When someone posts something on Facebook and I choose to share it, in the space that gives you the opportunity to, “Say Something About This.”
I usually write, “Take the Time” and then click Post.
I recently went to view the film “Indian Horse.”
During the film there were moments of great sadness where I felt my heart crying, followed by numbness.
As I left, walked to my car and drove home, my emotions became ones of anger, shame, I felt appalled.
I watched the years that were posted on the screen and thought, “I was a child, now I’m in my twenties, my thirties, my forties,” shaking my head, puzzled as to how it was possible not to know.
Family secrets of shame and disgrace are like this. They go to peoples graves more often then not, only to be uncovered when sorting through paperwork and boxes of the deceased, do they stumble into information kept hidden. You sit there, in shock, as to how you didn’t know.
And then there are those who just do not breathe a word, as they know it was wrong. So very wrong. They don’t want anyone to know.
The pain and damage we are capable of inflicting on another is atrocious.
When we decide that someone is not good enough and that they need be different and the different is what we decide for them is better – we rob someone of something we have no right to take.
Residential schools existed for over 100 years and the last federally operated school closed in 1996. I had my own children by then, who were attending the school of my choice, and at the end of their day, they came home to me.
As a Canadian I believed we were a good and decent people. We did not take part in terrible doings towards our fellow being.
But I’ve been foolish.
Like so many people, families, who in public go to church, take part in the community, hold jobs, coach their children’s sports teams and take smiling family photos. Only to close their front door and inside, away from the public eye abuse one another, degrade and destroy each other.
Facing what has been done to a race of people and witness the aftermath of hurt and wounded generations, knowing it is the same when anyone is abused by another and it is not healed, it continues on and the destruction travels through the genes, the blood, the bones into their children and their children’s children.
May we stop all this.
May we allow ourselves to wake up.
May we own that we now know.
May we feel the sorrow and be able to say we are sorry.
May we face what was done, and give ourselves the courage to be better.
May we open our doors and allow all the secrets to rush out into the air.
May we be good to each other, so the need for secrets no longer exists.
May we allow each other to be.
May we go forward.
Take The Time to see this film and then Give It Time, to feel, and then to say, “I now know and I shall do better.”
A great people came before us. No one has the right to take another’s greatness.
Indian Horse
Directed by Stephen Campanelli. Written by Dennis Foon. Adaptation of Richard Wagamese’s novel Indian Horse.
The film centres on Saul Indian Horse, a young Canadian First Nations boy who survives the Indian Residential School System to become a star ice hockey player. Wikipedia
Photos: Sharon Cooke & Internet Stock