By Carly Butler
@carlymbutton
Ever since the news broke of the mass grave found at Kamloops Residential School, I have been floating in a listless grief.
I live on the unceded territories of Matsqui, Kwantlen, Katzie and Semiahmoo nations (Langley, British Columbia), just a few hours away from Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc territory (Kamloops, BC) where the bodies of 215 Indigenous children were found using underground radar in late May. Since then, thousands more graves have been confirmed; there are still more than 100 schools across Canada and the United States that need to be searched.
I am an Indigenous Yaqui Mexican woman married to a first-generation British-Canadian, raising our 4.5-year-old son and three-year-old daughter roughly 3,000 kilometres away from our ancestral homelands. We carry our own uniquely different imprint of slavery, relocation, and generational trauma.
As settlers on this territory, we stand in solidarity, and we grieve with Indigenous peoples all across Canada.
In that spirit, I have been sharing my decolonization and reclamation journey publicly for a long time, and very intentionally sharing information about truths that we as a nation have been unable to face. Sometimes, I make people uncomfortable, especially the fellow evangelical Christians I was raised among. I’m okay with that.
From the ages of 12 to 16, I would go on a 12-hour bus ride from Northern, B.C. to Kamloops each May long weekend. My youth group attended the History Maker Youth Convention there, hosted by the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. I spent much of my time feeling ill at ease, trying to belong but wanting to crawl out of my skin, not knowing why.
The arena — filled with thousands of youth from all over the province gathered to worship God and speak in tongues and pray — was mere kilometers away from the bones of hundreds of youth who wanted to speak their own tongue, who prayed to go home. My body knew before I did.
We did not learn about the child victims of the Residential “Schools” in our education system, in our churches, in our conventions. And now we are grown up, some with our own children, and we feel shocked. Numb. How could this have happened for so long? How did we never know?
This not-knowing has been intentional from the very beginning. And with each layer that you peel back, the more sick you will feel. This is not a sign to turn back, to forget — in fact, quite the opposite.
Indigenous people have been telling North America about the children that never came home for decades. And for many of those decades, Gord Downie, the haunting and beloved singer/songwriter of the Tragically Hip, used his power beautifully as an ally through song and poetry and political action. He held court with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Trudeau made promises to Gord that he has not been able to keep.
In 2016, Indigenous nations gathered for a ceremony where Gord Downie was given a sacred eagle feather, wrapped in a handcrafted blanket and blessed with the honorary name Wicapi Omani, which is Lakota for “He Who Walks Among The Stars.” His solidarity mattered, and has ripple effects to this day.
Before Downie’s untimely death in 2017, he created a documentary called The Secret Path. In it, he shared poetry and music and the story of Chanie Wenjack, an Indigenous boy who died trying to escape his residential school in Ontario in the 1960s.
As Gord interviewed Chanie’s family, something he said stuck with me.
“For as long as the atrocity was allowed to continue, it will take that long for it to be fully healed.”
At least seven generations were lost to the unholy matrimony of church and government — and those who survived were gaslit and paid off not to be angry about it. This is no longer acceptable, and never should have been. The broken bone that never got properly treated must be rebroken and reset.
No one is taught details about the people who wrote our history books; that leaders like America’s first President George Washington made his dentures out of the teeth of his Black slaves while they were still living – or that Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. McDonald was a professed Christian with a dark appetite for death. His violent writings about how to eradicate Indigenous people from their culture and families were studied by Adolf Hitler in the years leading up to his attempted extermination of European Jewish, Romani, queer, and disabled communities.
To this day, people who followed Hitler’s orders are held accountable. Nazis face trial for war crimes even into their 90s; Hitler was not given the honour of a statue or a European street named after him. We would be rightfully horrified if that were the case. Instead, tourists can educate themselves at museums and historical sites to learn about the true history. The statute of limitations on genocide does not have an expiry date.
Meanwhile, across North America, Indigenous activists have to start petitions to ask for statues of their colonizers to be removed, and are often forced to take matters into their own hands when nothing changes. The Roman-Catholic Church and the Canadian government are still refusing to release records that would incriminate anyone involved in the Residential School system. The surface of American ground has barely been scratched for proof of their own bloodshed.
