As long as Palestinians are alive to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz has observed, empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It has nothing to do with them.” Or, put more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.”

Rather, we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought to think of ourselves in relation to the legacy of the shaheed. Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.

Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

For a long 10 minutes, I cried and cried. Overwhelmed by the horrors of the past few days, I walked out of the hospital and found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly, we could turn this city into a film set for war movies. Second World War films and end-of-the-world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood directors. Doomsday on demand.

Who could have the courage to tell Hanna, so far away in Ramallah, that her only sister had been killed? That her family had been killed? I phoned my colleague Manar and asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to delay the news from getting to her. “Lie to her,” I told Manar. “Say the building was attacked by F-16s but the neighbors think Huda and Hatem were out at the time. Any lie that could help.”

In the morning, I rejoined the search for bodies. The building was, as T.S. Eliot would say, “a heap of broken images.” We searchers picked through the ruins under the cricket-like hum of drones we couldn’t see in the sky.

What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn. During the Haitian revolution in the early 19th century, former slaves massacred white settler men, women, and children. During Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, insurgent slaves massacred white men, women, and children. During the Indian uprising of 1857, Indian rebels massacred English men, women, and children. During the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, Kenyan rebels massacred settler men, women, and children. At Oran in 1962, Algerian revolutionaries massacred French men, women, and children. Why should anyone expect Palestinians—or anyone else—to be different? To point these things out is not to justify them; it is to understand them. Every single one of these massacres was the result of decades or centuries of colonial violence and oppression, a structure of violence Frantz Fanon explained decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth.

What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit. And that while what’s happening in Gaza today is a consequence of decades of settler-colonial violence and must be placed in the broader history of that violence to be understood, it has taken us to places to which the entire history of colonialism has never taken us before.

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By Annalisa Bolin 

Years ago, during a stop in Phnom Penh while on a backpacking trip through Southeast Asia, I visited Tuol Sleng, a museum of the Cambodian genocide, and Choeung Ek, the killing fields. Both were places where thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge had been murdered; now, tourists moved along their hallways and paths, mostly in silence. I still remember staring down at my toes in dusty sandals, stopped just short of the human bone fragments coming up through the dirt, as a guide held his hand out to keep me moving.

After leaving, I couldn’t stop thinking about my visit. The terrible history of what had happened at these sites haunted me, as did their material remains, but so did the troubling decision I made to be there at all. Why had I chosen to go to these places? It felt like a responsibility, in a way — to learn about the country I was traveling through, to pay my respects, clumsily, to the dead — but I was disturbed, too, by what I had done. Was I just a voyeur of other people’s pain?

Sites like these fall under the umbrella of what can be called difficult heritage: the places, artifacts, stories, and practices that we have inherited from the past, and use, in some fashion, today. We tangle our presents together with our pasts. As an American I know the stories we tell about our history as a nation, and the icons in which they are rooted: the Liberty Bell; the Mayflower; the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that are on display in the National Archives. People often think of heritage as something they’re proud of, a unifying point around which to coalesce. But heritage comprises the horrible parts of history, too, the ones many would prefer to forget, or over which societies continue to come into conflict. In America, plantations and buildings still standing today, built by enslaved people, are part of our heritage; so are the sites of battles and the stolen lands that were part of the genocide against Native populations. And even more heritage has been lost through neglect and deliberate destruction, as Jill Lepore explains in a story below.

After that trip to Cambodia, I went on to study difficult heritage professionally as an archaeologist and anthropologist of Rwanda. I learned how Rwandans were using the remains of their terrible past — the genocide committed against the Tutsi population in 1994 — in memorials that served as sites of mourning but also places of memory and education (and, for that matter, tourism, just like the Cambodian ones). In a way, the next decade of my life was shaped by those questions to which I had no good answers. Not only the ones about what I was doing there as a tourist encountering mass atrocity, but even broader ones, too: What do we do now with heritage that raises questions about pain, suffering, and our human pasts as both victims and perpetrators? How do we make these decisions today, and who has the right to do so? What kinds of values and politics guide our choices?

Even purportedly straightforward and “unifying” heritage has its faultlines: The Declaration of Independence’s “We the People” can mean something quite different to the descendants of Americans who weren’t counted as fully human in 1776 than to the descendants of those who were. Once you start digging, as the pieces in this reading list do, you find difficult heritage all around you. Museums are full of art and artifacts taken by colonial and genocidal forces. Public monuments commemorate people whose legacies are often, to put it gently, conflicted. Even cultural practices that are today seen as cheerful or entertaining can mask darker pasts, like Sweden’s Easter witches, who bring something like Halloween to springtime.

As the global protests calling for the removal of controversial statues and monuments in recent years have shown, people care deeply about what we do with the objects and places that make up our heritage — what we save, and what we destroy. What we do with heritage reflects how we understand ourselves: who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.

“The Worst Day of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction” (Steve Kandell, Buzzfeed News, May 2014)

Sites that memorialize tragedy and atrocity can be found all over the world, from Phnom Penh to Auschwitz to Rwanda, and these sites are visited by survivors, mourners, and tourists. The tension between paying respects and bearing witness, and exploiting or gawking, is unresolved; maybe it’s unresolvable. Steve Kandell’s essay about the opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City is a raw personal account of confronting this tension. After his sister’s death in the Twin Towers, Kandell and his family did not participate in the development of the memorial museum; his story here recounts what happened when he decided to visit. His powerful, painful ambivalence about the memorial reminds us that even when history has been packaged up for public consumption, it also remains very present, personal, and agonizing for so many.

I think now of every war memorial I ever yawned through on a class trip, how someone else’s past horror was my vacant diversion and maybe I learned something but I didn’t feel anything. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark. Annotated divorce papers blown up and mounted, interactive exhibits detailing how your mom’s last round of chemo didn’t take, souvenir T-shirts emblazoned with your best friend’s last words before the car crash. And you should have to see for yourself how little your pain matters to a family of five who need to get some food before the kids melt down. Or maybe worse, watch it be co-opted by people who want, for whatever reason, to feel that connection so acutely.

“The Swedish Witch Trials Teach Us How to Confront Dark Heritage” (Jennie Tiderman-Österberg, Smithsonian Magazine, October 2021)

In spring, the historic core of Karlskrona, a city on Sweden’s southern coast, was decorated for Easter. Multicolored feathers were tied to bushes and, if I’d been there at the right time, a colleague told me, I could’ve seen little girls walking around in long, flowing clothes, with round red spots of makeup on their cheeks. “They’re the Easter witches!” she explained. “We used to love dressing up like that when we were kids.” I’d never heard of an Easter witch, so I pressed her. “Like Halloween!” she offered, adding that with the importation of that holiday from the U.S., Swedish children now have two run-around-town-demanding-candy festivals per year.

The Easter witches are called “påskkärringar,” and in this piece, Jennie Tiderman-Österberg traces the history of Swedish witches — or, rather, the country’s history of accusations of witchcraft, which resulted in the brutal deaths of a horrifying number of people (almost entirely women), particularly in the late 17th-century period called the Great Noise. The påskkärringar of today are charmingly attired kids who wear headscarves and carry baskets, but they owe their existence to a dark and terrible past. Tiderman-Österberg takes aim at a tradition that has neatly defanged itself, and asks us to consider the ways we transform, and even domesticate, pasts replete with suffering and pain.

Now, what do we do with this dark and difficult part of our history that caused so much suffering? How do we manage the memories of such ordeals?

In Sweden, we meet the suffering by basically playing around with the Easter Hag. Since the 1800s, she is the tradition. She has become our heritage, not the events which lie hidden in her background. Do Swedes do this to cope with a difficult recollection? Or to reminisce over the times before the witch trials when spells were not an evil act and the cunning women of the forest an important part of our healthcare system? Or do we dress our children as witches because we prefer to make quaint a wildness we still secretly fear?

“The Colonized World Wants Its Artifacts Back” (Tarisai Ngangura, Vice, December 2020)

When the news broke several months ago that the Smithsonian planned to return its collection of Benin Bronzes, it was met with relief from the Nigerian claimants — and surprise from observers who thought major Western museums would continue to fight tooth and nail to retain every item in their collections. These stunning bronze figures had been looted from the Kingdom of Benin by attacking British forces in the late 19th century, and they have been held in Western museums and private collections ever since. Requests for their return have mainly fallen upon deaf ears, as cultural institutions assert that returns would devastate their collections, or that the objects could not be adequately cared for elsewhere. Still, the Smithsonian’s change of position is not unique: Perhaps reflecting the start of a reckoning with colonial histories, recent years have seen an increasing number of returns, even as the total amount remains small.

In this piece, Tarisai Ngangura takes us through those requests. The article focuses on Africa, a continent whose cultural heritage has been stolen in massive quantities for the benefit of museums and collectors elsewhere. Ngangura considers what is lost when heritage is taken away; what claimants want returned (and how they hope to use what is returned); and how the beneficiaries of these collections — especially Western museums that have charged admission fees and built reputations on the backs of items gathered by colonial forces — have fought change. Whether museums in the Western world as we know them will exist in precisely the same form after such a reckoning is an open question. But if our status quo is dependent on ignoring how those museum collections came to be, that’s hardly a bad thing.

“They come into your house while you are sleeping, or when you are awake. They kill half your family. They steal from you. Take your art and your belongings to their country,” said Nana Oforiatta Ayim, curator, filmmaker, and author of The Godchild. “Then they showcase them like, look what I have. I am more powerful than you. Years later, when the world has somewhat righted itself, you ask for them back and they refuse.”

“The Ghosts in the Museum” (Lizzie Wade, Science, July 2021) 

I still remember the first time I saw a mummy. It was in the St. Louis Art Museum, in the 1990s, and I was on a field trip, small enough to be about eye height with the supine mummy’s wrapped feet. As we filed past, I dragged my own feet and had to be ushered along. The mummy’s painted cartonnage was certainly beautiful, with its delicate illustrations and its carved, serious face. But the wrappings were what transfixed me: a little decayed, a few scattered holes, the dirt of several thousand years. You mean there’s a person in there?

Like the Benin Bronzes, human remains are subject to repatriation claims. Bodies populate museum exhibitions around the world, from Egyptian mummies to those pulled from Europe’s peat bogs, and they serve as the subjects of scientific research, like the bones that are the focus of this story by Lizzie Wade. The Penn Museum’s Morton collection, an assemblage of human skulls, is named after the scientist Samuel Morton, who used cranial measurements to support his ideas about racial hierarchy and race “science.” Like many other institutions, the Morton collection accumulated its human remains in a process laced with structural violence, targeting those who had less power to prevent their bones from being collected: Black people, Indigenous communities, the enslaved. Over time, physical and biological anthropologists have tried to use new research approaches to reckon with their discipline’s former efforts to prove white supremacy through bone. Still, using the collection differently doesn’t solve the essential problem: Can museums still hold and study human remains when their owners didn’t give consent? And what should we do with those collections, like the Morton, whose origins are saturated with racism?

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked protests for racial justice around the country, more and more people within and outside Penn began to see the Morton collection as a present-day perpetuation of racism and its harms, rather than just a historic example. Until last summer, most researchers thought “the science is justified because we’re doing it thoughtfully. And this moment brought to bear, no, that’s not enough,” says Rachel Watkins, a Black biological anthropologist at American University.

Even with recent research that strove to be respectful, it was almost always scientists who decided how and why to study the skulls, not their descendant communities, Athreya notes. “We were speaking for people without them at the table,” she says. To move forward ethically, “Those of us in power are going to have to give up some.”

“When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak For the Dead?” (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, September 2021)

Sometimes we handle difficult heritage by changing or removing it. In order to stop honoring perpetrators of racist violence, activists have taken down Confederate monuments in the U.S., along with statues of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, King Leopold II in Belgium, and Edward Colston in the U.K. But the other side of the coin is what we choose to support instead. What lost histories and ignored people can we bring back into, and honor in, our social and political lives? What forgotten heritage sites deserve attention? As we consider what to remove, we might also consider what to restore.

In this piece, Jill Lepore traces attempts to save Black American heritage in the form of burial grounds and human remains. But these efforts are also faced with challenges: Who, for example, gets to make the decisions? (It’s a question Wade also touches on in her story about the Morton skull collection.) As Howard University professor Fatimah Jackson asks, referring to another actor in these debates: “Does he speak for Black America? Or do I speak for Black America?”

Examining the idea of “descendant communities” and the work of descendants, activists, scholars, and archaeologists, Lepore carefully untangles the complicated sociopolitics involved in trying to treat Black heritage, and Black communities, with the respect and dignity they have long been denied in the American public sphere.

