Content note: references residential school abuse
On my desk at home, I have a small framed photograph, an inch square, one of those black and white school pictures. In it, I’m about five, a bit of a smile, neat brown hair clipped back in a barrette. It was taken at about the time my mother first told me that I was half Indian.
The kitchen is small with one window over the table where we eat. My mother stands at the stove. Potatoes are boiling in the pot. I can hear the water bubbling, potatoes bumping.
I will soon start kindergarten, so maybe it is late August. She says she has something to tell me. I’m about to set the table, a bundle of forks in my hand. She stops what she’s doing and looks at me intently. I stand still to listen.
“You are half Indian,” she says in an even voice.
I’m thrilled to hear it, the specialness of being something that I didn’t know I was. Like finding out I’m part dragonfly.
Then her face changes to even more serious and her voice drops a little.
“But if anyone asks you about your background when you go to school,” she continues, “say you’re of English descent.”
My father is English. She is Mohawk. We visit my dark-haired cousins in the country on the farm where my grandfather waits by the window for our car to pull in. We visit my light-haired cousins in the city, where my father’s two sisters live. I am of both but I am to claim only one, only my father’s side.
I don’t know why this is so, but I can tell that it’s important by the way my mother is speaking directly to me, a little girl. Did she tell my brother when he started school? She waits a moment to see if I understand. I nod. She turns back to her task.
“Of English descent.” The words feel foreign when I say them to myself, metallic in my mouth. I don’t question her. Just as I know to keep my dress down so my underpants don’t show, and not to talk about vomit at the dinner table, I know now not to say I’m Indian. And the thrill I felt at being special dies in me. I place the forks carefully, one on the left side of each plate, as I’ve been taught.
* * *
I didn’t find out that my mother had attended a residential school until long after she had died. When residential schools were in the news some years before, I had asked her if she had gone to one and she said no. But then she did say, once, that she had attended “the Mohawk Institute.” She spoke of it proudly, as if it were an elite school, prestigious. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that the Mohawk Institute was one of the oldest and longest-running residential schools in Canada, operating from 1834 to 1970. My mother’s father, William, and her grandfather, Elijah, both went there in the 1800s. By the time I put together that she might have been a day student there in the early 1900s, my mother was long gone, and any talk of what it was like for her there, buried with her.
I tried to visit the Institute once with my daughter but the building was closed for renovations. We toured the Woodland Cultural Centre next to it instead, walking through a maze of dioramas and plaques detailing the history of our people. We saw the art installation of wooden doors that had been removed from the school, now painted, with audio recordings by Native artists. But it wasn’t until I took a virtual tour of the Institute that the full horror of the place became clear. Known as the “Mush Hole” for the deplorable food, it is a terrible place, redolent still, long after it closed, of neglect and abuse. The children were punished for speaking their Native languages with needles through their tongues. They couldn’t communicate with their visiting parents who didn’t speak English. The docent spoke of the sexual abuse in the noisy laundry rooms where screams couldn’t be heard. The mission of the schools was the mandated, systematic stripping away of every vestige of Native life and identity, of pride and dignity. As a day student, my mother would have been spared the worst of the abuse. But how could she not feel the anguish of the children from the Northern bush communities forced to live there, torn from their families and their way of life? How could she not be affected by the directive to denounce her culture and her upbringing? It would have been in the very air she breathed.
* * *
My cousin Carol and I are playing in the vacant house across the field from her place on the reserve. She and her family used to live in this house before moving over to my grandfather’s after he died. I’m visiting for a week as I do in the summer. I’m always a bit afraid that my parents won’t come back for me, but soon I relax into the easeful ways of my country cousins. Carol and I are playing house. Our favourite part of the game involves sneaking a sleeve of Saltine crackers from her house to take to this empty one. We are pretending to be poor orphans with only these crackers to eat and water to drink. We have two bowls and two spoons. We mash the crackers in the bowls and add water. Then we eat the watery mixture. We call this “making mush.”
— Melinda Burns is the daughter of a Mohawk mother and an English father. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, Grain, Canadian Notes and Queries, The Fiddlehead, and One Art. Her collection of poetry, Homecoming (BookLand Press) is forthcoming in 2025. She lives in Guelph, Ontario.
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