My mother, a boarding school survivor, once told me that children would disappear all the time. “Back to the reservation?” I asked her. “No, they would simply vanish, and we would never see them ever again,” she said. #KamloopsIndianResidentialSchool
Mom escaped, not ran away, from their boarding school 3 times. Her first 2 attempts were thwarted by clergy staff. But on her third try she made it to her unci’s (grandmothers.) My great unci hid her in her basement. Kinda like an Indigenous Anne Frank—Probably saved her life.
The abuses my father suffered at his boarding school are unmentionable. I remember him in the darkness of the night, insufferably crying in his sleep. And my mother, always slept with the lights on. Too afraid to revisit her boarding school trauma. And its accompanying nightmare.
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