It isn’t merely an academic dispute. The proposed burial-grounds network and graves-protection acts are parts of a larger public deliberation, less the always elusive “national conversation” than a quieter collective act of conscientious mourning, expressed, too, in new monuments and museum exhibits. History gets written down in books but, like archeology, it can seep up from the earth itself, from a loamy underground of sacred, ancient things: gravestones tucked under elms and tangled by vines; iron-nailed coffins trapped beneath pavement and parking lots and highway overpasses. How and whether the debates over human remains get resolved holds consequences not only for how Americans understand the country’s past but also for how they picture its future. The dispute itself, along the razor’s edge between archeology and history, is beset by a horrible irony. Enslavement and segregation denied people property and ancestry. But much here appears to turn on inheritance and title: Who owns these graveyards? Who owns these bones? Who owns, and what is owed?

Further Reading:

• “Grave Injustice” (Lyndsie Bourgon, The Walrus, March 2013)
• “Redrawing the Boundaries” (SAPIENS, February 2022) (Podcast transcript)
• “She Warned the Grain Elevator Would Disrupt Sacred Black History. They Deleted Her Findings.” (ProPublica, Seth Freed Wessler, May 2022)
• “Where Are the Indigenous Children Who Never Came Home?” (High Country News, Nick Estes and Alleen Brown, September 2018)
• “Emancipation” (Aeon, Casey Cep, October 2013)  

***

Annalisa Bolin is an anthropologist and archaeologist who studies the uses and politics of the past, from material objects and sites to human remains, in post-genocide Rwanda. She holds a PhD from Stanford University. Her literary nonfiction has been published in the Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Epoiesen, and elsewhere. Her academic articles can be found in Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Social Archaeology, and Journal of Eastern African Studies, among others, and she has also written for the magazine SAPIENS and Africa Is a Country. Her essay “A Ghost Map of Kigali,” which appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, won the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s award for creative nonfiction. Currently based in St. Louis, Missouri, she is writing a book that mixes her research in Rwanda with essays and memoir. She can be found on her website and Twitter.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin

In my dreams I’m back in that kitchen, chopping onions and garlic, running to fetch wood and water, and falling asleep in a hammock as Mae rocks me to sleep. But of course, that world is gone. My mother left me nothing but her songs and recipes, and aromatic memories to last the rest of my life.

I always remembered the flavor of happiness. It tasted like Mae’s pâté de foie, encased in cracked pepper and smelling of garlic and cloves. It tasted like anticipation: the lullaby chick chick chick of the night train from Battambang to Phnom Penh rocking me to sleep, as I dreamed of the pâte à choux cream pastry we would buy upon our arrival, just by the station.

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Annie Hylton | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (8,310 words)

This story was produced in collaboration with The Walrus.

As Peter Basil remembers it, the week leading up to Father’s Day, in June 2013, began like any other; he’s since replayed the events in his mind like a recurring bad dream. Peter recalls standing in the kitchen of his modest split-level home in Tache, a First Nations village that lies deep in the wilderness of northern interior British Columbia. His younger sister Mackie, then in her late 20s, followed him around as he made a pot of coffee.

“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie asked Peter, referring to her 5-year-old son.

“Yup,” he replied.

Mackie trailed Peter to the living room and sat next to him on the L-shaped couch, under high school graduation photos of herself and her sisters.

“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie repeated to Peter.

“Yeah, geez,” he responded. “Should I be worried? Are you coming back?”

“I’ll be back,” Mackie promised.

Although Mackie seemed troubled, Peter didn’t think much of the exchange at the time. A few days later, Mackie, Peter, and Peter’s wife, Vivian, went to a nearby community to buy a cake. Thank You Dads, it read, next to an image of an eagle. They picked up a few groceries and stopped to check for mail. Because she had lost her ID, Mackie asked Peter to purchase two bottles of vodka for a party later that night, then they went home.

Mackie showered and sat next to Vivian. She rolled on her gray “stretchies,” Vivian said of Mackie’s leggings, and pulled on a blue T-shirt and a black hoodie with a little maple leaf logo. In photos from the time, she has black hair that fell neatly below her shoulders, a youthful face, and a playful smile.

Mackie, who went nowhere without her music, grabbed her iPod and a bottle of vodka. She promised Vivian she would be back by the next day; she planned to take her son and nephew to the park. She left before dusk and later walked to where locals were having a party. When Mackie came home a few hours later, she took the second bottle of vodka and headed up a trail, next to the house, that led out of town. Peter cracked the front door open and looked out.

“Goodbye, bro. I love you,” Mackie called back to him.

In that moment, now frozen in his memory, Peter watched Mackie walk away. He lingered at the door as she climbed the path. He spotted a man waiting for her farther up the trail. Something was not quite right. Why, Peter asked himself, would Mackie have said goodbye in such a way if she were coming home? Then he wondered if, perhaps, this would be the last time he’d see her.

The village of Tache, home to Mackie’s people of the Tl’azt’en Nation, has one road in and one road out. To get there, you can drive or hitchhike along a seemingly endless tree-lined road, past wild roses, bald eagles, and black bears. You’ll then descend into a community that lies at the rim of a pristine, glass-like lake called Nak’alBun, where, on a sunny day, the clouds reflect off the water.

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The roughly 400 people who live there refer to themselves as Dakelh, people who travel upon water. In winter, most of them warm their houses with wood stoves. When summer comes, they fish salmon, pick soapberries up in the mountains, and preserve food for the cold months. But, year after year, the Basil family mostly searches for Mackie.

The truth of what happened to Immaculate Mary Basil, or Mackie, that night Peter last saw her nearly seven years ago is elusive. Did she hitchhike with a logger who abducted her? Was she killed by someone she knew, who then disposed of her body in the hundreds and hundreds of acres of wilderness?

Down the road toward Old Tache, where Mackie attended the party before she came home, Sharon Joseph lives a few houses past the rustic old church. Her sister Bonnie went missing in 2007; like Peter, she has been unable to ascertain her sister’s fate. “What I heard is that she was trying to hitchhike to Prince George, and I’m not sure what really happened,” Sharon explained. Sharon said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have no answers on Bonnie’s whereabouts. “I pray to her every night and day,” she told me. When I asked if she thought Bonnie heard her, she said, “Yes, I feel she’s with me, I just don’t know where. I just miss her so much — I’m the only one left, and I don’t want to be alone.” She began to cry. “I just wish that she can just come home.”

British Columbia’s Highway 16 is a remote belt that stretches across the province to Haida Gwaii. Part of that protracted highway — 724 kilometers of it — is often called the Highway of Tears for the countless women, mostly Indigenous, who have disappeared or been murdered near it. Dozens of families who live around Highway 16 have been left to grapple with the pain of loved ones vanishing with no trace, several of them in recent years.

In December 2018, 50-year-old Cynthia (Cindy) Martin went missing near the Gitanmaax reserve, northwest of Tache along Highway 16. The car she was driving was found locked with her belongings inside in the dead of winter, and footprints could be seen tracking away from the vehicle and back, said Cindy’s sister Faye. No sign of Cindy, though.

To find answers, the family began looking for clues on their territory. Time has seemed to stand still since Cindy disappeared, Faye told me from her mother’s home in Gitanmaax, roughly six months after she’d last seen her sister. “One night, I dreamt of this little bird just sitting on a branch, and I could actually feel and smell the snow,” Faye said. “I just felt then that Cindy had passed.” When I asked Faye what she wanted people to understand about her family’s grief, she said, “The whole population of Canada needs to be brought to justice — they need to be brought to their knees to understand what we’re dealing with.”

***

For decades, the Canadian government has appeared indifferent to murdered and missing Indigenous women like Mackie, Bonnie, and Cynthia. (In 2014, on the question of a public inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, then prime minister Stephen Harper said, “It isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest.”) Even the numbers are hard to quantify. The most comprehensive toll, which accounts for all police jurisdictions in Canada, was published in 2014 by the RCMP and identified nearly 1,200 “police-recorded incidents of Aboriginal female homicides and unresolved missing Aboriginal females” between 1980 and 2012.

Activists, however, suspect higher numbers. Several factors could contribute to this discrepancy: The RCMP, which controls the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, does not systematically collect race-based data, including data on missing Indigenous women across the country; police have also failed to investigate deaths that occurred under suspicious circumstances. An enduring mistrust of law enforcement means Indigenous communities do not always report crimes. “Most of the time, when people get victimized, they don’t want to call [the RCMP],” Peter said. In the Dakelh language, often called Carrier in English, the word police translates to “those who take us away.”

Meggie Cywink, from Whitefish River First Nation, in Ontario, has been compiling a database of missing and murdered Indigenous women that stretches back to the 1800s and contains over 1,500 cases. Cywink, whose sister Sonya was murdered while pregnant more than 25 years ago, said, “There’s a number of women and young girls who were with child when they were murdered, and nowhere does it statistically take into account that, in Indigenous ways and being, those are two souls that have been lost and taken.”

In 2015, decades of advocacy by families and survivors culminated in the Canadian government announcing the creation of a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

The inquiry was mandated to examine the underlying social, economic, cultural, institutional, and historical causes of systemic violence against Indigenous women and girls. The commissioners held hearings and gathered statements across the country and could also issue subpoenas for testimonies and documents. But, from its inception, the inquiry was marred with controversy. High-level staff quit because of internal dysfunction, and family members and survivors called it a colonial-led process instead of an Indigenous-led one.

In 2017, Cywink, along with a group of families, had discussions with the leadership of the inquiry, but she later told me that they felt their concerns had not been taken seriously. It was “a huge disrespect to families, to the voices of families,” Cywink said. “They are perpetuating, in my opinion, this very thing that they’re trying to stop, which is violence.”

That summer, Cywink and more than 100 family members sent an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asking for a “hard reset” of the inquiry. The commissioners, they said in the letter, “have maintained a deeply misguided approach that imposes a harmful, colonial process on us.” “There was never a response,” Cywink told me. The group sent another letter, in October of that year, this time with more than 180 family members signing on. No response then either, Cywink said.

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Marilyn Poitras, a Métis constitutional and Aboriginal law expert, who stepped down as a commissioner of the inquiry less than a year into the role, told me she too was troubled by the process. “Why was this left as an [Indigenous] issue? If thousands or hundreds of Indigenous women, girls, transgender, and two-spirit people are going missing, either to human trafficking, murder, or domestic violence, isn’t that a public safety issue? Why is that an Indian issue?” she said. “That blows me away because, if it was white women, where would you put it? … I was seeing we were headed in a direction I couldn’t live with. Throwing millions of dollars at it and getting people to study us is a well-worn path.”

Last June, after hearing from more than 2,300 people across the country, the four commissioners presented their final report to the Trudeau government. They found that persistent violence and human rights violations against Indigenous peoples, “which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people,” amounted to a race-based genocide.

For Poitras, the framing of it is the issue: If Canada is responsible for genocide against Indigenous people, which Trudeau admitted soon after the final report, why do Indigenous people continue to be examined and probed? “What needs to happen to say this comes from somewhere? Who is Mr. Pickton?” Poitras said, referring to Canada’s most prolific serial killer, Robert Pickton, many of whose victims were Indigenous women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “This is not an Indian problem in terms of we do this to ourselves. We’re merely the side effect,” she added. “What are the roots of white supremacy? Because that’s where colonization and domination and violence and all of this disenfranchisement comes from. … This is a white supremacy issue.”

While some welcomed the outcome of the inquiry, others were concerned that nothing would change. “What do we get?” Cywink asked. “We get a bunch of paper … but there’s no fucking action on any of this.” Suzan Fraser, a lawyer who represented 20 families, including Cywink’s, before the federal court in a petition to get them standing at the inquiry’s hearings, told me that the families she worked with are left wondering, “What was that for? What happens next?” Those still waiting for their loved ones to come home want to know what happened, she said. “The key thing they want is to make sure that this was not in vain, that something must be different, and that they get answers.” The assaults on Indigenous women’s identity are “constant and pervasive,” Fraser said. “We have a lot of work to do. All Canadians have to look at the way in which they’ve benefited, either directly or indirectly, from the destruction of Indigenous populations.”

Following the report’s release, I reached out to Trudeau’s office to set up an interview to discuss the government’s plan to implement the inquiry’s recommendations. His team responded that he wouldn’t be available in the coming months due to his “packed schedule” and put me in touch with the office of Carolyn Bennett, the minister of Crown-Indigenous relations. Her office responded with an email statement and, after months of attempts to set up an interview, was unable to provide any additional comments.

