Native American Heritage Month 2018: Children's books to break your heart

Last year's reading covered a lot regarding education and residential schools too, but this year was largely built upon one list:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/10-books-about-residential-schools-to-read-with-your-kids-1.3208021

(This is a CBC list so these are Canadian books, but the US has Carlisle and others, so we don't get to cast stones.)

I read all but Kookum's Red Shoes, because I could not find a copy. I also read an additional book by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, Not My Girl, a picture book version of A Stranger At Home. (It looks like there is a corresponding picture book for Fatty Legs as well.)

You may notices that Nicola Campbell has two books also, Shi-shi-etko and Shin-chi's Canoe. In both cases the books divide up the story. One book tells you more about home life, and one about school life. Putting both situations in the same book heightens the contrast, but breaking it down over two books allows more detail.

I'm not saying that I have a preference for one technique over the other, but having read the paired books earlier, I think I may have felt the contrast more. These children had loving homes, where they were valued as beloved children and able to contribute to their families as they learned their traditional ways of life. Then they were taken from those homes to far away where long, hard work that didn't teach them a lot was common, along with insufficient food and clothing, punishment for using their own names and language, and where there was frequently physical and sexual abuse.

(The sexual abuse is not treated in the picture books. It is in some of the chapter books, but not treated graphically. For an adult perspective on the schools, try The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir, by Joseph Auguste Merasty with David Carpenter.)

The part that cut me most was Margaret Pokiak-Fenton's homecoming, as told in both A Stranger At Home and Not My Girl. That's what her mother said to her. "Not my girl." Not after two years away, having forgotten most of her language, and having grown very thin and no longer being used to their food. Things got better, but the trauma was real.

None of the books this year spent a lot of time on illness, but from other reading I know there are children that never made it back.

One of the aspects that came up in studies last year was that there were parenting knowledge gaps. During important developmental times, parents and children were separated, and they were not learning good family patterns or discipline or even healthy expression of affection.

I have long been aware of issues that can happen when a child's primary language gets substituted for another.

The new thought this year was how not getting sufficient food during growth spurts would have long-lasting effects as well.

I have read about generational trauma being carried down genetically. I don't doubt the science of that, but there is so much else wrong there to affect physical and mental health.

So the thing that I couldn't help but think as I was reading was that they should have killed every single white person that came over. There should have been no trust, no benefit of the doubt. They should have killed us all.

I know there are impracticalities with that. I don't exactly wish I were dead (not for that, anyway). Also, with buffalo slaughter and infected blankets and Sand Creek, Maria's Massacre, and Wounded Knee, there were plenty of other reasons to kill us all, but the one I get stuck on is the children. It was wrong. It didn't need to be that way.

Maybe it stings more to know that we are caging brown children today and not giving them sufficient care. It's not even being condemned to repeat it because we didn't learn; the people making the decisions know what they are doing.

And that's as dark as I will get for this year's reading. There is horror every year, it isn't even completely new information, but I understand people who want to burn the whole place down. The only reason not to is because it causes so much more pain before any healing begins, and it doesn't put us in a particularly good place to start healing efforts either. That will require love instead of hate.