I had not thought that death had undone so many

The first of the mass graves of children was officially excavated in Canada this week.

Everywhere people are talking about the 215 children found in that grave, from age 3 on up. Everywhere they are grieving and honouring.

I've always lived a little in the future. Working in forestry, on the landbase with the Indigenous Nations whose children these are, I've had to learn about our history with these Nations both professionally and personally. I live in a town that's very Indigenous, maybe 30-40% of the folks in town depending on how you look at it?

And so I know that 215 is the tip of a very large iceberg.

Canada's policy of removing children and sending them to these residential schools lasted a very long time. A very high percentage of these children died, the figure I've heard most recently was around 25%. 1 in 4. The abuse in these schools was horrific so it's not just that these kids died. These kids died far from home while enduring the kind of tortures Christians describe in their hell. They were buried by their surviving siblings and friends and other fellow children who then went home and, having experienced only institutional abuse sometimes for a couple generations, tried to parent their children.

Mourning these 215 children, seeing them, is a release. They are loved in death, as they were no doubt loved at a distance by powerless parents in life. But there are so many to come, so many, so many.

I was abused a little as a kid, not enough to really grasp the enormity of this but enough to know that with enough support I could come back from it and find love and connection and trust in the world again. The Nations as a whole are doing this, their people slowly knitting themselves back towards wholeness.

I had that chance so I know what it would have meant to not have it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that no one in the world would save me, that there were people cruel enough to make that happen and no kindness was powerful enough to stop it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that the balance of the world was against me.

None of this is new. The exact numbers aren't known because when too many kids at these schools started dying Canada stopped keeping count. The Catholics who ran the schools may have numbers but they aren't telling. The official, likely very low numbers, are in the thousands. This has been sitting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission website since 2015, along with some calls to action to try and fix things (this is the "reconciliation" Canada talks about). I had to learn about it in a couple different places in school, and in communities with any reasonable sized First Nation population it's just known; many of these folks went to the schools and basically all their parents did, after all.

But there's something about seeing this exact number going around, 215, that's so hard for me. Maybe it's the press of the rest of them, waiting.

There's nothing about this that was ok. Genocide, knowledge loss, family separation, abuse, death, removing people from their ecosystems: none of it was ok.

This week I am carrying grief for the as-yet-uncounted dead.

It's bigger than I am.

I had not thought that death had undone so many

The first of the mass graves of children was officially excavated in Canada this week.

Everywhere people are talking about the 215 children found in that grave, from age 3 on up. Everywhere they are grieving and honouring.

I've always lived a little in the future. Working in forestry, on the landbase with the Indigenous Nations whose children these are, I've had to learn about our history with these Nations both professionally and personally. I live in a town that's very Indigenous, maybe 30-40% of the folks in town depending on how you look at it?

And so I know that 215 is the tip of a very large iceberg.

Canada's policy of removing children and sending them to these residential schools lasted a very long time. A very high percentage of these children died, the figure I've heard most recently was around 25%. 1 in 4. The abuse in these schools was horrific so it's not just that these kids died. These kids died far from home while enduring the kind of tortures Christians describe in their hell. They were buried by their surviving siblings and friends and other fellow children who then went home and, having experienced only institutional abuse sometimes for a couple generations, tried to parent their children.

Mourning these 215 children, seeing them, is a release. They are loved in death, as they were no doubt loved at a distance by powerless parents in life. But there are so many to come, so many, so many.

I was abused a little as a kid, not enough to really grasp the enormity of this but enough to know that with enough support I could come back from it and find love and connection and trust in the world again. The Nations as a whole are doing this, their people slowly knitting themselves back towards wholeness.

I had that chance so I know what it would have meant to not have it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that no one in the world would save me, that there were people cruel enough to make that happen and no kindness was powerful enough to stop it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that the balance of the world was against me.

None of this is new. The exact numbers aren't known because when too many kids at these schools started dying Canada stopped keeping count. The Catholics who ran the schools may have numbers but they aren't telling. The official, likely very low numbers, are in the thousands. This has been sitting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission website since 2015, along with some calls to action to try and fix things (this is the "reconciliation" Canada talks about). I had to learn about it in a couple different places in school, and in communities with any reasonable sized First Nation population it's just known; many of these folks went to the schools and basically all their parents did, after all.

But there's something about seeing this exact number going around, 215, that's so hard for me. Maybe it's the press of the rest of them, waiting.

There's nothing about this that was ok. Genocide, knowledge loss, family separation, abuse, death, removing people from their ecosystems: none of it was ok.

This week I am carrying grief for the as-yet-uncounted dead.

It's bigger than I am.