The seed was planted more than 500 years ago in Europe, when a “blank cheque” mandate called the Doctrine of Discovery was scribed by the Pope: any land “discovered” beyond European shores was to be conquered for God, and any people discovered on those lands were to be converted or killed. Explorers like Christopher Columbus gladly fulfilled this mission.
Once they cleansed Turtle Island (North and Central America), they started fresh. They formed governments and built homes and churches and schools for free on the backs of the other “heathen” people that they stole from Africa and China and India and the Pacific Islands. All the places they’d already divided and conquered.
And now, here we are, living under the shade of a tree that’s rotting from the roots up. Our true origins are being unearthed and exhumed. Being able to trace your family back multiple generations is no longer a brag, but possible evidence that your ancestors were complicit in genocide.
But whether you are a new or old settler, you have reaped the harvest of our annihilation. The land you walk, the clean water you taste, your children who always come home. Laws and traditions enacted under the Doctrine of Discovery are still in place to this day, and they benefit you.
True accountability is dodged and so, colonization is ongoing.
But now you know the beginning of the truth, and now you have a choice you must make: you can ignore the truth and carry on, or you must begin the five stages of Grief.
Since the last Canadian Residential School closed in 1996, most of our country has been stuck in Denial and Bargaining. A lot of us want to skip to the end, where changing our Facebook profile pictures and wearing orange shirts for a day is a catalyst for change, and problems are solved, and everyone feels better now, and Canada is nice again.
But the uncomfortable middle of Anger is next, and it cannot be bypassed.
Growing up in conservative evangelicalism, anger (among many other feelings) was not allowed. Whatever someone in leadership said or did was the right thing because he, almost always he, was anointed by God.
Evangelical Christians have conveniently forgotten that the Son of God they claim to follow was often quoted speaking directly against oppression and tyranny, that his anger against hypocrites in religious and governmental power was particularly fierce.
As time passes, we must learn to sit and make friends with the steps of Anger and Depression before Healing and Reparations can take place because I can guarantee you that this summer’s news of mass graves found at Residential Schools will not be the last. Our hearts and illusions are going to be shattered again and again. And with each fresh blow to each Indigenous community, we must be allowed to feel however the fuck we need to feel about it, for an indeterminate amount of time. No exceptions.
What will we do to set up the next seven generations on a path toward healing? How will you fight with us for clean drinking water, for accessible food, for residential schools to be demolished and their records exposed, for truthful education?
Will you protest for families to be reunited, for mental and physical health priority, for forced sterilization to end, for our pregnancies and parenting to be supported?
Will you give up your time and money to our art and music and entertainment without appropriation, for white sage to grow in abundance for our ceremonies, for us to thrive in all Creator has given us?
Will you be okay if you do not see tangible results in your lifetime?
You don’t have to be famous like Gord Downie or The Tragically Hip; if you have social media, you can share from your platform. If you have children, you can teach them. If you have friends and family who are antagonistic, you can speak up.
It all matters.
To continue your re-education, you can visit these places:
- Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery: 18-01-22-Dismantling-the-Doctrine-of-Discovery-EN.pdf (afn.ca)
- The History of Manifest Destiny: www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/manifest-destiny
- Gord Downie’s documentary and music: downiewenjack.ca
- Truth & Reconciliation Report @ trc.ca
- Donate to residential school survivors @ www.irsss.ca
MMIW (Missing & Murderered Indigenous Women, Girls, 2Spirit People) Inquiry @ mmiwg-ffada.ca - Safe Water For First Nations @ canadians.org/fn-water
- Indigenous History Month @ www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca
Read it, face it, mourn it, teach it, learn from it.
But, for the love of God, do not get over it.
Carly Butler is an Indigequeer wife and disability mama living in Langley, BC. She survived a childhood of religious conspiracy theories and illegal immigration – only to wonder if she’s going to survive this pandemic and writing a memoir. She copes using her children’s laughter, nature walks, adult colouring and dramatic TV. This is her first publication; she hopes it won’t be her last.