The statement read, in part, that the “government is committed to ending the ongoing national tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people” and that it has “accepted” the report and respects its conclusions and is “taking the time to fully review the report.”

In June, the same month the inquiry held its closing ceremony, which also happened to mark the six-year anniversary of Mackie’s disappearance, I, along with photographer Andrew Lichtenstein, visited Tache. The use of the word “genocide” to describe the situation seemed to hold little significance to Mackie’s family. Peter thought maybe the finding could help them convince the RCMP not to let Mackie’s case go cold. “That word that they’re saying now — the RCMP and investigators can’t just put the missing people’s files on the shelf and forget about them,” he said. Now, at least, Peter said, “the government has to pass things and recognize things that weren’t getting recognized before.” The question remains, though, whether this $92.3 million process will help them “get proper justice,” as Peter says, for their loved one. “The only thing I would like to honor my sister is for the people who did it to come forward and give her back to us,” Peter said. “It’s tearing my family apart.”

***

Violence against women is rooted in Canada’s founding. While First Nations across Canada differ significantly, historians generally agree that, prior to European contact in the 16th century, Indigenous women played powerful roles and were the backbones of their communities and families. Some peoples, like the Gitxsan, Haida, and Tsimshian, were also matrilineal — the mother passed on wealth, power, and inheritance to new generations.

The way that colonization has affected Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit, and LGBTQ people over the course of centuries cannot be divorced from broader patterns of gender-based violence, the national inquiry concluded in its final report. Practices that denied women legal and property rights in Europe were replicated in Canada. Furthermore, colonialism imposed gender binaries onto Indigenous societies that had been mostly fluid and had revered multiple gender identities. U.S.-based researcher and scholar Will Roscoe identified “alternative gender roles for males in over 150 tribes in North America. About a third had comparable roles for females,” he notes on his website. In an article for Indigenous Nationhood Movement, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and academic, noted, “How do you infuse a society with the heteropatriarchy necessary in order to carry out your capitalist dreams when Indigenous men aren’t actively engaged in upholding a system designed to exploit women? Well, the introduction of gender violence is one answer. Destroying and then reconstructing sexuality and gender identity is another.”

The patriarchal system through which Canada was created was later written into policies and legislation. The Indian Act, first passed by the federal government in 1876, regulates many areas of Indigenous life, including whether one qualifies as a “status Indian” and is therefore registered as a ward of the Canadian government, a paternalistic relationship through which rights are conferred.

Those with status are granted access to lands and provided government benefits. For more than a century, various iterations of the act legislated that women were unequal to men: If husbands abandoned them, women and their children were stripped of their status and forced to leave their homes. This legacy has affected thousands of women and their children, who continue to suffer the consequences. “Sex discrimination in the Act has been cited as one of the root causes of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Canada,” Pamela Palmater, a Mi’kmaq lawyer and chair in Indigenous governance at Ryerson University, wrote in in Maclean’s. “Missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls are connected to this act. If you want people to disappear, don’t give them full membership,” Sandra Lockhart, an Indigenous activist, told the Yellowknife-based magazine EdgeYK in 2016. (Lockhart died last year.)

Until 1985, provisions in the act legislated that Indigenous women lost their status if they married non-Indigenous men; the same was not true for Indigenous men who married non-Indigenous women. Though examples of reserves exist from as early as the 17th century, the federal government officially established the reserve system through the Indian Act and treaty agreements, imposing borders and displacing communities to areas that were, in many cases, away from ceremonial sites and traditional territories used for generations. Lands were divided, houses were built, resources were extracted, and poverty rose. Today, reserves can be isolated and can segregate Indigenous people from educational and economic opportunities. “We’ve been put into a corner on a postage-stamp reserve,” Ron Winser, Mackie’s cousin and the Indigenous Justice Program coordinator of Tl’azt’en Nation, said of Tache. Often, Winser explained, there’s one road connecting communities to urban centres or main highways, and “that little string to town, well, people can target that.” Despite signs dotted along Highway 16 warning women not to hitchhike and that a killer may be on the loose, for many there’s no choice. “You have a lot of Indigenous women trying to hitchhike to urban centres to try to create a life for themselves, and on the way there, they’re targeted.”

***

Chrystal, Mackie’s younger sister, does “odd jobs here and there,” she said, and hitchhikes when she has no alternative. Her resemblance to Mackie in photos is uncanny. She described her sister, simply, as “a good person,” and said, “Talking about [what happened] every day helps us process it.” Because of Mackie, whose presence is at once permeating and no longer perceptible, Chrystal has observed a gendered shift in her community. “Over the years, I noticed since Mackie’s been missing, the women have been taking power,” she said. “They don’t let men control them no more.”

One day, we drove the 45 minutes from Tache to Fort St. James, a former fur-trade post. The family doesn’t have a car, and a private transportation service costs them $60 that they could put toward food for the four-person household. Sometimes, they travel by community bus to the neighbouring reserve, Binche, to the gas-station shop where they can get coffee, chips, and beef jerky. On this day, though, they wanted to stock up at Save-On-Foods and order takeout from the Chinese restaurant that also serves fries and hamburgers. Chrystal had recently broken up with her boyfriend and needed a ride to town. She planned to meet up with some friends for the night. On the drive, we got to talking about her relationship.

“Is he a nice guy?” I asked.

“No.”

Chrystal wasn’t sure how she’d be getting back to Tache later that night and said she would likely hitchhike. I suggested she call us if she got stuck, but she didn’t have a phone plan. Plus, even if she did need to contact someone, most of the route from Fort St. James to Tache doesn’t have cell service. She would be fine, she urged. Before leaving, she described once hitching a ride with two men in a pickup truck after a night out. The drive back to Tache took hours, she said, because they took her along a back road. She heard them saying, “Let’s take her over here.” To which she replied, “I may be drunk, but I know what you’re saying. Are you going to kill me?”

***

When Immaculate Mary Basil was born, on a cold December day in 1985, her father named her in honor of the Virgin Mary. Mackie was one of eight siblings — Peter, now 41, is the eldest. Chrystal is a year younger than Mackie, and Ida, who currently lives in Prince George, is a year older. The family has since lost two siblings. Three if you count Mackie.

Their mother attended the Lejac residential school, in Fraser Lake, where generations of Dakelh children, as well as Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en, and Sekani children, were taken from neighboring reserves. The school, which was open from 1922 to 1976, was part of the government-mandated and church-run system that stripped children from their cultures, traditions, and families, and whose goal was to “kill the Indian in the child,” a phrase that’s been widely attributed to civil servant and acclaimed literary figure Duncan Campbell Scott. (Whether the provenance of that phrase came from Scott was called into question in a 2013 book by Mark Abley; what’s clear, though, is that, during Scott’s tenure as deputy superintendent at the Department of Indian Affairs, from 1913 to 1932, he oversaw the expansion and brutality of the residential school system. In 1920, before a parliamentary committee, Scott said, “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.”)

The last residential school didn’t close until 1996. In 2006, the Canadian government approved a settlement agreement to pay reparations to survivors, and it officially apologized in 2008. Several churches involved in physical, sexual, and emotional abuse offered formal apologies in the 1980s and ’90s, but the Catholic Church, which was responsible for more than half of all residential schools in Canada, including Lejac, has yet to issue a formal apology. During a visit to the Vatican in 2017, Trudeau personally asked Pope Francis to make a gesture, but the pope ultimately declined.

“The available information suggests a devastating link between the large numbers of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and the many harmful background factors in their lives,” the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)’s final report, released in 2015, found, citing the multigenerational trauma of residential schools as one of the main factors. “It should not be surprising that those who were sexually abused in the schools as children sometimes perpetuated sexual violence later in their lives. It should not be surprising that those who were taken from their parents and exposed to harsh and regimented discipline in the schools and disparagement of their culture and families often became poor and sometimes violent parents later in their lives,” the report stated.

The day I visited the Lejac site, the clouds hung low. Few physical signs of the school remained, as if to erase any remembrance of it; today, it is the site of a pilgrimage, bestrewn with Catholic symbolism. Down the road, a construction site for the 670-kilometer Coastal GasLink pipeline project is underway. The Lejac camp, which will house hundreds of workers, is to be built on reserve land.

TransCanada, which owns the pipeline, said it signed agreements with all First Nations along the proposed route, but it was met in some cases with fierce resistance. Hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, west of Fraser Lake, oppose the pipeline crossing their traditional territory. Last year, the Wet’suwet’en Nation and its supporters occupied two camps, asserting its title and rights to that land. Heavily armed RCMP officers moved into a checkpoint and made arrests, and protests erupted across the nation.

One of the reasons the Wet’suwet’en continue to oppose the pipeline is that it would bring a “man camp,” or industrial work camp, to their territory. These camps are temporary housing facilities that bring in hundreds of men for industrial work in or near Indigenous communities. “There are linear relationships between the highly paid shadow populations at industrial camps, the hyper-masculine culture, and a rise in crime, sexual violence, and trafficking of Indigenous women,” a 2017 report funded by the BC Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation stated. The authors cited a 2014 report by scholars at the University of Victoria and University of British Columbia examining the consequences of a local mine’s construction: RCMP data showed a 38 percent increase in sexual assaults and a 37 percent increase in missing people during the first full year. They also found that a rise in sex work coincided with industrial activity.

Near the proposed Lejac camp and former residential school site, a man named Norman Charlie chopped wood with his son. When I asked if he could share more about the Lejac school, he responded that, yes, in fact, he could — he is a residential school survivor. “For a long time, I was trying to get back at the world because of this place,” he said. Many other survivors, he said, “are probably all underground.”

Charlie said his mother had attended the school and was used as a laborer to build the place. Along with the other children, she farmed the land and tended to livestock; the fruits of their work — carrots, corn, turnips — however, were not for the students’ consumption. When Charlie was taken, at the age of 6 or 7, in the mid-1960s, he remembers entering the school with long, thick black hair. Administrators called him a girl and tried to make him wear a dress until they eventually forced him to cut off his hair. “There’s a big stool — they slammed me on it and shaved my head,” he said. Staff beat him on the ears, hands, and back with a yardstick and hit him with a strap made from a conveyor belt. And, he said, a supervisor molested him. “I went to the front lines,” he said. “I went there to sacrifice my life and body so you don’t have to go through what I went through,” he sometimes tells younger generations. Charlie declined to name the supervisor who had molested him, as he said he’s made peace with the past.

Mary Teegee, the executive director of child and family services of Carrier Sekani Family Services, said the stories she’s heard about Lejac from close family members and Elders illustrate that it was a violent residential school. Teegee described the amount of sexual abuse as “horrific” and said that, if you magnify what happened in the rest of Canada, “that was Lejac.” (According to TRC chief commissioner Murray Sinclair, more than 6,000 children died because of residential schools. The TRC found that this number includes several from Lejac.) Students were deprived of their cultural identities, and some then went on to continue the cycle of abuse — within the family, the community, or internally, with addiction. “One of the biggest impacts is the loss of human potential — that we’ve had all these people who knew the land and culture who could never get there because of the hurt, the trauma,” Teegee said. “These people should have been leaders of this country.”

Many people of Mackie’s generation have parents or grandparents who attended Lejac and still live in Tache. “When people started opening up about it, they started drinking more,” Chrystal said when I asked about the impact of residential schools on the community.

In February 2018, Peter, Vivian, and Vivian’s father, Daniel Alexis, travelled the roughly two and a half hours from Tache to Prince George. They were given an appointment to share a statement about Mackie’s life with the national inquiry, and the question of residential schools came up. What is common among the families speaking to the commissioners, the questioner said, is the trauma sustained in residential schools, which continues through the generations. Peter, whose unassuming, quiet presence belies his doggedness and abiding devotion to finding closure, shared that his mother was a survivor of Lejac. She passed away when a vehicle struck her in Prince George, in 2006, he said.

“Was there a police investigation around that?” the statement gatherer asked.

“Yeah,” Peter replied.

“And what was the result of it?”

“They were telling me that her head was stuck between the tractor-trailer tires and she was in the ICU for maybe a couple hours and then, after that, they just had to unplug her, I guess,” Peter said.

“I’m so sorry that happened. That is awful.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty hard to deal with things like that … now I’m kind of learning from all the past history of what happened, like, and trying to fit it all together,” Peter said.

“Was the driver ever charged for hitting her?”

“No. I think he took his own life.”

Later in the statement, Peter shared that his mother had begun to open up about her experience at Lejac and was speaking with lawyers about requesting a settlement from the government. But, he said, “her history died with her.”

