May 30, 2021 A lost soul…

Joe cried out for his mommy.

She wasn’t there.

He woke up in fear and turned over to look at the kids next to him. The darkness hid the pain and the tears in their eyes. Still, he could here the sobs in the night. Sobs of fear and anguish. All caused by the oppressive instructors that took them from their homes and held them virtual prisoners of a foreign way of life. Joe turned over and closed his eyes wishing for it to all end.

Wishing to go home again.

There was no going home for him and the countless other children he stayed with. Except those that disappeared… did they go home or were they in the freshly turned earth that showed up in the ground behind the building?

Joe didn’t know what happened to his sister Mary. One day she was coughing very badly, and the next she was gone. When he asked the master what happened to her, he turned on him and looked at Joe like he would pounce on him.

“She has gone to seek god.” was the gruff reply from father Williams.

What did god have to do with anything? What was this god they so often spoke about? How could this god that was supposed to be so loving allow such terrible things to happen?

How could this man who claimed to be god’s chosen one, be so cruel to all the kids around him?

Questions continued to wrack Joe’s brain as he closed his eyes and tried to tune out the horror of his life.

Ten years later Joe looked out at the night sky once more. His days in the living hell of the Kamloops Indian School were coming to an end. Soon they would send him off to join the Canadian army and go to war. The white man’s war. A war against evil and oppression. Why was he being sent to fight against evil when he has spent the last ten years living in the clutches of an evil far worse than any he could imagine?

Still… it was a way out.

It had to be a better escape than the other ones he had seen in the last years. Some of his friends just disappeared. Others ran away only to be found frozen, dead on the road only a mile away from their home.

Home… he had no real concept of home anymore. He could barely remember the language of his parents and when he went back to the reserve he saw poverty and decay that shook him to the core. His memories of Christmas were of drunken binges where his mother cried and his father yelled. They were strangers to him and he could barely understand their language. It was a language he had forgotten because to speak it at the school was to invite a beating to his body and his soul.

His soul that was damaged beyond repair.

He would go fight in this foreign war; hopefully he would die. At least the horror of the last ten years would be over.

The old man leaned on the shopping cart. its one wheel was bent sideways and kept it from rolling straight. Joe chuckled to himself when he looked at the broken wheel. It was just like the life he lived. It was bent and broken and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t make it go straight.

Since he was discharged from the army he had wandered aimlessly from job to job, town to town. He could never find peace. He always wound up back inside a bottle and evicted from his homes. He could barely remember all the places he had been since the day he left the military and walked into the unforgiving world of the white man.

By now he was used to all the slurs that were hurled at him. They didn’t hurt anymore. The pain he suffered as a child growing up in the residential school overshadowed any suffering he felt at the hands of the police or the ignorant people that heaped abuse on his tired frame.

His only peace and escape was in the alcohol that numbed his pain. It helped him forget everything.

Those priests and nuns in the school he grew up in should be satisfied. They did their best to get him to forget his culture. They forced him to unlearn his language and took away his connection to mother earth. In the end did they win? There were no winners…

Joe lay on the bench waiting for his life to end. How many others spent their childhood being abused by those that promised to take care of them? He struggled for a moment trying to remember all those he knew. He could no longer remember their faces.

He would never forget the sobs in the night.

As Joe took his last breath he felt the presence of the great spirit lift him up. In his waning moments on earth Joe sent his last thoughts to those poor forgotten souls.

Buried in the ground and buried by the government. The souls that died young and those that died lost and abandoned should be forgotten no more.