Maggie Hodgson - Speaking My Truth

is made up of water. Our tears are water. Tom Badger, an Elder from Beaver
Lake, said, “Rain cleanses the earth and our tears cleanse our souls.” 5
Water spirit is a gift we use when we cry. In residential school, many people
learned not to cry. When children cried in residential school and there was
no response except, “I’ll give you something to cry for!” they learned to shut
down sadness. Over time, they built such a wall around their sadness that
when they cry now, they say, “I broke down.” When children cried themselves
to sleep because they missed their parents so much, they eventually learned
they could cry all they wanted but they were still not going home. This is
one of the roots of poor mental health. The sense of abandonment was
experienced by many children. They wondered why their parents did not
come to visit them. After one hundred years, there was not much water spirit
left; in its place was hopelessness, a deep sense of abandonment, and anger.
This proved to be fertilizer for suicide and addictions.
In the mid-1800s, French sociologist Emile Durkheim spoke about the
result of attempts to replace the values and beliefs of one group of people
with those of another. 6 When those attempts are unsuccessful, the result is
anomie, a sense of hopelessness and alienation from traditional values and
beliefs that can result in social problems such as addictions and suicide.
A recent publication, Suicide Among Aboriginal People in Canada, notes
that Durkheim’s theory “still provides a useful way to understand some
of the harmful effects of social breakdown and disruption in Aboriginal
communities that have come from colonization, forced assimilation, and
relocation.” 7 Reversing the effects of hundreds of years of social disruption
and alienation will take time. Reconciliation for the collective is a long-term
process. Thank the Creator we are in that process in many people’s lives.
Collective Reconciliation
The road to addressing trauma and reconciliation did not just start with the
current litigation. 8 Our community had to first deal with the impact of the
removal of ceremony—the community dysfunction that resulted from the
removal of ceremony as well as the disruption of family support systems and
loss of loved ones.
Most people who attended residential school focus on their experience of
the abuse they suffered there; however, they usually only speak in private
about the abuse and neglect they may have suffered within their own family
or society. The years of alcoholism and violence experienced within families
and communities from about the 1950s to the 1970s has not been addressed in
the same public way as the residential school experience. Many people prefer
to see these issues as being the result of colonization. That is a political world
364 | Maggie Hodgson