***

In her earliest years, Mackie had a stable life: Her parents worked steady jobs and always had food on the table. But, when her father had an affair with another woman and left the family, things deteriorated. “From there, my mom turned to alcohol and kind of just left us behind,” Peter said. In the early ’90s, Peter, a teenager at the time, remembers caring for his siblings, “but somewhere along the line, the welfare got involved with them, with us, and took them.” Seven of the eight siblings were placed in foster care. The three youngest girls — Chrystal, Mackie, and Ida, who were about 4, 5, and 6, respectively — bounced around to different foster and group homes, mostly with non-Indigenous parents.

Around that time, Canadian provinces had been carrying out a decades-long practice that later became known as the Sixties Scoop, during which child welfare authorities “scooped” up Indigenous children, some at birth, from their homes and communities, placed them in foster homes, and adopted them into white families across Canada, the U.S., and in some cases, Europe and New Zealand. The process dispossessed Indigenous children of their cultures and languages; some never learned of their Indigenous roots, and many suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

In 2017, the Canadian government announced a settlement to compensate some survivors of the Sixties Scoop who were taken between 1951 and 1991, and payouts for those found eligible are slated to begin this year. Ida and Chrystal have applied for a settlement, as they consider themselves survivors along with Mackie, but they have yet to hear from the government if they qualify.

A public Facebook group set up to share information about the claims process is full of survivors describing immense sadness and loss. One survivor, Star Nayea, wrote that, as a newborn, she was wrapped in a blanket and placed in a boot box with ventilation holes, put on a prop plane, and flown to the U.S. to be adopted by a white family that later abused her. She recalled her father, who had been told he was getting a white baby, scrubbing her with a Brillo pad during bath time, repeating that the dirt wouldn’t come off. Her skin, she told me, was as dark as tree bark and “was left raw and nearly bleeding from his attempt to wash off my brown skin.” For the first 18 years of her life, she thought she was of German, Scottish, and Irish descent (or, she says, that’s what the adoption agency had told her father), until a customer at a restaurant where she’d been working as a teenager told her otherwise. “What’s Native American?” she asked. Nayea has yet to obtain documentation about her birth family or place of origin, but she’s since been adopted into Anishinaabe tribes. “It all happened for a purpose,” she told me. “Part of my spiritual walk is coming to terms with it.” (Nayea has since withdrawn her application for compensation, as she does not believe the settlement will change the past.)

When Mackie and her sisters were taken into care, at first they were kept together. Their foster parents served them sour milk and would “just treat us wrong” and were “just in it for the money,” Chrystal said. After they finished playing outside, if they got wet, “our foster mom made us strip down in public,” Chrystal said. At some point, Mackie was placed on her own. But the girls would see one another at school, which is how they remained connected. Mackie’s foster parents would dress her in “really tacky clothes, like from the 1970s,” Ida recalled. A typical outfit included white stockings, a green turtleneck, and a lime-green plaid pleated skirt. Those outfits, in addition to Mackie talking with a thick Carrier accent, provided fodder for other kids to bully her.

Eventually, as they aged, the three of them were placed together in group homes around Vanderhoof and Fort St. James. “We lived out of hotel rooms as well because they couldn’t find a place for us, and so we’d stay in hotel rooms for weeks at a time,” Ida recalled. As Chrystal remembers it, the girls would gather their allowances for the week for bus tickets or hitchhike back to the reserve to see Peter, who, by this point, was too old to be put in foster care, and Vivian. “Because we didn’t get to grow up in an Indigenous home, Mackie always said she wanted to go back home and get to know our family and get to know the community,” Ida said.

It wasn’t until later in life that Chrystal learned Mackie and Ida had sacrificed their bodies to spare her. “All that time, they were getting sexually abused by our foster parents to save me,” Chrystal said. As Ida remembers it, Mackie “got most of it,” including physical, sexual, and verbal abuse, in different homes. “It happened to both of us, like they’d take turns,” Ida said of one of their foster dads who sexually abused them. “We kind of kept quiet about it,” she added. “The person would threaten us.”

Scholars and activists have described the child welfare system as a pipeline to missing and murdered Indigenous women. Canada continues to have disproportionate rates of Indigenous children in foster care. In Manitoba, of the 11,000 children in care, up to 90 percent are Indigenous. (The province’s child welfare service is currently being overhauled as a result.) Cora Morgan, the First Nations family advocate of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, testified as an expert witness before the commissioners of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2018. When the First Nations Family Advocate Office first opened in Winnipeg, in 2015, mothers flooded in, and the office received 1,200 calls per week. These women, Morgan explained in her testimony, sometimes hadn’t seen their children for ten years; others had recently given birth, and their newborns were going to be apprehended from the hospital, similar to the practices employed during the Sixties Scoop.

“Our Elders say the most violent act you can commit to a woman is to steal her child,” Morgan told me. In Manitoba alone, Morgan estimates, hundreds of newborn babies are apprehended from their Indigenous mothers every year. (A government spokesperson told the Canadian Press that, in 2017/18, Manitoba child welfare agencies issued 558 birth alerts for high-risk mothers, a label that disproportionately affects Indigenous women.) The reasons for apprehension vary, and a mother’s family history is considered in the assessment. This means that, if she has been a ward of family services herself or a victim of domestic violence, her child could be taken away. Once her child is taken, the woman loses her child tax credit, and if she can’t pay rent, she could be forced to stay with a violent partner or live in precarious housing. Winnipeg police have estimated that more than 70 percent of missing persons are women and 80 percent of cases involve kids under the protection of Manitoba’s Child and Family Services.

The extent to which the child welfare system can doom Indigenous women and girls was made particularly clear in the case of Tina Fontaine, who was murdered in 2014 at the age of 15. Fontaine’s small body was discovered wrapped in a duvet, weighted down by 25 pounds of rocks, in Winnipeg’s Red River. She had previously been in and out of contact with health workers, Winnipeg police, and Child and Family Services, whose agency worker had placed her in a Best Western hotel in downtown Winnipeg, under the care of a contracted worker, around the time she was last seen. The systems meant to protect Fontaine ultimately failed to help her, a report released by Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth found last year. “There was sufficient evidence known by each of these groups to warrant a request for involvement by the child abuse unit of Winnipeg Police,” yet none had initiated a follow-up, the report noted. In 2018, a jury found Raymond Cormier, the main suspect in Fontaine’s case, not guilty.

“You’re living in a time when something like residential schools is going on,” Morgan said. When I asked why there isn’t a national outrage, she replied, “In the days of residential schools, mainstream society wasn’t aware of what was happening to children.”

Chrystal and Peter echoed the sentiment. “What happened in Lejac school and the residential schools is the same thing that’s happening with the ministry,” Chrystal said, referring to BC’s Ministry of Children and Family Development. “After they did away with Lejac … the white people couldn’t take away our kids anymore, so they had to form the ministry to come step in and take kids that way,” Peter added.

When Peter, Vivian, and Ida were preparing to share their statements with the national inquiry, they knew they wanted to target their message to the role the ministry had played in their lives and how it shaped where many of them ended up. The questioner asked Peter how his siblings were doing as adults after having spent their childhoods in care. After Mackie went missing, in 2013, he said, “my other sister, Samantha, died [in Prince George] too. She had a large amount of fentanyl in her system, they found.” Samantha had three sons, and Peter and Vivian still care for her youngest as if he were their own. Peter’s youngest brother, Travis, was shot and killed in Prince George. “I think he was pretty mixed up in life,” Peter said.

“I think they just don’t know how to deal with the trauma they’ve been through,” Peter added. In 2016, the day of Travis’s funeral service, the family gathered to grieve his passing. One of their brothers was absent from the service; people from the ministry had shown up at his home to remove his children, and he missed the funeral.

In the early 2000s, when Mackie graduated high school and aged out of foster care, she remained faithful to her dream of reconnecting with her people. Back in Tache, she lived with her partner, and they had a child together. Mackie worked several jobs: at the local school, as a receptionist at the band office, and as a house cleaner in the community. She was a devoted mother who wrote notes to herself about her child’s possible autism. She adored kids and became a foster parent to some on the reserve, “so what happened to us doesn’t happen to them,” Chrystal said. Those who knew her describe Mackie as a vibrant and assiduous person — someone who struggled but was loving and optimistic and did her best to overcome the formidable forces that tried to hold her back. “She took a lot in because of her past and held that in and didn’t show it, so she was always happy and did stuff for other people,” Ida said. She was “just a very loving and caring and bubbly person even though she went through a lot of hard times.”

In 2012, after Mackie and her partner split, she stayed with Peter and Vivian off and on. Mackie kept a bag of clothes in the closet. She and Vivian would pick berries in the mountains, and she would help cook moose steak and spaghetti. When Mackie had the house to herself, she would sit on the porch and blare her music on surround sound — Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason”, Rihanna’s “We Found Love”, Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” — until the family came home, at which point she would swiftly turn the volume down. Her laugh was infectious. She liked to draw and color, and she decorated for birthdays, Christmas, and family celebrations.

What happened after Mackie said goodbye to Peter that evening in June 2013 is not entirely clear. The RCMP’s Sascha Baldinger and Todd Wiebe, who’ve left “no stone unturned,” according to Wiebe, and have been on the case since Mackie was reported missing, told me Mackie got into a pickup truck with a couple of local men to continue the party at a cabin down a remote forest-service road just off Leo Creek Road. At roughly 9:30 the next morning, according to the RCMP, a forestry worker saw a woman with long hair walking over a bridge, away from a truck, which had become stuck. Two men were seen at that time with the vehicle, but the woman was walking alone.

When Mackie hadn’t come home by Father’s Day, her family started to worry. They began calling people and knocking on doors, but no one had seen her since the night of the party. The two men she had been with told Vivian that Mackie caught a ride with someone else. The family called the police. The next day, the community set up a search camp near the bridge where Mackie had last been seen. Roughly 300 people, including those from neighboring reserves, came to search for her. A day later, a police search-and-rescue team set out with canines. After a few weeks, when the police hadn’t found any credible evidence of Mackie’s whereabouts, they pulled out. The community kept searching. They found threads, socks, ribbons, buttons, old beer bottles, cans, bones. But none of what they found belonged to Mackie.

Meanwhile, rumors circulated about who could be responsible, and during a search, Peter and Vivian woke up to find a hole slashed through their tent. In town, locals told the family they saw the truck the two men had given Mackie a ride in being washed out with bleach, but the RCMP said the police took possession of the vehicle and found no evidence of such a claim. The police also investigated Mackie’s ex-boyfriend, whom she had been dating until some point leading up to the night her family last saw her. The man allegedly later left town, but the RCMP said he had an alibi.

To the RCMP, who told me they thoroughly investigated every lead on the case, nobody can technically be considered a “suspect” because, to this day, there’s no crime scene. The reality is that “pretty much anybody could probably take advantage of a woman who went by herself with two guys … or more guys in the vehicle,” Peter said.

In the warmer months, when the family searches for Mackie, they depend on dreams and animals to guide them. The dreams have led them to the creek, to the meadow, and deep into the wilderness, where they hope to find a clue as to her whereabouts; the animals — eagles and hawks they believe are their ancestors — channel messages about a piece of hair or clothing that might lead them to her. The family regularly gathers to watch crime shows on the Investigation Discovery channel for ideas on leads. They’ve seen a few psychics over the years, too, and last year, one prophesied that someone would come forward with information. So they keep looking.

One afternoon, Peter and Vivian drove with us to the remote cabin where Mackie was the night she went missing. We turned onto Leo Creek Road, outside of Tache, and the dust from the logging trucks enveloped our vehicle. We passed a large poster on which Mackie’s face and the text MISSING were fixed to two large wooden planks. Next to the poster was a map, on which someone had spray-painted Murderers Live Here.

We turned up a winding road and drove by clear-cuts, where trees once stood. Eventually, we parked the car. “There’s a lot of angry people about this, Mackie missing,” Peter said. He grabbed his hunting gun and slung it behind his shoulder. “Maybe the predator of Mackie, they’re still around, and they try to take us out or something,” he said. “That’s why I travel with my gun.” It’s also convenient if bears approach, Peter explained, to assuage the trepidation in the air.

We walked for roughly 20 minutes, climbing a steep path with overgrown shrubbery, fireweed, medicinal plants, and old trapping trails to meet an abandoned, half-constructed wood cabin.

