We can no longer sit in the privilege of not knowing

Over the past several weeks, a chilling number has steadily ballooned across our headlines: the count of Native children whose remains Canadian First Nations are unearthing across that country’s historical residential schools — schools the U.S. also established in its own territories as but one tactic in its violent colonization of the land Americans now inhabit, many of us ignorant to or in denial of truths like these, even as Native communities persist through their lasting burden.

Colonization rests upon an effective erasure of Indigenous people: of their culture, their language, often their very lives, all under a thin pretext of forcing compliance with a national ideal of what it means to be “civilized.” The boarding schools were one mechanism by which colonizers instituted this effort at the very seed of Native communities, among their children. At these schools, under the guise of education and reform, teachers and administrators punished children for speaking their own languages or otherwise sharing in their cultures. Some of these school leaders abused the young people physically and sexually, traumatizing them well beyond their years within those schools’ walls and destabilizing the communities to which they returned as adults.

If this is news to you, you haven’t been listening. You haven’t heard what Native communities have been telling us for centuries about their experiences of white settlers’ colonization — and not just hundreds of years ago, but through to the very day you are reading these words. At last, some of our highest institutions of power are scratching the surface of their stories, already finding horror and heartbreak beyond comprehension. What they as leaders, and what we as citizens, will do with this knowledge, remains to be seen. Will we shut down in denial or guilt? Or might we proactively learn these truths — about boarding schools, forced removals, calculated massacres, and so many other tactics of colonization — and move through the acknowledgment, apology and grief that will compel us to action?

And if that, then what action? Well, just as Native communities have held these truths for centuries, so too have they held paths forward, only we haven’t listened to those either. Now is a critical moment for us to educate ourselves on these solutions, from honoring treaties and ratifying the UN Declaration of Indigenous Peoples to enacting Free Prior and Informed Consent and engaging in a national truth and conciliation process.

In the next several months, America’s first Native Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, under the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, will undertake a similar investigation to that which First Nations communities have undertaken into Canada’s schools. Doubtless, we will find analogous tragedy in our own soils, and we must educate ourselves in preparation for these truths. More importantly, too, we must open our hearts for the grief and collective healing they will require of us moving forward, centering and amplifying the knowledge and answers Native communities have held out for generations.

Jessica Girard is the founding director of Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition.

Leah Moss is communications director for The Alaska Center.

Veri di Suvero is executive director of Alaska Public Interest Research Group.

Matt Jackson is a climate organizer, Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

Taylor Kendal is communications director for Cook Inletkeeper.

The authors are white-identifying allies seeking to amplify and support Indigenous voices at the decision-making tables in Alaska. They live and work on the unceded lands of Alaska Native Peoples.

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