The Power of Shared Grief

U.S. civil rights lawyer and activist Valarie Kaur once observed, "When people who have no obvious reason to love each other come together to grieve, they can give birth to new relationships.”

When members of the Remembering Project gather this week to visit the Mohawk Institute, we will come face to face with an institution that harmed thousands of children. We will meet survivors who still carry the pain of that place. We will pay our respects at the memorial for the 100 or more children who died there.

“We come to know people when we grieve with them through stories and rituals. It is how we can build real solidarity, the kind that points us to the world we want to live in—and our role in fighting for it….America’s greatest social movements … were rooted in the solidarity that came from shared grieving. First people grieved together. Then they organized together….When people who have no obvious reason to love each other come together to grieve, they can give birth to new relationships.”

• Valarie Kaur, Revolutionary Love

A good friend shared an honest moment with me recently. She feels terrible about what Canada did with residential schools. They also feel terrible about the war in Gaza. But there is only so much pain one can realistically confront.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot in the past few weeks because it raises a question about why we confront the legacy of residential schools.  Particularly compared to all the other kinds of pain happening in the world.

In a sense, the Remembering Project is an invitation to grieve. it’s impossible to confront the loss of so many innocent lives, and the trauma caused to so that lived, and not be affected by the enormity of the loss.

I can tell when a fellow Canadian has internalized the reality of residential schools when I see that reaction. It’s not an easy feeling to carry.

But of all the human emotions, grief is an emotion meant for sharing.

As members of the society created residential schools, it will be difficult to confront the harm done in the school we will visit this week. The Mohawk Institute was designed to take members of proud nations, like the Hodinohsho:ni, and turn them into us. The harm done there was done in our name – to create a nation in our image, not theirs.

We won’t find forgiveness there. We will not receive absolution. Nothing that we do in the Remembering Project will bring those thousands of children back to life, or undo the abuse that survivors endured. The damage has been done.

But we can grieve. And in grieving, we open the possibility of a new relationship.

And as Kaur notes, those relationships can accumulate into something bigger. Through shared grieving, we can build a coalition for change.

We can grieve for the children of Gaza and the children of Israel too. But when we grieve for the impact of residential schools, we create the possibility of relationships here, where we live, where we can make change happen.