Dear Dutta Dibakar,
I liked the article you wrote on the missing children, dated July 2, 2021. I just wanted to say when I was in outpatient treatment we did a lot of different things for awareness. I remember we did an annual awareness walk for the children that went missing in the residential schools, we wore orange shirts and walked and smudged and drummed. It was a beautiful day to do an event like that. This took place in Bemidji, Mn. I would love to continue to do more walks and spread awareness throughout the U.S because what they did was very wrong and they should be punished for what they did to those children.
What people are feeling is what I feel reading these articles: anger, pain, resentment, hatred…a lot of feelings. I just wish we could do more to help and bring back happiness to the families that lost their loved ones in the residential schools. What I don’t understand is that people say burning churches is a “hate crime” and a “violent crime against the Catholic community”. What about what they did to the kids? Where were you when they were getting sexual abused? What about being beaten when they spoke the native language? Or when they were starved?
All of that was wrong, and people want to say that the churches being burned down is a crime against Catholic communities? What about the crimes of killing the indigenous children, there is a lot of crime there but no one wants to say anything about it. That is what I don’t understand, over 3,200 to 6,000 kids died or went missing and there is nothing being done about it. All we find are just a whole lot more graves and it’s going to keep continuing to go up.
I am very disturbed to know that some of my ancestors were in those schools and I can’t even ask questions about it because my family says, “it is a very tragic thing to discuss at your age”. Some of the girls and boys in those schools were sexually abused and beaten and the girls got pregnant from it and were forced to give up their babies and the babies were killed and people wonder why I have hate for the Catholic community.
I don’t attend church for these reasons, they talk about things like “violence is a sin”, “lying is a sin”, “you get punished for the bad crimes you do”, okay? So why ain’t you in prison being punished for your sins, the violence? Everything they did is very sinful and wrong and yet they want to call themselves a “Christian” or a “child of God” and than they keep going to church not knowing or maybe even caring that there could be a whole cemetery of indigenous children under them and they don’t even know it until the church gets burned and they dig up the land.