It appeared that nobody had been there for years, and inside it was empty apart from construction material and dust and spiderwebs covering an old couch. Mackie’s decision to travel to the cabin was a last-minute calculation, Baldinger and Wiebe, the investigators, told me. There’s no cell phone service in the area, so she couldn’t have called for help or notified anyone of her whereabouts. “We don’t know what happened to Mackie,” they said. “We don’t have a crime scene, and we obviously haven’t recovered her remains, so if she is, in fact, dead, which I think she likely is, we would have no cause of death,” Wiebe said.

Peter admits to wanting to take justice into his own hands. “I told the investigators straight up, ‘I want to hurt those people,’” he said, but then added, “Our Elders tell us to forgive.” So, instead, Peter has restrained himself from doing anything criminal out of respect for traditional law enforcement channels. “Right now, it feels like you’re a lost soul yourself, just wandering this world, and deep down in your heart, sometimes you do get to the breaking point, where sometimes you just want to take things into your own hands and deal with it your own way. But you can’t,” Peter told me. “You just gotta keep on trying to find answers.”

As the years go by, “it just gets harder and harder” for the family to go on this way, Vivian said through tears. It has been nearly seven years now, but Peter is in regular contact with the investigators, sharing bones they’ve found while they’re out searching and tips he hears from others. “I just have grade seven and that’s about it,” Peter said. “It’s my way of getting educated, searching for Mackie.” But Peter has suffered health problems, and sometimes he sits at night thinking about Mackie and cries.

One late afternoon, as the sun crept behind the trees, Peter and his cousin Ron Winser took us for a boat ride on the still, placid lake. When I asked how Mackie’s disappearance has impacted the community, Winser told me people were in “dire shock.” Mackie comes from a society that looks after its people, its families, its members. “We’ve always found our people,” he said. “So to have someone go missing down one of our logging roads, where there was a number of people, where she should have never gone missing, to have no evidence of her, and it’s six years later? … It’s a major hurt to our people.”

When Winser was 12, his mother, who was Mackie’s aunt on her father’s side, was stabbed multiple times during a visit to Vancouver from Prince George. After a bingo night, she was killed on her way to buy a Greyhound bus ticket home. Her case remains unsolved, and Winser said he has since spent his life learning about human behavior. He suspects the person who murdered her knew or was related to her. “I think it had to have been someone she knew. Anybody could be that person,” Winser said. “I’ve lived through this twice now.”

When Mackie’s family tries to talk about what happened to her, where she might be now, the only thing they can conclude is that somebody knows something, and they think that person lives in their village.

While there’s a long list of colonial policies that have harmed this family and this community, they continue to place their trust in the same systems that have perpetually failed them, hoping justice will eventually materialize. Some days, Peter told me, he walks the stretch of Tache. On one end, someone asks him for a cigarette; on the other, someone tells him they want to kill themselves. “They’ll throw us welfare checks, and we’ll fight like cats and dogs, and then they’ll rip in and tear our children away,” Peter said. “Sometimes, I just sit and watch. It takes the breath right out of me, the life right out of me.”

Now that the national inquiry has concluded, one hopes it wasn’t part of yet another empty promise by the Canadian government to repair the damage. For Peter, it’s too soon to tell. “Hopefully, they could get more programs, like I keep saying, for people in need of help — mental health and drug and alcohol counsellors to intervene with people living through this kind of tragedy we live through right now,” Peter said. “Pretty much everyone who [went] to that inquiry is looking for an answer.”

Until that answer comes, Mackie’s family continues to roam their territory, searching for a sign of her. One of the last pieces of potential evidence they found was a bone, but it came back from an analysis as belonging to an animal. “It leads to a dead end all the time,” Peter said. “To this day, actually, I kind of expect her to come walking in the door.”

* * *

Annie Hylton is an international investigative journalist with a background in human rights law. Through long-form narrative writing, she seeks to create empathy and illustrate the human stakes behind key policy debates. She writes about gender, immigration, human rights, and conflict, and has worked in the Middle East, Central America, Asia, and Europe. She reported this story on a fellowship from the International Reporting Project (IRP).

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Rebecca Wong | Longreads | May 2019 | 8 minutes (2,187 words)

As a relationship therapist, I know a lot about love, loss, repair, endurance, and growth. Of course, I was trained for this. But the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned came from my grandparents, who taught me nearly everything there is to know about these things.

That is, until one evening three years ago that left me to question everything they taught me.

That night, I’m drawing a bath for my young daughters when my phone dings. As the water runs, I look and see that it’s a forwarded email from my mother, a message from one of my father’s long removed cousins — the daughter of my grandfather’s estranged brother. The email is about my grandfather’s dark side, a part of him I knew nothing about.

***

When I was a little girl, life with my Grandpa was full of love. I knew him to be a sweet, tender, gentle man. He and my Grandma were owners of a gourmet grocery store in Providence, Rhode Island.

I recall him lifting me, when I was 3, with his loving arms so I could sneak raspberry and blackberry candies from the wire baskets that hung overhead. Even though he helped me, it felt sneaky. He was my co-conspirator.

When I was 5, I remember asking him for the first time about the tattoo on his arm. By that time, the Providence store had been sold and my grandparents had moved to Pembroke Pines, Florida. Grandpa and I were sitting together in a flower print swivel club chair in the mirrored living room. (It was the early 80s.)

I sat on his lap, cuddled into him, and traced the green numbers, 106751, on his left forearm with my index finger, over and over, just the same as I’d located each freckle on his arm. These were his markings. I knew them by heart. What I knew more than anything was the love I felt sitting on his lap as I traced. This was my safe space.

“Grandpa,” I asked, “what do these numbers mean?”

“These numbers,” he told me — that time, and countless times to come — “are my story. And you are my reason for living.”

These were big words to land on the shoulders of a child still small and innocent enough to nestle into grandpa’s lap for a journey through the stories that followed each “why?” I so naturally provoked him with.

He told me he had so many stories in him, but that he’d promised himself not to share most of them with me. “You don’t need to know it all,” he said gently.

Over the years he opened up a bit more, in small bursts, telling me about some difficult experiences — like the time his family was separated immediately after getting off the cattle cars at Auschwitz. One of my grandfather’s brothers was carrying their invalid father, a World War I hero, followed by his mother and two sisters. When they arrived, everyone but my grandfather was sent to the left. He alone was sent to the right. He alone survived.

Later that day, he asked another prisoner when he’d see his family again. The prisoner responded by shouting to him, “Look up. You see that smoke? There they are.” And so my grandfather knew. Not even 24 hours after entering the camp, he knew what was in store for them all.

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He also shared stories about liberation. My grandfather and his two buddies, whom he’d bonded and survived with in camp, went looking for a sister whom they’d heard survived at Bergen Belsen. They didn’t find her. Instead they met three women, among them my grandmother. The women were still living in the camp when they met. The men told them they’d be back when they had a place for them to live, then they’d marry them. The women laughed. Who were these guys? These three newly liberated men used their moxie and somehow managed to obtain new suits from a local shopkeeper, then came back to woo the women. Again and again. Each time in new suits. In no time the three couples married.

Girls my age had princes and princesses, but I had liberation as my love story.

***

Then, decades later, comes my cousin’s email. I learn from it that despite all my grandfather shared, there were many things he didn’t — things he couldn’t bear for me to know. After all, I was his reason for living. The email is about things he did to survive the war. While my girls dance around the house creating a ruckus and avoiding bath and bedtime, I read on.

My cousin shares the reason her father and my grandfather were never able to repair their relationship. Of 12 siblings, he was one of the few who survived. She tells me her father did not talk about the concentration camp until she sat him down at age 93. It was then he told her that at one of the camps, my grandfather was a kapo — a Jewish guard working for the Nazis. He never forgave my grandfather for that. Grandpa asked him if he should have been killed instead, and his brother told him, “Yes.” In all the stories he shared, I had never heard any about my grandfather being a kapo.

***

I hand off my phone to my husband so he can read what I’ve just read. So he can know where my mind is whirling off to.

As I attempt to corral the girls into the bath, the little one bites me. She leaves marks on my arm. I’d like to say she never does this, but her sister nicknamed her Gator for a reason. Still, this is extreme. It hurts. I hold the bite mark. It’s right where my grandfather’s numbers were.

I’m so overwhelmed. This is not what I thought motherhood was going to be. I feel deep shame. I thought motherhood would fulfill me. But I feel like I’m failing. I feel full of my own unmet needs and defined by the needs of others. I wasn’t ready for all of this.

The blur between the girls’ actions and my inner whirling gets heavier. I’m trying to understand, “Is my daughter triggering me? Or am I triggering her?” I take a seat on the edge of my bed. The little one runs from my husband, upset with herself for biting me, and with me for not attending to her pain. She tosses herself dramatically, naked, on the bed next to me.

“Mamma!” she shouts, “when I grow up, I’m gonna live far away from you I think, ’cause you don’t hear me!”

It reminds me of the time, as a teen, when I was so angry at my grandmother, I yelled in her face, “I hate you!”

“I know mamaloshen,” she replied, “and still, I love you. I will always love you.” This moment is ingrained in the essence of who I am.

With my daughter’s words, I sink back into my body. Out of my head. This child is whirling in the mess of trying to understand it all with me, even though I haven’t spoken any words about my experience. My daughter is so much like me. Both of my daughters are. I hug her. She melts in. I have no words. Hers were plenty.

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My husband puts the girls to bed that night as I think about all I’ve just learned and all that just happened. My husband and children are my reasons for living. This life we have built. This family. These relationships may be taking away all the things I thought I was, and making me into this new being full of feeling. But they are my reason.

That night I lie next to my husband with my girls tucked in their beds after a hard night, and I try to make new sense of one of my favorite love stories, passed down by my grandparents — two holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives on The Somehow Theory. That somehow, if you believe enough, if you hope enough, it will work out. No matter how hard it is.

***

After reading about my grandfather I found myself asking, “Who was he? Did I know him?” Of course I did. I knew how I experienced him. He was security.  Safety. He believed in me more than anyone. He was who he was to me, and he had a dark side.

I struggled to reconcile this new information with the old. How to make sense of the grandfather I knew and adored, and make space to accept and integrate this dark side? What if I couldn’t? Three years after my cousin’s email, I’m still processing, still making meaning.

What I understand today is that this kapo story is just a snippet of information about a person I experienced very differently. What’s more, it’s hearsay. He’s not here to explain, and I’m not sure it matters. What does matter to me is what’s been brought to light — the penumbra — the realization that we all have dark sides. We all have shadows, shame, and secrets. And those stories are parts of us, but not all of us. How we reckon with them, what we do with them, is what makes up who we are.

I have a dark side; you do too. I can suck at communication. Especially after holding deep, dark intimate space with clients, I can be guarded, brief, and distracted — absorbed with containing and replenishing my energies within myself and my family. At times, I come off as harsh or abrupt. My lack of tending is often about learning my limits, it’s such an imperfect science.

Perhaps what I know of my grandfather’s dark side can teach me more about myself. There are also parts of me that I find difficult to accept. I wonder how not accepting them holds me back and keep me stuck? When I accept my difficult parts I make space to move from surviving to thriving. Maybe my grandfather was working on accepting his difficult parts too. Maybe I never heard about them because of the shame he carried.

I know this intimately as a therapist, and yet I’m not so gentle with myself in my own inner dialogue. I can be harsh when reflecting on the darker sides of myself. It’s a much bigger struggle for me to find compassion and forgiveness for my own shadow than for grandfather’s, or anyone else’s.

***

Recently, I came to this realization: There is no information about my grandfather’s past that could ever change who he was to me. Twenty-five years after his death I find myself calling on that belief to hold me through my own shadows. To carry me through the trials and messes of life, partnership and parenting.

Something I heard Krista Tippet say in an interview about her podcast, On Being, has helped me to make sense of it: “It’s walking through things we don’t know we’ll survive that deepen us and force us to ask the hard questions…if I hadn’t had that experience I wouldn’t be what I am…”

My grandfather had already survived what he didn’t believe he would survive. And it’s after he survived that he impacted me.

We all suffer. We all have wounds. We all must discern for ourselves how to survive. In order to evolve, instead of burying these parts of ourselves, we must bring them into consciousness and reckon with them. This is how we heal and grow. And as we do, we must continue to reckon with these parts of ourselves from a more functioning, safer, protected, connected, place.

This kind of growth and healing is hard, but it’s necessary, and doable, and there is hope in it. This is where my training and experience as a relationship therapist greatly supplement what I learned from my grandparents.

Here is what I’ve come to know: In order to fix a problem, you first need to be curious and understand what it is. It’s through understanding that you’ll be inspired to make a shift. This process involves seasons of connection, disconnection, resolution and repair. The process is healthy.

