Ojbway graveyard by the residential school

By Richard Wagamese

My brother Jack had passed away before I made it back to my people. I was twenty four and all I learned about my brother was what I learned through stories and recollections. I’d never really had a brother and the idea of never having met him hurt a lot.

I found out where he’d been laid to rest and I drove out there one day to pay my respects and maybe say a few words to the wind and cry. There was a graveyard set beyond the yard of the residential school that my family had attended.

The graves were all unmarked. That struck me as odd just as the fact that the edges were marked by barbed wire stuck on posts that were broken and rotting. The grass was uncut and there were no flowers to be seen. It looked like a lonely, sad place to rest.

It seemed odd to me. My people’s very idea of god sprang from the ground in which they were laid and yet there was nothing to proclaim this as a sanctuary or even as a resting place. If anything it seemed abandoned and uncared for. Even the wind was lonely.

Across the road was the graveyard for the nuns and priest who’d died while working at the school. Their graves were marked by elaborate and ornate marble and granite headstones, carefully carved with names and dates and epitaphs. The grounds were carefully tended.

I thought about what I had been taught of the bible and religion in the homes I lived in. Suffer the children to come unto me. I remembered that. It was a bitter irony that the children who lay there were forgotten, cast aside by those who pretended to care for them.

I’d heard it said that we Indians never say goodbye. Standing there looking for the unmarked grave of a brother I had never met I came to doubt that was true. No people in their right minds or hearts would cling to the sad effigies of residential schools.

I cried for my brother that day. I cried for all of them who’d lived with the knowledge that someone once thought that they were less than human deserving nothing in the end but an unmarked plot of earth. Keep your blessing for yourselves, I said to the ghosts of nuns and priests. In the end you’re the ones who need them.