I just finished reading In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resilience by Helen Knott. Right at the beginning, the author tells me that she did not write this book for me:
“I did not write this book so that people can learn how to humanize Indigenous women and gain context for the violence that seems to fill our lives.”
I read the book with an eye to better understanding the context of her life, especially because we are close in age and she grew up in Northern BC, not far from where I grew up. The person who wrote the foreword, Eden Robinson, is the sister of one of my high school classmates.
Helen grew up in Northeastern BC. I grew up in Northwestern BC. I know the towns and roads she mentions in the book. And yet I know so little about the life that she led. The colonial town of Kitimat, where I lived, was fifteen kilometres from the reservation of Kitamaat, home of the Haisla Nation. I was naive and shielded from the lives of the kids from Kitamaat.
I am glad that she wrote this for herself and others like her, but also that she was willing to share it with people like me who want to gain a deeper understanding of her experience.
At one point in the book she says:
“I used to believe that sexual abuse was exclusively an ‘Indian girl’ experience when I was growing up. I remember when I met my first Indian girl at age fourteen who hadn’t been sexually abused and I was so confused. I did not know that it was something that did not happen to all of us.”
This brought tears to my eyes, but it also brought back a memory from my first year of university that has always troubled me. B, who lived across the hall from me, was studying early childhood education. She commented that, for some Indian cultures, molestation was part of the culture. I do not think she meant harm in saying that; rather, she struggled with it. It was said in a way that challenged our understanding of what is right and wrong, asking if molestation is wrong if it is part of the culture. But the assumption that molestation was part of the culture in the first place was not questioned. It was stated as a fact, and that is the part of the conversation that troubled me. Could that really be the case?
This was before the damage of residential schools was widely known within the colonial culture. I had heard about residential schools and how they were bad, but I did not know much beyond that. We were still living with the ramifications of a generation who did not learn how to parent. Worse, many of the parents in this community had grown up being molested by those in authority at residential schools. Rather than molestation being part of Indigenous culture, it was part of the colonial culture that was enforced upon those who lived through residential schools.
Looking back more than twenty years later, I think about the comment that B made, and I see it in a different light. I do not have an answer to that light, other than to try to better understand what has happened and to do everything I can to not judge others in my community who have lived through so much intergenerational trauma. I cannot even imagine it.
In reading this book, I find hope that the current and future “Indian girl experience” may no longer involve sexual abuse. I pray that our future world can be without that trauma.
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