Do You Remember....

 By Marilyn Moore

From the National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools

Gimikwenden ina

Aanin ezhinikaazoyan

Aandi wenjibaayan

Gimikwenden ina

Gimikwenden ina

Nindedeyag nimaamaayag

Nimiseyag nisayeyah

These words, from a song in Corey Payette’s Children of God, are written in the Ojibwe language.  The Ojibwe are part of the Anishinaabeg group of Indigenous peoples, the second largest in North America, still found today in Canada and the area around the Great Lakes in the US.  The words translated into English…

Do you remember

What you are called?

Where you are from?

Do you remember?

Do you remember

Our fathers and mothers,

Our sisters and brothers?

You might have wondered as you read the English words if they reflected the experiences of Ojibwe children, taken from their parents and placed in government boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  If you did, you were correct.  

A reminder of that horrible time in our nation’s history, and in Canadian history, too, when deliberate and intentional efforts were made to extinguish Indigenous history, language, religion, food, tradition, clothing, culture…indeed, extinguishing Indigenous peoples altogether.  The diabolical means?  Start with the children….  Separate children from their parents, from their extended families, from their villages, from all that’s familiar, and enroll them in residential boarding schools. Forbid them to use the name that had been given to them at birth, to speak the language they know, to eat the food that is familiar, to wear the clothing that is theirs, to practice traditions and religious practices they’ve known all their lives, to even mention their parents or family members, or the land and people they were forced to leave.  Then give them an “American” name, force them to become child laborers, teaching them the barest minimum level of literacy, along with basic skills which would be useful in an agricultural/manufacturing economy.  And require them to practice Christianity.  The stated policy goal was to remove the Indian from the child…that bold, that daring, that disrespectful, some would say that evil.

The children learned not to speak where they could be heard by those who were in charge about their families, their land, their names, their beliefs.  They also suffered, physically, emotionally, socially.  There were deaths, by accident, illness, and suicide.  Some remembered…some of what they were not supposed to remember.  But they were children, and details disappear from memory after a while.  Eventually, language and culture and custom and tradition mostly disappeared.  Except…while the details may have disappeared from children’s memories, the sense that something important, something essential, something at the very core of their being, lingered.  They did remember that something else had been a part of their lives, and was still a part of who they were.  

It's a long, sorry story, an embarrassing and cruel part of our nation’s history.  Today we would say, “That’s not who we are….” But we were…. This was not just a northern US/Canadian story, it was a Nebraska story, too.  One of those Indian Boarding Schools was in Genoa, Nebraska.  It operated from 1884 to 1934, housing more than 4000 students over those fifty years…4000 children, wondering in their souls if they remembered.  And wondering if their mothers and fathers, and sisters and brothers, remembered them….

There are many ways of remembering.  There are stories, and tales, and pictures, and poetry, and artifacts, and music.  Somehow, in some way, the elders kept these alive, though keeping the language alive has been hard.  There are other ways.  Indigenous women sewed seeds of plants and grain into the hems of their skirts when they sensed the village where they lived would soon be forced to move, either by warfare or yet another treaty.  They would be able to take something of their homeland with them, perhaps to be able to grow the plants in a new place.  (I have recently read that women captured in Africa, bound for slavery, did the same, weaving seeds into their hair, so they could carry something of home with them.  Women are amazing, aren’t we….) Aliyah American Horse, Nebraska’s Youth Poet Laureate, wrote a poem for National Day of Remembrance for US Indian Boarding Schools about the significance of hair in Indian culture; hair is a carrier of story and history and identity. When officials at the Indian Boarding Schools, or school officials in Nebraska today, cut the hair of Indigenous students, they are cutting that child’s identity.   

Remembering who we are, what we are called, where we are from, our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, is important to our identity as individuals and as members of a community.  Trying to blot out that memory, to suppress it, in the name of unity, or superiority, or ethnocentrism, is harmful.  It’s hurtful.  It’s antithetical to the belief that every person is a person of value and worth, a bedrock value in our nation’s founding documents.  

While the Indian Boarding Schools have closed, though the effects are still reverberating through Indigenous peoples today, there is a modern-day effort to suppress remembering.  This is on a larger scale, an effort to not tell, to overlook, to forget, the chapters in American history that are uncomfortable.  Like enslavement.  Like the Indian Boarding Schools.  Like the Tulsa race massacre.  Like the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, more than half of whom were American citizens.  Like the Jim Crow laws for nearly a century following the Civil War.  In the eyes and minds of some of our political leaders, anything that might make students uncomfortable should not be included in school curriculum, nor in school libraries.  Once again, start with the children, and see if we can erase these ugly parts of our history.  

It won’t work, of course.  There are many sources of information, way beyond textbooks and library books, and anything that is “forbidden” is all the more interesting to learners of any age.  So these chapters won’t disappear from our national story.  But the efforts to make them unseen and unheard and unremembered are damaging to our national psyche.  Trauma that has been suppressed, whether in an individual or a nation, has a way of emerging later with great power, great disruption, and often tragic results, unless it’s confronted, remembered, and dealt with in such a way that the person, or the nation, emerges healthy and whole.  

I don’t know how we as a nation, or we as individuals, ever compensate Indigenous families for the great harm that was caused by the Indian Boarding Schools, or how we compensate Black Americans for the harm that was caused by enslavement, or how we compensate other groups of people that were intentionally and deliberately harmed.  In 1988, Congress provided reparation payments to Japanese families that had been incarcerated during WWII.  Proposals have been made for reparations to Black Americans for four centuries of discriminatory laws, statutes, and actions…but they have not been enacted.  One has only to look at quality of life indicators, like life span, education level, health, income, home ownership, for Indigenous people compared to others in this nation to conclude that whatever treaties may have been signed, whatever governmental support services may have been put in place, have not begun to repair the damage that was inflicted on the first people of this land.

I don’t know what it will take to repair the harm.  I do believe that it starts by remembering….

(A personal note.  I learned this song as a member of a choir invited to sing at a service on the National Day of Remembrance for US Indian Boarding Schools.  It was a powerful experience to learn the language, to learn the meaning of the words, to feel the beat of the drum that accompanies the song. It is beyond my comprehension how much more powerful, like a thousand times more so, it must be for Indigenous people to sing this…it is their story.)

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