Ignorance Needn’t Be Permanent

Several years ago, a Native American friend lost two of her grown children to suicide. They died within thirty-three days of each other. It was a tragedy of monumental proportions with a grief cloud so large and so dense that people only tangentially related to the family were overwhelmed. I was one of them.

At the time, the endless search for meaning swooped far and wide and undergirding it all was the profound need to affix blame. I didn’t think about reasons or blame because I am of the mind that much of life is random, that horrible things happen to people even if they have ‘done everything right.’ But others raised theories, most circling the theme that the parents had not done enough, that they failed in some awful way that better parents would not have. It was sickening.

One of my friend’s other adult children wrote a response to all the blaming in which he talked most eloquently about the historical/intergenerational trauma carried by Native Americans. I had just pulled up to an event about homelessness when I saw his post on Facebook. I sat in my car reading it for a good while and then sat for a good while longer trying to absorb what I’d read.

It was so foreign to me.

I had always regarded trauma as a lived memory – something terrible happened to a person and that person’s life was altered in an unhealable way. But my friend’s son wrote about what almost seemed like the cellular transmission of trauma from one generation to another. I couldn’t comprehend.

After a discussion about her own history, another Indigenous friend sent me a video about Chief Oshkosh, her great (4x) grandfather and then videos about the boarding schools including survivors’ heartbreaking firsthand stories. The impact on me was profound. I didn’t know this history, but I also had never made the effort to learn.

But ignorance never has to be a permanent state.

I finished The Plot Against Native America, which focuses on the damage done by boarding schools) and I’m about to start An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (which, I guess, is everything, the print is very small). It’ll take me months to get through.

I’ve got time and a fair amount of motivation. There’s a lot of blank space in my brain where this kind of history should be stored. Time to pack it in.