The problem is what keeps us stuck — an old trauma, blocked energy. Something that can’t or hasn’t yet moved into our consciousness, and so we carry it. It can be of our lived experience, something that happened to us, or something that didn’t happen but should have. It can also be inherited, passed down through generations, showing up in our lives like an echo from the past — epigenetics. Showing up so that we can finally be the one to stand up for ourselves, our ancestors, and all the generations to come, and liberate it.

In order to liberate ourselves, we need to reckon with ourselves, and with our stories.

Is this story about my grandfather comfortable to live with? No. But I know this story is now mine to rumble with, to make sense or meaning of in my life.

Because if I don’t look at it, I’ll pass it down.

* * *

Rebecca Wong is a relationship therapist, mentor, and creator of Connectfulness® method for restoring the connection to the self, others, and the world. She’s also host of the Connectfulness Practice Podcast.

* * *

This essay is published in collaboration with TMI Project, a nonprofit organization offering transformative true storytelling workshops and live storytelling performances to underserved communities. TMI Project storytellers become agents of change for social justice movement building by bravely and candidly sharing the “too much information” parts of their stories, the parts they usually leave out because they’re too ashamed or embarrassed., a non-profit organization offering transformative memoir workshops and performances that invite storytellers and audience members to explore new perspectives. By sharing their personal stories, storytellers become agents of change. You can watch Rebecca Wong tell a version of this story at the 53:49 mark here.

Editor: Sari Botton

Joy Lanzendorfer| Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,300 words)

On February 6, 1885, David Kendall, a city councilman in Eureka, California, was shot. Two Chinese men, possibly from rival gangs, were firing at each other from across the street when a bullet hit Kendall and killed him. Within 20 minutes of his death, a mob of 600 white men marched into Chinatown, intending to burn it to the ground.

Disturbingly, this wasn’t unusual. Violence against Chinese people and Chinese-Americans was a regular occurrence on the West Coast. However, this event was different because of what happened next. Instead of destroying Chinatown, the city decided to order the Chinese to leave. Within 48 hours, most of the Chinese residents were forced onto boats bound for San Francisco. This “peaceful” method of expelling them from their homes was quickly imitated. Towns up and down America’s West Coast, but also as far north as Vancouver, Canada, and as far east as Augusta, Georgia, began forcing out their Chinese populations. Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans, considers it ethnic cleansing.

“The intention … was to round up all the Chinese people in over 200 towns across the Pacific Northwest and drive them out so they would never come back,” she says.

Today, Eureka is a predominantly white coastal town situated between redwood forests and the Humboldt Bay. In 1885, about 200 Chinese people — including 20 women — lived downtown. Anti-Chinese sentiments had been brewing in the United States for some time. Three years before, the Chinese Exclusion Act had barred laborers from entering the US. Before that, the Page Act of 1875 banned Chinese women.

In Eureka, the Chinese were the focus of government-sanctioned vitriol. They were blamed for stealing jobs from white people, and for the slummy state of Chinatown, which they had little control over. Since they weren’t allowed to own property, they rented low-quality shacks made out of remnants from lumber mills. A slough of filthy water ran through the center of town. A local described the Chinese “huddled together in small tenements, a great number of which were closely built upon a single block of ground called ‘Chinatown.’ … [It] had no sewer system, and all the sewage remained with them on the surface of the ground.”

Kendall’s death gave the white residents the excuse they wanted to get rid of the Chinese. But as the mob gathered, a bell ringer went through town, shouting to assemble at Centennial Hall. There, the throngs were convinced to hold off violence for 24 hours while the Chinese were driven out. A committee of 15 men, including a city councilor and prominent businessmen, strode through Chinatown informing residents they must be on the dock to leave by 3 o’clock the next day.

That night, the mob looted Chinatown. Teams went into the countryside to inform Chinese people living there that they too had to leave. When some 60 men fled into the forests, they were tracked down and dragged back to the dock. By morning, gallows had been erected with an effigy hanging from it. A sign read: “Any Chinese Seen on the Street After Three O’clock Today Will Be Hung to This Gallows.”

The white townspeople … celebrated the anniversary of the expulsion of their Chinese neighbors with a festival.

The next day, between 310 and 480 Chinese people — depending on the account — were herded to the wharf. They stayed in a warehouse under guard to protect them from the mob as skiffs transferred them from the docks to two boats anchored in the bay. It took 23 trips to get them all on board. Then the tide went out, forcing them to spend the night in the harbor. Meanwhile, the white mob ransacked Chinatown, stealing their remaining belongings. On February 8, the boats sailed for San Francisco.

The white townspeople congratulated themselves for their “civilized” actions. A year later, they celebrated the anniversary of the expulsion of their Chinese neighbors with a festival. Towns in the area, including Arcata, Ferndale, Fortuna, and Crescent City, began driving out Chinese residents too. By 1890, the Humboldt County business directory boasted that it was “the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.”

But it wasn’t only local towns that took note of Eureka’s actions. Other cities followed their lead.

“By this point there was a telegraph,” says Pfaelzer. “And actually the telegraph officers’ union was very racist, and they just kept spreading the word and spreading the word. My image of it is people like us sending out emails or posting it on Facebook. It spread very quickly.”

Like many other immigrant groups, the Chinese came to California during the 1849 Gold Rush. They experienced persecution from the beginning — the Foreign Miners’ Tax was largely aimed at them and made up half the state’s revenue until 1870. Later, more Chinese came over to help build the railroads. By the time it was completed in 1869, 63,000 Chinese people lived in the United States.

Now out of work, most of them moved to the West Coast looking for employment. At the same time, the economy slumped. Tense racial relationships were fanned by labor unions and the Chinese became scapegoats as white people blamed them for the low wages and the lack of jobs.

“The rhetoric of the anti-Chinese movement focused a lot on Chinese immigrants as an economic threat — that ‘cheap coolie labor’ would undercut the American workingman,” says Beth Lew-Williams, author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. “But behind these economic fears were racial assumptions. At the time, most white Americans believe the Chinese were an innately servile race that could never assimilate and become upstanding American citizens.”

Racists also stoked the fear that if the Chinese stayed, they would overtake the white population. In 1869, The Workingman’s Advocate, a newspaper in Chicago, wrote that a “new and dangerous foe looms up in the far west” and that the Chinese would soon “swarm through the Rocky Mountains, like devouring locusts and spread out over the country.” Governments on every level began passing laws restricting the Chinese. San Francisco, for example, made it illegal Chinese people to live in small spaces or peddle wares in baskets attached to a pole. In California, Chinese citizens couldn’t own land, testify against a white person in court, or attend public school. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 came after years of regional restrictions.

With these laws came violence. One of the worst cases happened in 1871 in Los Angeles. Like in Eureka, it began when a white man was wounded in a gunfight between Chinese tongs, or gangs. A mob descended on Calle de los Negros, a poor, diverse neighborhood where Chinese people lived. A frenzy of violence followed as Chinese residents were seized and hanged by the neck. They included a well-respected doctor, a woman, and a 14-year-old boy. By morning, 18 people were dead. According to Doug Chan of the Chinese Historical Society of America, the Los Angeles Massacre of 1871 is probably “the largest number of lynchings in a single day in United States history.”

After these murders, eight men were convicted of manslaughter and sent to San Quentin, but they were released after only three weeks.

In 1885, however, as the “Eureka Method” spread, anti-Chinese violence exploded. In that year alone, over 100 towns followed Eureka’s lead. According to Driven Out, this included “Riverside, Santa Cruz, Stockton, Napa, San Buenaventura, Tulare, Antioch, Wheatland, Bloomfield, Sonora, Sumner, Washington Territory, and East Portland, Oregon.”

The No Place Project is a website devoted to documenting anti-Chinese violence. Tim Greyhavens travels the West Coast photographing the locations of vanished Chinatowns and other locations of recorded violence against Chinese people. His pictures speak volumes in what they’re not showing. Instead of homes and businesses, they often depict parking lots or grassy fields — places of emptiness.

“One of the first things I had to get past in my own mind was that there was nothing of interest to photograph,” says Greyhavens. “I would sit on a corner [where the Chinese had been], looking around, going, ‘This is the most mundane, boring street corner you could find.’ Then I realized that’s the story. These incidents are so far buried in the past that it’s right under our own noses and we don’t even know it.”

For Greyhavens, the worst case of violence was in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he says the white people resorted to “almost feral viciousness” against the Chinese. A week after the Eureka purge, coal miners attacked Chinese workers who wouldn’t join them in a strike over low wages. The white mob went on a rampage, burning 79 buildings, killing at least 28 people, and injuring 15 others.

Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans continued fighting for their rights. In the process, they helped define civil rights that we depend on today.

In an 1885 letter, Chinese witnesses described the white hoard descending on the Chinatown in Rock Springs, where they attacked everyone in sight.

… Some of the rioters would let a Chinese go after depriving him of all his gold and silver, while another Chinese would be beaten with the butt ends of the weapons before being let go. Some of the rioters, when they could not stop a Chinese, would shoot him dead on the spot, and then search and rob him. … Some, who took no part either in beating or robbing the Chinese, stood by, shouting loudly and laughing and clapping their hands. There was a gang of women that stood at the ‘Chinatown’ end of the plank bridge and cheered; among the women, two of them each fired successive shots at the Chinese.

… After having been killed, the dead bodies of some were carried to the burning buildings and thrown into the flames. Some of the Chinese, who had hid themselves in the houses, were killed and their bodies burned; some, who on account of sickness could not run, were burned alive in the houses.

According to these witnesses, Chinese who fled the mob returned to find their homes “burned to ashes, and there was then no place of shelter for them; they were obliged to run blindly from hill to hill.” US troops finally intervened and escorted the Chinese back to Rock Springs. There, they were met with a gruesome sight.

Some of the dead bodies had been buried by the company, while others, mangled and decomposed, were strewn on the ground and were being eaten by dogs and hogs. Some of the bodies were not found until they were dug out of the ruins of the buildings. Some had been burned beyond recognition. It was a sad and painful sight to see the son crying for the father, the brother for the brother, the uncle for the nephew, and friend for friend.

While 22 people were arrested for these crimes, no witnesses would testify against them, and they were all acquitted. To smooth over trade relations, President Grover Cleveland paid the Chinese government $147,748 in damages for Rock Springs, but the money didn’t go to the victims.

The violence spread into Oregon and Washington as well. Tacoma consciously imitated Eureka and elected a committee, called a Committee of Fifteen, to demand the 350 Chinese residents leave. At 9:30 in the morning on November 3, 1885, mill whistles blew and hundreds of white people descended on Tacoma’s Chinatown. As it was raining, this “mob in raincoats” marched through the streets, hammering on doors and ordering residents be gone by that afternoon.

Lum May, a merchant who had lived in Tacoma for ten years, described the mob in a statement where he requested $45,532 in lost property:

…A large crowd of citizens of Tacoma marched down to Chinatown and told all the Chinese that the whole Chinese population of Tacoma must leave town by half past one o’clock in the afternoon of that day. There must have been in the neighborhood of 1000 people in the crowd of white people… Where the doors were locked they broke forcibly into the houses, smashing in doors and breaking windows. Some of the crowd was armed with pistols, some with clubs. They acted in a rude and threatening manner, dragging and kicking the Chinese out of their houses.

My wife refused to go and some of the white persons dragged her out of the house. From the excitement, the fright, and the losses we sustained through the riot, she lost her reason, and has ever since been hopelessly insane. She threatens to kill people with a hatchet or any other weapon she can get hold of. The outrages I and my family suffered at the hands of the mob have utterly ruined me… My wife was perfectly sane before the riot.

I saw my countrymen marched out of Tacoma on November 3rd. They presented a sad spectacle. Some had lost their trunks, some their blankets, some were crying for their things.

Armed white men were behind the Chinese, on horseback sternly urging them on. It was raining and blowing hard. On the 5th of November all the Chinese houses situated on the wharf were burnt down by incendiaries.

On that rainy day, the expelled Chinese residents walked nine miles through the mud to a train depot. Those who had money for tickets got on a train to Portland, while others walked on through the storm.

But the incidents of violence along the Puget Sound were far from over. On February 7, 1886, as Eureka got ready to celebrate one year without a Chinatown, Seattle turned on its Chinese population. Some 300 to 400 people were forced onto the dock to be put on a steamer called Queen of the Pacific. Among these was a merchant, Chin Gee Hee, and his pregnant wife, who had been “dragged downstairs from the second story [of their house] and out on the street by the hair of her head,” according to an 1888 letter by a witness, Chang Yen Hoon. Three days later, she miscarried the child.

