What are we going to do when they find the bodies?
CW: Boarding schools, death of children, and everything else they’ve ever done.
What are we going to do when they find the bodies?
What are we going to do.
After two years of a pandemic, where we lost more people than we should.
After two years of being unable to mourn the way we would normally.
After two years.
Two hundred.
Three hundred.
Five hundred years.
Not knowing where they went.
But knowing exactly where they went.
And not being able to mourn.
When I found out about the 215, I considered tattooing 215 individual lines on my skin, without ink, invisible, but there.
After the 751, I realized the lines are already there.
They are all over me.
They have always been.
They are all over all of us.
We wear our mourning on our skin, and we cover it up and pretend its not an open wound, a wound that has never healed, will never heal, if we don’t decide what we are going to do.
What are we going to do when they find the bodies?
Are we going to start a hashtag?
Are we going to take to social media, with a handprint on our mouths, and a song recorded, sent to everyone.
Are we going to start a tik tok trend, with the five horrifying things you didn’t know about boarding schools?
Ten shocking truths about the BIA?
What are we going to do when they find the bodies?
Are we going to start a campaign to teach the whites about the bodies they buried?
The children who they snuffed out like a candle, and discarded like trash?
Are we going to parade survivors around and use them to pass a law?
To create a day, a national day of mourning?
What are we going to do when they find the bodies?
Are we going to hypothesize, philosophize and proselytize about the the humanity of people who would do such a thing?
Are we going to say they were monsters?
Are we going to say that not all of them were monsters?
That maybe after the first, second, third body, they stopped seeing the children as human?
Maybe it got easier with each one.
Maybe they never cared.
Maybe they did it on purpose.
What are we going to do when they find the bodies?
Are we going to write another article?
A poem?
A song?
A play?
A pilot?
A movie?
Are we going to just keep digging till we find ourselves down there, in a grave we dug ourselves?
Or are we finally going to mourn?
Are we finally bury them?
To sing their names, dance their songs, cry, weep, wail, lose our fucking minds, rage, fight, demand, destroy, create, crush, take, remove, invoke spirits and mountains and ancestors and love and hate and fight and fight and fight and fight till justice is no longer a question, no longer an ask, no longer a demand, till justice is the story we tell to our children, justice is the story we write on our land, justice is the story we remember, justice is the story we took, and when we look back on what happened, we will know that we have created a world where a child, where OUR CHILD, can say their names in a tongue that was almost cut out of our mouths, reattaches, stitched together and made new, where they can look at their land and know it is theirs, where they can sing their songs, old and new, dance and pray and cry and die when they are old and fat and happy and justice is just a thing, a name, a story we had to fight for long ago, and now they tell their children about what was, and create the stories of what will be, free free free
free
will we become free
how many more bodies do we have to uncover
before we do what we should have a long time ago
i am ready if you are
the children were ready
they still are
what are we going to do
i only ask, because i was a child too
and so were you
“are we not worthy of a city of ash?” — Danez Smith
