Our Town Reckons with the Severed Hand

February 11, 2024

In our town on Thursday night a long-planned event of witness occurred.  In our town people from different local organizations, including myself, sponsored this event because we believe it is time for us to confront our history of violence and harm and racism towards our Wabanaki citizens.  In our town, friends and neighbors came out into the too-warm February night prepared, I believe, to be moved, to be changed. 

It was Eric Smith, the Director of the Freeport Historical Society and one time star on this same stage of Our Town, who introduced the evening’s event: a screening and panel discussion of the movie Dawnland, released in 2019, an award-winning documentary about the emotional, social, and cultural harm to generations of Wabanaki parents and children caused by very recent child welfare practices which forcibly removed children from their tribe and family. 

“Some of what you are about to see,” Eric advised, “is very painful and may stir up some deep feelings.  We understand that and urge you to breathe deeply, put your feet on the floor, and know we are here for you.”  I had seen the movie at the Portland Museum of Art when it first came out. At that time the faces and stories floated over my body like a sad gray cloud, but this time, my experience with Dawnland was very different.

The entire transcript of the movie is online here.  Below is a tiny sample of the testimonies taken by Maine’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the TRC, between 2012 and 2015 and recorded in the movie:  

Georgiana:

My baby sister and I sat in a tub of bleach…we're getting white…they would accept us. The boys… said we were dirt … used for one thing. Where was the state?... that was supposed… to have been our guardians? How come it took so long…. for you all to get a group together to see if they can help us?

Donna May;

I had my mouth washed out with soap…for speaking Penobscot. We were put in a very racist home, where, um, the foster mother was part of that… whole '50s push to, uh, kill the Indian to save the man…I was going to my first pow-wow and, uh, I did nothing but hide, because I didn't know how to dance.

Welfare Worker:

The basic notion in child welfare among the child protective people…was, quote, "The apple doesn't fall from the tree" …it's a good idea to get them away from their family.

Welfare Worker: Two sneakers for the feet sometimes is more important than …

I am not sure how coherently I can describe my experience when, after the movie had been screened and the audience invited to speak, I stood at the back of the old First Parish Church, which now houses Meetinghouse Arts, and looked out over the crowd of a hundred people sitting in the pews before me and up at the four women panelists on stage and listened as a Wabanaki woman, with two of her siblings beside her, stood and courageously told her story of being taken from her parents as an infant and placed in the home of a white racist foster family. 

With the force of a powerful waterfall, I had the unnerving sensation that life was flowing back into the whole right side of my body, taking up a vast hollow space, a space I hadn’t recognized as vacant, as silent, still, like an empty room in an empty house.  Still and unnourished.  Still and separate.  Cut off.  As the space filled, I felt tears come to my eyes and gratitude for being made more whole, for being trusted with this pain, for the gift of witness and the gift of possible healing and connection.  

At the end of the evening, the empty space in my body was thronged with people I hadn’t known before and with their stories and all the accompanying pain that those stories carry.  Surrounded by community, I was able to face what happened to all of us.  The Wabanaki were torn from their families, and we privileged white people tried to erase them from their land and their culture.  We treated them as dead people even before they were dead.  My grief, compassion, horror, shame, guilt: all of it filled that once empty part of my body.  Experiencing all those feelings was far better than the empty void that was there before. 

Being part of a system designed not to know diminished my consciousness, shrank my humanity, robbed me of my ability to face pain and make amends and have compassion.  I recognize that the silent, empty, dead space that was in my body is in no way comparable to what was taken from the Wabanaki people, but I feel it is important to recognize how the unexamined racist system is harmful to all of us. 

Face pain.  It is an honor to be asked to face pain with another.  Life is filled with pain and no drug or behavior modification technique will diminish that pain. But compassion will, which is ultimately what the movie demonstrates and what the organization, Wabanaki Reach, so brilliantly and courageously addressed in its Truth and Reconciliation work as shown in this movie and continue to address in the work they undertake today. 

Which brings me back to love.  So much that we love is now threatened with the same kind of violence and extinction that the Wabanaki have faced. And for many of the same reasons. One image in the Audubon newsletter has stayed with me this week:  an image of a loon on a partially frozen inland lake slowly dying inside a small circle of water with too small a circumference for it to take fight towards open ocean where most winters, before the climate warmed and threw off the loon’s instinct to leave at the proper time, this loon found her home, her family. 

To love anything is at some point to face pain.  A lover will die. Or leave us.  A child will falter.  A mother will fall into depression.  It takes courage to love.  And I fear that since so much of what we love is suffering, too many of us will shut down to the love of all these things because it just hurts too much.  

But Thursday night taught me something else about love and facing pain: that facing it together makes it so much more possible, transforms the act into one that feels right, and do I dare say, holy.  Watching Dawnland from inside a church with darkened stained-glass windows surrounded by my community which intentionally came together to witness these terrible stories: surely this was a holy act. 

I offer you the image of my half empty body as warning of the consequences of not facing pain, together, with intention and love.  This sensation of wholeness from embracing harm and violence returns me to last week’s blog and Robins Jeffers’ poem, “The Answer”, which not coincidentally, contains the image of the severed hand.  In that blog I wrote that Jeffers “urges us to reckon with that hand and with the forces that created the severed hand and then to be merciful.” Reckoning with the severed hand is indeed what was going on inside that old church Thursday night at Meeting House Arts.

I am grateful for all the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, for Wabanaki Reach, for my friends who sat beside me and shared witness and compassion and look forward to continuing this work here in our town.