
I lost my mother when I was 20.
I have been through a lot of loss. Why would they do that to us? The trauma has been spanning over generations. The mass graves and the abuse. How they rounded up all the warriors and slaughtered them like cattle. While they locked up the women, the life givers, inside of tipis along with the children, just to be set on fire. Imagine being in one of those tipis in silence. Hearing the screams and moans of the dying warriors and waiting for whatever was going to happen to you next. How cruel is that? These stories and our own experiences haunt us to this day.
But on the other hand, every time you tell your story – it gets easier. You know it's going to help somebody else heal. It's a difficult journey. But we are relearning our ways and we're learning about our own beauty. It starts in the morning when I get up and I say, I love you Shining Thunderbird Eagle Man, which is my spirit name. Self-love this is the key to help others. If you don't love yourself, you're not going to be able to love anybody else and you won’t be able to help anyone else. There is always good. There is hope.
Goodness always follows goodness
Imagine the following, a tea cup and the saucer on which it stands. You fill the tea cup with your spirit medicine by doing good to people. You keep doing that until your cup is full. This is not enough you keep going until the cup is overflowing and starts filling the saucer. Whatever is in that saucer, it will help the people around you. Afterall, Goodness always follows goodness and the opposite.
There are still hateful people out there – and I try either turn it into something positive or ignore them and let them keep their problems. For instance the Canadian government tried to compensate us for what we had to endure in the residential schools. I refused any form of reparation, I don't want their blood money. The money won’t bring back my brother. Besides that, today the abuse and discrimination is still happening around us – we need to work on that. It starts when I go to supermarkets and security guards keeps following me, because they are told to follow minorities. Do I look like a thief? And goes on when I look at crimes committed against my community. Indigenous women and youth are going missing every day here in Canada. Three youth were murdered in Thunder Bay, Ontario. And the police is doing nothing, the chief of police was just fired because of his inaction. When is that going to change? No money on earth can compensate us for what we had to endure and are still enduring. But I see a lot of change in society. For instance we are now allowed to put up tipis in this park, light the sacred fire and hold ceremonies – we rekindled the fire of our culture they tried to extinguish. My ancestors seven generations ago thought about me today in their actions. So what am I going to do for the next seven generations? I will not see the next seven generations for sure, but I'm certainly going to plant that seed of hope, because that's all we can do – it is our free choice.”
“May the stars carry your sadness away, May the flowers fill your heart with beauty, May hope forever wipe away your tears, And, above all, may silence make you strong.”
