The last month has been a chaotic wrapping of my head around things as this lockdown and pandemic stretches on. It’s been difficult for me to think clearly, requiring time to step away.

And part of that stepping away was cutting back: news stories, social media and other emotional drains.

Then someone texts me a story about the remains of 215 children found buried under a former residential school.

My head is still shrieking and I haven’t been able to put it into words, but I’ll do my best.

I had no idea about the history of the native people of this country until my third year of University—and I started at twenty. I was twenty three years old before I heard about the systematic destruction of an entire culture through various means (or whatever means necessary, it seems).

Up until that point, my only experience were the slanderous jokes people told, a local news story about the killing of Dudley George and comments from adults about “freeloading,” “laziness,” and other such adjectives. The history of native people may have been briefly brushed upon (and we’re talking light strokes) during school.

To all of a sudden learn about a history of people who had their children forcibly removed from their homes and dragged vast distances to be physically, mentally and sexually abused by clergy… it didn’t sit right. How could it?

I was angry for a multitude of reasons.

How is it that I could know about the history of slavery in the US before ever knowing what happened here?

Seven generations of silence.

Then there’s the Church… and oh… I’ll save that for a later post. There’s too much that can be said and right now, it’s splintering from the fallout of indoctrinating two generations of people in partisan culture wars rather than kerygma. You reap what you sow.

Over the last fifteen years, I’ve kept my eyes wide open. I’ve had the privilege of working alongside some incredible people, especially young people, in the Indigenous community. To learn their stories, their teachings and their pleas. I’ve also had the chance to see a general population slowly learning about this horrid history, as we all come to terms with how can we move forward in reconciliation.

An extensive report was put together in 2015 with ninety-four calls to action.

And yet, here we are, six years later, finding the graves of children. A gravesite so buried, it was purposefully forgotten about to hide the actual number of deaths that occurred.

Residential school survivors, in hearing about this story, are reliving the trauma from when they attended.

There’s been a huge response, which is good. However, I wonder how many of these are simply performative before people move on to the next story. This is not a tragedy that happened. These were children who were purposefully killed.

So where do we go from here?

I’ve always been a big advocate of “talk less, listen more.”

But in this case: talk less, do more.