Letter to the editor: Truth, Reconciliation, and Healing

** Trigger warning: readers may be triggered by the recount of Indian Residential Schools. To access a 24-hour National Crisis Line, call: 1-866-925-4419. **

As revelations about Canadian Indian Residential Schools continue, those of us who are descendants of survivors face a defining moment in our history. We can choose to emphasize our victimhood, reinforce the narrative of powerlessness that residential schools attempted to instill, and contribute to a growing atmosphere of vengeance and retribution. Or, we can explore ways of escaping from intergenerational trauma.

My grandfather would not want me to vicariously re-live the pain and suffering of his childhood spent in three residential schools in the United States. I believe that he died wanting us to know the never-spoken hidden truth of his childhood. But he did not know how to do this. This realization came to me as I wrote a book about my awakening to Indigenous heritage.

A pivotal moment in this awakening came in 2019 when I attended a performance of Children of God, at the Segal Performing Arts Centre in Montreal. Corey Payette’s powerful musical play about abuses in Canadian residential schools appeared on stage less than a meter from my front-row seat.  Initially, I felt myself an unwilling participant in the recreated world of residential school torments unfolding almost in my lap. And then, at the moment when I felt I might need to leave, I felt my ancestor’s presence and sensed his tearful apology for hiding such an important part of his life from his family. Instead of feeling pain and anger more deeply as I had as the play began, I gradually experienced a sense of relief that the truth was now known and shared. I felt the beginning of a healing process and believe that it was also the beginning of letting go of the bitterness. It was the beginning of healing for my grandfather’s spirit as well as mine. It was liberating.

Then in recent weeks, with revelations about hidden corpses at residential schools, my anger and bitterness began to return. I had nightmares about my grandfather’s last years – seeing him as he sat silent and broken-spirited in a small dark room slowly succumbing to emphysema. He did not invite me into that darkness. At the time, I was puzzled. Now I am beginning to understand that this was not an act of rejection. It was a loving act of protection. He waited until I was old enough to understand that I did not need to embrace the anger and bitterness that he must have struggled with. What I once saw as the weakness of a broken spirit, I now see as strength and wisdom. He knew that the cycle of trauma must be broken. He knew what Nelson Mandela expressed after his decades-long experience of injustice and imprisonment, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies”.

I write on behalf of my grandfather’s spirit and the spirits of thousands of residential school survivors. Their message is clear. Now is the time that the truth is being told.  Let it be the beginning of the end of the pain. Don’t wear the badge of victimhood; don’t continue the trauma.

I write asking my First Nations kin to find it in their hearts to forgive. Not to forget. Nothing is to be gained by recycling settler colonist hatred. We are above this. Our time has come and the world is looking to us for examples of healing the planet. They are also looking for inspiration about how to escape downward spirals of racism, anger and retribution. Let us show them a better way: our concept of restorative justice where both victims and victimizers collaborate in healing by exchanging repentance and forgiveness.

Randy Kritkausky is the author of Without Reservation: Awakening to Native American Spirituality and the Ways of Our Ancestors. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation tribe. He lives in Lachine Quebec and Vermont.