The history of Chinese Exclusion … illustrates how racist laws work hand in hand with violent and racist attacks.

The armed mob was surprised to learn that the captain wouldn’t allow anyone on the boat without a paid fare. They took up a collection and raised money to force many of the Chinese people on board. The boat, full to bursting, sailed to San Francisco.

When militia accompanied the remaining people back to Chinatown, they encountered a huge mob blocking their path. Violence erupted, and five white men were shot. The governor declared martial law and sentinels were placed in Chinatown. Two days later, federal troops arrived to restore order. But while the Chinese were allowed to return home, their lives were constantly in danger. On February 14, many of the remaining residents left Seattle on a steamer. Later, six men were tried on charges of unlawful conspiracy, but the jury judged them not guilty.

* * *

As for the Chinese refugees from Eureka, when the boats docked in San Francisco, they fled into Chinatown and immediately called what today would be a press conference.

“They invite the local press and they invite the San Francisco mayor and they make this bold announcement that someone will have to pay for what has been done to them,” says Pfaelzer. “And the reason it’s a demand for reparations is that they’re not just suing for their property. They’re suing for being the victims of mob violence.”

Banding together, 52 expelled Eureka residents hired a lawyer. The lawsuit, Wing Hing vs. the City of Eureka, was a threat that gave anti-Chinese groups pause. By May, reporters were asking citizens in Eureka about it. Attorney AJ Bledsoe, a member of Eureka’s Committee of Fifteen, which had been responsible for facilitating the expulsion, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “The talk about actions for millions of dollars is the sheerest nonsense.” Then, as if to convince himself, he added that the city couldn’t owe the Chinese more than $2,000. “The people of Eureka are aware that, as a matter of law, they are liable for actual damages inflicted upon the Chinese but if … anyone else undertakes to collect more, they will have their hands full.”

With legal repercussions looming, some adjusted their tactics. Truckee, a small town in the Sierra Mountains, had one of the largest Chinese populations in California. Around a thousand lived in the woods working as woodchoppers for the railroad. Still others lived in Chinatown, which, by 1886, had burned down more than once and relocated across the river.

Newspaper editor Charles McGlashan came up with a new way to attack the Chinese: Starve them out. He formed the Truckee Anti-Chinese Boycotting Committee and sent around a petition pressuring people not to have economic or social interactions with Chinese people. This meant no hiring, renting, or selling to them — including basics like food.

The results were slow, but effective. As Chinese people lost their jobs or lodgings, they began getting on trains going down to Sacramento. It got so bad that the lumbermen in the woods were starving and white butchers started leaving them packets of food to eat. By June 1886, Truckee was thought to be rid of its Chinese residents and Chinatown again burst into flames. Fire engines rained water on the white part of town and people gathered on the balcony of the Truckee Hotel to watch the buildings burn. Unknown to them, two men, Tem Ah Yeck and Ah Juy, were hiding in a Chinatown basement with their valuables. They died in the fire.

McGlashan, who wanted a political career, began peddling his new “Truckee Method” around California. He was an organizer of the two anti-Chinese conventions that were held in Sacramento. Delegates from all over the state met to discuss “the Chinese question,” and people like McGlashan gave speeches. In 1886, more towns expelled part or all of their Chinese community. In California, this included San Jose, Redding, Placerville, and Petaluma. Some towns held anti-Chinese fundraisers or balls to raise money for their fares out of town. In Red Bluff, a children’s anti-Chinese club paraded through the street “armed with cotton bats,” according to Pfaelzer.

* * *

The courts ruled against Eureka’s expelled Chinese residents in Wing Hing v. The City of Eureka. Even though they had lost furniture, boats, vegetable crops, and other belongings when driven from their homes, the judge said that since they couldn’t own land, they had lost no property.

Still, Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans continued fighting for their rights. In the process, they helped define civil rights that we depend on today. Some of these include equal protection under the law, the right to education, and birthright citizenship, which guarantees that everyone born in the United States is a citizen. This law is currently under attack by Donald Trump, who last October said that a plan to do away with birthright citizenship was “in the process.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943 when China became a U.S. ally in World War II. Today, attacks on immigrants, ranging from the Muslim Ban to the border wall, have made the history of Chinese Exclusion feel startlingly relevant. Among other things, it illustrates how racist laws work hand in hand with violent and racist attacks.

“One of the things that the history of Chinese Exclusion teaches us is that border control policies have effects far beyond the border,” says Lew-Williams. “By declaring Chinese immigrants undesirable in the nineteenth century, Congress made [them] vulnerable to local prejudice and violence.”

The full extent of the Chinese-American experience in the West is still unknown, largely because their voices were ignored or dismissed by the dominant culture. Still, what is known of their experiences point to a broader, more complex, and often ugly picture of the American West. Greyhavens encourages people to investigate their local histories.

“Regardless of what town or city you live in, small or large, throughout the west, there’s probably some part of Chinese history in that town, and people aren’t aware of it,” he says. “And you could do the same thing for African-Americans or Latin-American people. There are all these histories that are part of what it took for cities and towns to become what they are now.”

For Chan, the study of Chinese-American history is essential to understanding the formation of the West. But uncovering that history is a challenge, since the contributions of non-white people have been erased.

“It’s the kind of history where people frankly try to avert their eyes, because the truth is so harsh,” says Chan. “And to understand that truth is to call into question the myth of the American frontier.”

* * *

Joy Lanzendorfer‘s work has been featured in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Smithsonian, Tin House, The Guardian, NPR, Poetry Foundation, and many others.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Factchecker: Ethan Chiel

David Fettling | Longreads | March 2018 | 19 minutes (5,019 words)

Now what I remember most about him is what he said about the Rohingya: that they were troublemakers, not really citizens of his country, undeserving of sympathy, that he hated them. He had said it standing under a banyan tree, and I had noticed, again, his dress: he was wearing a longyi, a Burmese sarong, and with it, new-looking, Western hiking boots. His longyi’s knot was tied impeccably. His boots appeared to me to not quite fit him.

But I spent three days and walked 50 kilometers with him before he said this. Through a trekking agency I’d arranged to meet him in Kalaw, in hill-country in central Myanmar, and took an overnight bus there from Yangon. The bus was ultra-modern, air-conditioned, and near-empty. Arriving at dawn, I disembarked into cold air and a fog that obscured the tops of pine trees. I found the café where we were to meet, ordered a tea. Every few minutes a man sidled up to me and asked if I needed a guide. When I said I had one already they looked not merely disappointed but resentful; slinking away, I saw them lingering on the café’s margins.

This was a year ago, so Myanmar was still in-vogue: after decades of oppressive military government and isolation internationally, it had begun to ‘open’ and appeared to be moving toward democratization. A perception of the country as a dramatic ‘good-news story’ — a newly-liberated populace, pursuing long-denied opportunities — was drawing increasing international interest. I badly wanted to see Myanmar and Kalaw through this lens; but those sullen, hands-in-pockets-would-be-guides kept straying into my field of vision.

He arrived fifteen minutes late. He looked extremely young: early twenties, I guessed. He introduced himself as Thomas — I blinked, asked him to repeat it. Thomas was at once exuberantly friendly and palpably nervous: as he met me he profusely apologized. “I’m sorry, sir” — I never got him to stop calling me sir — “I am running late. I still have to get some things from the supermarket. I am running late, I am sorry. I think maybe you will write this on TripAdvisor.” I told him it was no problem, and we walked two streets over, not to a supermarket but to a small, dowdy grocery store. Thomas disappeared; I waited outside. Next-door was an internet café. Young men played computer games, their faces near-expressionless. The fog was clearing to a powder-blue sky, yet I felt a sense of anti-climax: this, apparently, was Myanmar’s transformation in actuality. Thomas reappeared; walking quickly, he continued to apologize. “I am sorry about this,” he said, into the chilly blue morning. “I am sorry about this.”

Thomas talked compulsively. He probably had instructions — making conversation was a way of making happy guests. Yet I had a sense he also genuinely wanted to make a connection with me.

We walked toward the hills. Rapidly the streets became less busy. Small houses sat amid ferns. Then, the trekkers’ worst nightmare: I felt something awry in my bowels.

The crisis was immediate. I told Thomas, who spoke Burmese to an elderly couple sitting on their porch. I was led to a wooden shed behind their house: there, the apocalypse duly took place. Back outside, I found a bowl of water and bottle of soap. I soaped my hands, washed them in the bowl; then, gazing at the soapsuds unmoving in the water, I knew I’d done the wrong thing. There was no drainage mechanism: clearly you were supposed to wash your hands some other way. I had defiled the water. Thomas had accepted a tea, and the three of them were sitting without speaking, the couple calm in this disruption to what looked like a familiar, well-honed daily routine. I said nothing about the suds. We walked on.

My mood had changed. That gleaming, empty bus, those furtive loitering would-be guides, the expressionless cybercafé teens, my guide’s inexplicable anxiety, my own failing bowels, the floating soapsuds — everything seemed to go together, somehow; there was something not quite right about the entire morning, something fundamentally off-kilter. Thomas and I resumed walking. “I’m sorry,” Thomas said, again. “I’m sorry.”

* * *

Thomas turned onto a dirt track. We walked through a glade of pine trees, then into a more open country of tawny-yellow grass. Soon we were climbing, following a ridgeline; green valleys appeared below us.

Thomas talked compulsively. He probably had instructions — making conversation was a way of making happy guests. Yet I had a sense he also genuinely wanted to make a connection with me. There was something in his tone when he questioned me that suggested he acutely wanted to hear the answers, and something in the way he told me things that suggested he wanted me to hear what he had to say. I wanted to chat, too, but my bowels had made me less talkative than normal.

“This is your first trip to Myanmar?”

“It is.”

“Oh: great.” That turned out to be a recurring expression of his, at permanent odds with his nervousness.

Thomas had a smartphone, a Samsung, and he often flicked and swiped on it as he spoke. I looked again at his longyi-and-hiking-boot combination. I noticed that, young as Thomas appeared, he had several white hairs.

“I’ve been a guide for one year.”

“It must be exciting living in Myanmar now,” I said, trying to return to my preferred way of thinking about the country. “Democracy, reform — many new opportunities for people, right?” Thomas nodded, but I saw him frowning just slightly. I asked, “What did you do before you were a guide?”

“I worked in Mandalay, in a factory that mixed cement bricks.”

“And you want to be a guide for a while, or move onto something else?”

“Actually, I am studying law. But I haven’t been able to pass yet.” He didn’t elaborate. I knew entire universities had been shut down for long periods under military rule. I told him to keep studying, then wondered if that was helpful or even applicable advice.

“I want to get married,” Thomas said — he had a girlfriend — “but, she told me, “not enough money.” So he was trying to get as much guiding work, as many treks, as possible. I wondered if this explained his anxiety: a fretful determination to ace every trip, the success of which he was measuring constantly. I asked how he and his girlfriend met. “In our village,” he replied, with a tone that suggested this was rather a dumb question, that it was self-evident people would meet in their own village. Below in the valley, an old man slowly walked across a rice-field. “Not enough money,” Thomas repeated, “not enough money.” I said everything would work out, then pondered again whether that was a useful thing to say.

“Yes,” Thomas said. “But so much time will have passed. We will be old. We will not be young. I think it’s better to be married when you’re young.” Tall clumps of bamboo lined our path; on one leaf, a butterfly opened and closed its yellow and red wings. I told him that in the West, people typically got married when they were much older than he was. But he only nodded, as if that fact, while interesting, had no relevance to him.

For perhaps 40 seconds, we didn’t speak. “It’s so quiet,” Thomas said, and laughed nervously. I saw him searching for a topic. “Do you have brothers and sisters?” Before answering I looked at him, tried to read his expression. “Three?” he said. “Oh: great” — and he did look like he thought it was great. “I have two. But, I never see them. They are still in my village. I have not been back.” Now he was the one who let the silence resume. I wondered if this meant he hadn’t seen his girlfriend in that time.

The silence extended; again, he looked mortified. Then he said, in what appeared to be an analysis of causation, “I think my English is not good.” I assured him it was. He looked at the ground: unthinkingly following his gaze, I saw the precision of his footwork on the rock-strewn path. He said, “My father died when I was small. He spoke very good English. So after that, for many years, I couldn’t practice my English.” Sadness suddenly emanated from him like a heat.

