A few months ago I sat with a group of elders. Some of them had lived through the boarding schools themselves. Not read about them in a textbook the way I had. Lived them. I didn’t walk into that room with a prepared speech. I just told them the truest thing I had: I honor your experience. I respect you as elders, and I want you to keep telling your stories to as many people as will listen. We have to heal. But we cannot forget.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing I came to say. We must heal. But we must not forget.
I’ve thought about that sentence more than almost anything else I’ve ever written, because it holds two things that aren’t supposed to fit in the same hand. Healing asks you to lay something down. Remembering asks you to keep carrying it. For a long time I thought those were opposites — that getting better meant letting go, full stop, no exceptions. I don’t think that anymore.
By the time I sat in that room, I’d already spent months walking back through my own inheritance. The breakfast table where a truth got announced once and never discussed again. The enrollment card with a newborn’s name on it, filed by a government deciding who counted and who didn’t. The pasture grass bending one way and then the other, never breaking, never given a say in which direction the wind would push it next. Every piece of that inheritance taught me the same thing the elders were teaching me in that room, just on a different scale. You don’t get to choose what gets handed down to you. You only get to choose what you do with it once it’s in your hands.
I don’t look Native. I know that. I’m aware of it every time I stand in front of a room full of Native women and open my mouth. I carry my ancestry in my blood and my name and my history, but not in my face, and in spaces where identity has been questioned and stripped away for generations, that matters. I don’t ask for a pass. I just want the room to know that I know.
What I also know is this. When I get the chance to sit with my Native sisters, we are not strangers to each other’s pain. We are neighbors in it. Different nations, different specific histories, different ceremonies and languages — and underneath all of it, the same grief, handed down the same way grief always gets handed down: quietly, without anyone asking permission first.
Here’s what I’ve learned from all four of these pieces together, not just this last one. The pattern running through a family, the silence at the breakfast table, the documents that reduce a person to a roll number, the land itself carrying weight older than any of us — none of that is destiny. Understanding where it came from is not the same as accepting that it gets to define you. It’s more like finally getting a diagnosis for something you’ve been living with for years without a name. The diagnosis doesn’t give you the illness. You already had it. What it gives you is a path toward treating it.
You didn’t choose the roots. But you get to decide what grows from them.
That’s true whether your inheritance runs through a boarding school or a breakfast table, a war or a quiet abuse nobody named out loud, an enrollment card or a name you didn’t get told until you were sixteen. The specific history is different for every one of us. The weight is different. The particular shape of what got handed down is different. But the decision belongs to all of us the same way — the moment a woman looks at everything she inherited and says, I am the one who ends this here.
We must heal. But we must not forget.
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