by John Holman
I am cursed with my eyes being the light: I see everything that was once in darkness. In my past is a wreckage trail of loved ones, despair, loss, anguish and rage.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission may have touched on this tragedy on a national scale, but on an individual basis, we who suffered carry this conflict with us still. It is not even my direct legacy, but of those before me and I and my children, still got caught up in it.
I did not want to bury my papa upon his apparently gruesome and painful end. I was so full of loathing and hatred that I was relieved he had met his maker. I knew my judgment would not be in accordance with such higher grace and dignity, so I merely let this go. That is, instead of working through it, I just released the pent-up rage and my hostility against him. Intuitively, I knew his behavioural problems that led to familiar abuse could be traced directly back to the barbaric colonization activities of his time.
Still, I roil in this post-colonialist dissatisfaction, screaming and letting tears fly, gripping the rusty bars holding me in. Nobody sees this aspect of myself; they see a mask. I experience this in my id and sometimes my ego, gushing with anxiety on occasion for no reason.
It was because I was afflicted with this syndrome of residential schools that immolated our ancestral identity, that I too, lost even my own children, my love and myself. Alcohol has a place in joy and ritual, but maybe not so with intimate and personal problem-solving.
In spite of such behavioural and cognitive disadvantages that come with inter-generational dysfunction, I still strive for common sense, decency and esprit de corps. This much remains from the cross-cultural flux our Indigenous peoples have gone through: A stiff upper lip.
Luckily, I am also gifted with the virtue of stubbornness. This resilience has served me through homelessness, madness, disenfranchisement and guilt. I would not be who I am without suffering, even that which is self-imposed, but I have no doubt I would have been happier without it; that is, if I had grown up with my parents on the land, living wild. What I missed in life, is what they missed, our heart in the land. Such love is described by our southern cousins in prayer: “There is beauty behind me, beauty in front of me, beauty beside me, beauty above me, beauty below me, beauty all around me.”
I cannot put together my past from its crumbled pieces, but I can cherish the good and the breath in this moment, for there still is a future. This is my truth for now and reconciliation will not be its equal for some time, perhaps never. Still, the sun also rises each day and at the end of it, must go into that good night.