Dreams of Deaths at a Residential School

 As I learned about what has been happening to the Natives of North America, in the "Indian Residential Schools", it felt like a knife was twisting in my soul. My heart ached, for those children and their parents. My pain started stumbling through the creation of this blog, in order to share the videos and help make a stand for the Natives. I felt a deep connection to it all and was grappling with why. I had not attended the schools. But a deep, gut wrenching pain kept surfacing and it seemed to be because of more than my Native blood and more than my empathy for the Native children who suffered in the schools and the parents who lost their children. It felt like my soul and spirit were somehow directly connected to the whole horrible situation. It felt like a deep aching wound in my heart and soul. I wondered if my mother's generation, or her mother's generation, may have been victims of the residential schools. But then I decided that they were not, because my mother was only about half Native and her mother had married an English man. So, I closed the door on my wondering. But the night after I decided that they were not victims of the schools, (March 10, 2021) I had a dream which pointed in the other direction and was telling me to turn back around and look again. 
In the dream; I'm walking on my property and look at the wall of a red brick building, next to my house. Then I turn around and am walking away. Then I stop and turn back toward it and walk over to take a closer look. I see that it has a small door, and several small crosses, way down on the foundation of the building/wall. The door is miniature - about one foot high and is wooden and arched and closed. The crosses were really little. I am standing there looking at them when I wake up.

   What a cross means to me is the murder of what is innocent and sacred, so this is what the crosses mean in the dream. The fact that the door and crosses are really small, implies being about little children. And the door and crosses being at the foundation, implies something about murdered children in or around the basement of a red brick building.
   As I thought about the dream I remembered my mother telling me that her mother had twelve children and that five of them had died. She never told me how they died, but I am now wondering. Judging by this dream and the depths of feelings I've had connected with the whole "Indian boarding school" thing it looks like my mother and her siblings did go to a residential school and that up to five of them may have died there. I feel a heavy weight in my heart and tears keep welling up and I wish I could be sure of the truth. I prayed for answers on what happened to my aunts and uncles.

After this I had two more dreams (March 11th and 15th); one showed a small group of children running from adults in an institution. One of them gets caught and is being beaten on the floor and then the others turn around to fight the attackers and save him. The dream did not show what happened after that, but it was children fighting for their lives against adults in an institution, which makes it pretty clear. The other dream showed an adult throwing a boy into a river to drown. His little sister is crying and his mother is in shock and noone is there to comfort the little girl. Are these dreams about my aunts and uncles? It appears so, because I had prayed for answers after the first dream. I am really struggling with all of this right now.

I wrote the following poem after the first dream.

Residential School 

One large brick wall,
Red as a child's blood.
Five little crosses
Rise out of the mud,
Next to a closed door
That was hard to see.
It blocked the cries
That need reach me.
But I turned around
And then I heard.
And now my tears
Drip into words.
Oh dear God,
Bring your Light
For all the children
Killed in that night
And all the others
Who carry pain
Into the future
For evil's gain.
Oh please, God,
Set us free -
My aunts, uncles,
Mother and me,
And the rest
Of humanity.

  There has been some confusion about my Native blood. Although my mother told me we are partly Native, other people have told me that its not true. It appears that my mother was telling me the truth and that there have been efforts to hide this truth. Since the dreams I had about the residential schools there is no doubt left in my mind - I know that there is Native blood on my mother's and her mother's side of our family and that there have been efforts to wash it away and pretend that it did not exist.
   I have felt the Native part of me in my heart, soul and spirit since I was a very young child. My title - "Return of Native Spirit" was originally a call for the healing of the Heart/Spirit of all Native people - it was about returning to the true Heart and Spirit of the Native people.  But it is also about me. Although I do not completely fit into any box of any race, my heart and spirit have naturally felt more connected to many of the old Native ways than to any other way, throughout all of my life.