On family separations and Indian residential schools

As the brutal separations of asylum-seeking families at the U.S.-Mexico border unfolded last week, my twitter feed was filled with folks writing "this is not who we are!" Quickly, these were countered by others saying, "this is exactly who we are and always have been" - and referencing, among other things, the Indian residential schools that were established in the U.S. (and in Canada) during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Designed to rob indigenous people of their culture, language, and family ties, these schools, where children were forcibly sent to live - apart from their parents - at kindergarten age or younger, were standard practice by colonialist and imperialist powers around the globe. The schools were one way to, essentially, brainwash children into accepting the dominant culture and dampen resistance to the ruling regime. Native American children (and First Nations children in Canada) were forced to have their hair cut, punished for speaking their native languages, made to practice Christianity instead of their native religions, and subjected to physical, mental, and sexual abuse. Tens of thousands died of sickness and malnutrition due to inhumane living conditions.

It should go without saying that separating families in this way has a (to say the very least) demoralizing effect on the parents whose children are taken. Robbed of your dearest, closest people, left with no one to help with daily tasks, unable to pass on treasured and life-giving traditions, what is left for you? And for the children, the loss of your childhood, your identity, and the absence of love reverberates for a lifetime. 

In my research on sports and hockey in indigenous communities I came across a number of people and communities that have been effected in this way by Indian residential schools in the United States and Canada. (I include Canada because, since Seeking the Center takes place in Canada, most of my research was focused there. However, conditions were the same in the United States.)

Michael Robidoux's book about First Nations hockey, Stickhandling through the Margins, has a chapter about the effects of the residential school system on one particular community, the Esketemc First Nation, through generations - effects including extremely high rates of alcoholism and other self-destructive behavior. Their saving grace is that they are coming together in recent years to find solutions. Robidoux describes how they are adopting (and adapting) hockey as a path toward healing.

In his documentary and book They Call Me Chief: Warriors on Ice, Don Marks writes about the fabulously talented Fred Sasakamoose, one of the first, if not the first, First Nations man to play in the National Hockey League. Sasakamoose was taken away from home at age five by force, his parents threatened with imprisonment. He told Marks, "the main thing I remember was the loneliness." At age 14 he ran away from residential school and hid. Despite his recruitment by and contract with the Chicago Blackhawks, he had been traumatized and never escaped the loneliness, the homesickness, and the sense of being different in a strange place. He cut his career short because of it.

Among examples in the U.S., I came across the great Jim Thorpe, Olympic track gold-medalist and professional football and baseball player. In an account of his life by Joseph Bruchac (Jim Thorpe: Original All-American), Thorpe says, "Running away was nothing unusual for a Carlisle student to do. Boys and girls ran away from the school all the time." Carlisle was the last of three residential schools that Thorpe attended, and he ran away from all of them. And though he documents the abusive treatment he and his fellow students experienced, the trauma of being away from home and family seemed to be the hardest thing to take.

Separating families as a way of promoting colonialist, imperialist, and racist agendas and of quelling resistance to the same is not new. We need to learn the history, and learn from the history. We must understand that this strategy as used by the current U.S. administration is not a random thing. It is part of a known pattern and strategy of such regimes and we need to call it out as such.

Addendum: Coincidentally, the New York Times ran an article about indigenous hockey players today, including information about Fred Sasakamoose, referenced above.

Romance, girl power and the Women's March

Romance novels sometimes get a bum rap - denigrated for taking on "trivial" subjects such as love and relationships. And, let's be real: the fact that the majority of their audience is female also earns them a fair amount of disrespect.

I've had enough of this. These so-called "women's issues"  - the issues that concern the creation of families, reproduction, and nurturing - are indisputably central to human life. Let's not allow them to be marginalized.

But I digress (slightly).

Not every novel has to be serious. A thriller in which a secret agent saves the world from an evil overlord can be flighty and fun, and that's fine. By the same token, romance per se is not trivial. It can be quite weighty.

Early on in Seeking the Center, Agnes identifies the force against which she will struggle during the course of the novel. She muses: 

Dad didn't want her to move to Wapahaska. He was afraid that she would never come back. From Wapahaska she would be lured to Thompson, or some other big city, a place that had mutated, like the cannibal Windigo of the old stories, into a silent, howling flash-freeze, parched and ravenous. But instead of feasting on her flesh, it would feast on her spirit.

Agnes was well aware of the dangers, though, and they didn't lurk in any particular geographical location. Being young, female, and brown-skinned meant that she was expendable, and set her up for the worst anyone anywhere cared to dish out. Huddling in fear at home in St. Cyp was no guarantee of safety, much less of vanquishing Windigo and feeding her own spirit.

Traditionally, Windigo is the cannibal spirit of the Algonquin tribes of sub-Arctic Canada, a place where, during the long, cold winters, starvation often threatened. In that difficult environment, in what must rank as one of the cruelest reversals imaginable, Windigo could possess a person so that, instead of feeding their family, that person would eat their family. Notice that the primary issue wasn't that Windigo could cause death, but rather that it could unravel our most important relationships and interdependencies. It could undermine the very foundation of society itself, and threaten the survival of humankind. 

During the centuries since Europeans first came to North America, Windigo has come to represent the greed of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism which, in the words of scholar Grace Dillon, "makes sense because imperialism is cannibalism: the consumption of one people by another." (In my mind, at least, this links up with the longstanding, tragic issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women: these women have simply been consumed.) In Agnes's mind - and in her father's - Windigo is a force that threatens to swallow her up, either physically, spiritually or both.

What I didn't know when I first wrote Seeking the Center was the degree to which, in the traditional Windigo stories, the spirit targets women - often young women - by disrupting their potential marriages and their reproductive and nurturing roles. Windigo was no dummy - it struck at the very heart of the family and therefore of society. But what I also didn't know was that, in those same stories, women are the people most able to defeat Windigo, using tools and attributes associated with their traditional roles: i.e., pots, pans, knives, bodily fluids, and that extra-special something they possess when menstruating.

I bring all this up to say that these northern people put young women and their relationships front and center in the battle for the preservation of society. In Seeking, as in romance in general, the characters are looking to create relationships and, the implication often is, become a family unit, thus perpetuating society and humankind. Male as well as female - people of any gender - these romance characters win their personal battles to the extent that they engage their nurturing impulses, their capacity for love.

As Claude the hockey enforcer says in Seeking, "There's fighting on the outside, but the inside battle is what it's about. You know, taking care of each other." 

Which brings us to today, January 21, 2017, the start of a new era. Windigo threatens. Let's get out our pots and pans, and whatever we've got, and march, and fight. Our families and our society are depending on us.