All morning we walked along the ridge. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant that advertised itself as Nepalese. I said I would eat only a little because of my bowels and Thomas looked startled, as if I had discarded some carefully-prepared script, and he feared for the consequences. He reached for his phone. I glanced at his screen, saw him playing a Tetris-like game: by stabbing at the screen he was smashing colored blocks, attempting to clear a straight path for himself. He collapsed that game, then I saw squiggles of Burmese text on the familiar blue-and-white of Facebook.com. “Are all these messages from friends of yours?” I asked. He pursed his lips, as if thinking about the question. He scrolled and scrolled, as if searching for some piece of information that was eluding him. He talked of TripAdvisor and Booking.com, about travelers posting critical comments; he mentioned, with an embarrassed grin, the benefits of me leaving a five-star review. His expression, staring into the phone, was tight-lipped, pensive.

Thomas looked at me with surprise. ‘I am Burmese,’ he said. So much else was fluid, undergoing transformation: but this assertion landed in our conversation solid as a rock.

As the Nepalese staff served curries and breads, I noticed that Thomas’s features looked more than slightly Indian. Certainly he was physically distinct from the typical Bamar, Myanmar’s dominant ethnic group. Interested in the presence of South Asians in the country, I asked about his ethnic background. Thomas looked at me with surprise. “I am Burmese,” he said. So much else was fluid, undergoing transformation: but this assertion landed in our conversation solid as a rock.

Now we walked downhill, into the valley. We began following a train-line. Thick, dry undergrowth was on one side of the tracks, rice-fields on the other. Inevitably I thought about the laying of the rail-lines by the British Empire, about that well-worn trope of trains as symbols of modernity. “What if a train comes?” I asked. But Thomas knew the times: he said the next one was not due for five hours. The track gauge was strikingly-narrow. The wooden planks were beginning to rot. A small train-station, with a village wrapped around it, appeared on our left. A man sat on a bench on the platform. I wondered if he could be waiting for the distant evening train. Perhaps he was waiting for something else. Perhaps he was not waiting for anything.

Fog was now back around the treetops. I saw two bulbuls in a tree. We arrived at the outskirts of the village where we would spend the night. The houses, basic two-story constructions, all had electric paint-jobs. One had purple doors and green walls, another green doors and blue walls. The colors stood out in the foggy dusk. Thomas turned left, into our homestay. A Burmese family greeted me with the wordless wide grins by which people with no common language communicate. I sat exhausted on the front step.

There, abruptly, I remembered other news and analysis I’d read about Myanmar, things I had chosen to ignore since my arrival, preferring airbrushed accounts. That still-unmet expectations were causing rising frustration. That people’s predominant feelings were not merely or even mostly of dramatically-opened possibilities, but of a scramble for resources and opportunities which they saw as palpably finite. That change, displacing traditions and disrupting communities, was causing anxiety and disorientation — and prompting searches for reassuringly simple racial-religious-nationalist ideas of identity.

I found myself watching Thomas as he unlaced his hiking-boots and put on flip-flops. I saw his feet. They were wrinkled, calloused feet, the feet of someone who’d grown up walking without shoes. He’d been tied into village life enough to want to marry from there. But the old rural patterns had been disrupted — not only had Thomas himself moved, to Mandalay for factory-work, then Kalaw, but back in his village, his prospective wife was demanding more money. Thomas was attempting, through the tourist industry, to plug into a nascent Myanmar of greater economic opportunity. Yet his constant talking to me, tending me like an over-watered plant, suggested an entrenched notion that foreign travelers were a scarce and precious resource. On his phone Thomas always had anxiety on his face, as if he believed Mark Zuckerberg’s “connected world” could bring as many disasters as windfalls, as if one bad TripAdvisor review could sink all his dreams, as if all that he’d built for himself remained fundamentally insecure. His hiking boots now sat on the balcony, socks scrunched into them, juxtaposed against the rural dusk. I remembered his words inside the Nepalese restaurant: I am Burmese. The only truly confident declaration he’d made.

Night came. In the house three low-wattage light bulbs flickered on. Each illuminated perhaps four feet. In the kitchen, Thomas and the homestay family chopped vegetables I didn’t recognize. He spoke to the family familiarly in Burmese. I offered to help; he switched back to English to tell me it wasn’t necessary, resumed talking Burmese. His face looked washed of the concern I’d seen earlier. I heard water trickling in an irrigation channel of a neighboring rice-paddy: I wondered how many generations had tended it. A puttering sound: a motorbike came up the driveway. Its sole headlight glowed, far stronger than any light in the house. The driver parked; chatted briefly in the kitchen; left again. I watched the headlight’s glow become smaller, then disappear.

* * *

Through the small porthole of a window beyond my bed’s mosquito netting, I could see only fog. I stepped outside. Although fog enveloped the multi-colored houses, in the rice-field I could make out the long green stalks, heavy rice-grains at their tops. Next door a young girl was on a swing made from rope and a hessian bag. I felt better this morning, in this house, amid this countryside. The girl swung with an unchanging, entirely predictable rhythm. Thomas put away his flip-flops, wrenched on and laced up his hiking-boots. We started walking.

Bright yellow squares appeared on the hillsides. Thomas said they were sesame fields. Old women were spreading chilies on blankets on the road, to dry in the sun. Thomas told me about that, and other crops, and harvesting methods. In his pocket his phone beeped. “Over there they are growing potatoes.” His phone beeped again. “And that is corn.” His phone beeped again.

Then, a pivot: after speaking about Myanmar’s countryside, he wanted, amid the sesame-checkered hillsides, to know about my country.

“Is there rice in Australia?”

“Only a little.”

“Is the weather warm in Australia?”

“It depends. In the south it gets cold in winter.”

“I like winter-time the best,” said Thomas. In Kalaw, he told me, it became quite chilly in December. I told him that in the Australian city where I used to live there was often frost on the ground in the early mornings, and it looked almost like snow.

“Oh: great,” Thomas said. Then he said, “I like this about my job. I meet people from everywhere. France, the Netherlands, America. And they tell me things.” He paused. “I have not seen snow.” A plane was flying overhead, and he said,: “Actually, I have not been on a plane.” He laughed, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again. Another rice-field. Thomas told me that in this area, farmers got two harvests per year. Then he said he had a cousin working in Malaysia, in construction, and maybe one day he would visit him. I watched his hiking boots scuff the ground, left, right, left, right, as our conversation shifted between inwardness and outwardness, between old and new worlds.

On his phone Thomas always had anxiety on his face, as if he believed Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘connected world’ could bring as many disasters as windfalls, as if one bad TripAdvisor review could sink all his dreams, as if all that he’d built for himself remained fundamentally insecure.

We began climbing again, into another set of hills. Blue-black clouds appeared on the horizon.

“Are there earthquakes in Australia?” Thomas asked.

“Not many.”

“Oh: great.” Thomas said. “Here in Myanmar we just had an earthquake in Bagan” — the ancient city, comparable to Angkor, filled with archaeological monuments. “Two hundred buildings were damaged,” he said. “It is terrible. It is terrible, because it is like our heritage is disappearing. We are in mourning.” He said the word “mourning” very carefully.

I said, “We’re certainly getting more extreme weather in Australia. Fires, floods, rain at strange times of the year, things like that.”

“Same in Myanmar!” said Thomas, and I noticed his excitement at finding a point of commonality. “Like now. There shouldn’t be rain like this, in November. This is not normal.”

As if on cue, we saw, below us, a rice-field that had been flattened, the rice-stalks horizontal against the ground — it was like a movie-scene of a UFO landing. “This is from heavy rain last week,” Thomas said. “It is damaging because it is coming at a different time in the rice-cycle. It has destroyed a lot of crops.” He paused. “I think the world is changing very fast.”

I said, “In Australia farmers can buy insurance against poor crops or bad weather. Sometimes they get help from the government, as well. Is there any talk of that, yet, in Myanmar?”

Thomas asked me for clarification. Then, he said, “No.”

“It started in Australia in the Great Depression,” I said. “After the economy collapsed, a lot of farms had big difficulties, a lot of people had it very tough.” Then, listening to myself, I stopped speaking.

The clouds were closer to us. We put on raincoats. It began to bucket. Brown water poured down our path; the earth turned to sludge. Thomas calmly found footfalls in the muck; I stepped where he stepped. A large monastery appeared. Thomas gestured for us to enter. We walked into the courtyard, then stood under a sloping red roof at the main entrance. Rain poured off the roof. Monks in yellow robes walked slowly up the steps.

Thomas said, “Are you religious?”

“I’m not, no.”

“You have no religion at all,” he said, declaratively. “A lot of my clients from the West are like that.” I had a feeling he’d been about to instinctively say “oh: great,” but had pulled back just in time. I noticed his use of “client.” He looked at the rain, adjusted his jacket. Then he said, “But you know, in Myanmar, that would be very difficult — to have no religion at all.

“Villages around here are all losing the old religion,” Thomas continued. “Here people practice a Buddhism, but an old-fashioned Buddhism, with animism and other traditions mixed in. Now the old still believe that, but the young don’t.”

“Why do you think the young don’t follow the old style?”

“It takes a lot of time,” Thomas said. “Young people now, they don’t have time.” Back on the path, two locals were attempting to walk in the rain. They squinted, held up their hands to shield their faces, disoriented.

“So you’re more of a conventional Buddhist, Thomas?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am a Buddhist.” A second confident assertion from him, and it seemed to me again, given all his other freely-expressed doubts, jarringly-so.

The rain lightened; we left the monastery. Our boots squelched in the earth. Visibility was still poor, so it took awhile for me to see a large poster stuck on a house. I opened my jacket, wiped my glasses on my shirt, then saw pictures of a man I didn’t recognize, and Aung San Suu Kyi.

“Who’s the guy on the left?”

“That’s the new President.”

“What do you think of the new government, then?”

“For a long time things were terrible. Now everything is better. We are very happy.” From his tone, he made it sound like the well-worn verse of a school song — he sang it dully, as if by rote. Whether he did so for my benefit or his own, I didn’t know.

The rain stopped, and the valley and next range of hills became visible again. Now I could see a startlingly conical-shaped hill among the range, and Thomas said, “A hermit lives there.”

“Really?”

“He went there and became a monk. He lives up there and works on his religion.”

I looked. On the hill’s summit was a small hut, surrounded by maybe a half-dozen pine trees. For a second I thought I could make out a figure, but of course I couldn’t.

“He gave up everything,” Thomas repeated, “and became a monk.”

On some impulse I said, “You ever feel like doing that?”

He said, “Do you?”

“Sure, some days.” But I said it with a dumb grin on my face. When he replied, “yes, sometimes,” he looked contemplative, and grave.

We arrived in the village where we would stay the night. One shop on its outskirts had several outside tables and was selling beer to tourists. At one of the tables was a group of newly-bronzed northern Europeans, and one of them said, “Hey, Thomas!”

He had escorted them to Inle Lake several days ago. They had stayed there, and were now heading back to Kalaw by another route. There was a shouted recollection of some mid-trail embarrassment which left ambiguous who was being mocked; they invited Thomas to have a beer with them. We walked quickly to the homestay so he could drop off his things before heading back. He asked if I wanted to come; I declined.

At the homestay I went to the outside shower, poured cold water from a bucket over myself, put on my last clean clothes, went to the house’s second-floor, and opened my book. Night came. I had a sudden appreciation for simplicity. Old routines in an old house, I thought to myself. Thomas still wasn’t back. On my arrival the old man at this homestay had nodded to me only slightly. As I read he sat on the floor on the opposite side of the room, underneath framed pictures of presumably-deceased relatives. But my presence in this house likely complicated any practice of household routines for him. At around 9 o’clock, a confused rooster began to crow.

* * *

When I woke up and went outside, I found Thomas already on the verandah packing his bag. We walked on, in more fog. He hadn’t shaved: it made him look older. On the village’s outskirts was a field of corn, dead. After two hours of walking Thomas realized he had left behind his rain-jacket.

Now we were passing through different country again, an open grassy valley with scattered banyan trees and rocky limestone cliffs to our left and right. Inle Lake, grey, calm, was visible ahead. A thin trail of Western tourists was moving through this valley from various tributary paths in the hills. I saw once again the country’s potential — this could indeed be a major tourist attraction.

Then, I felt again the dreaded sensation in my bowels. Why now? I told Thomas through a self-deprecating joke, then went broodingly quiet. Yet Thomas still insisted on speaking, asking one question after another. Preoccupied with Richter scale rumblings in my intestines, my responses became terser until I was answering in monosyllables. I looked at him, saw his now-familiar anxiety. Eventually he said, simply, “We are silent.” I looked at him. He was desperately unhappy.

I could see he was thinking of a new topic. But it seemed to me that all his anxieties conditioned the one he now chose.

In an attempt to reset the situation, I said, ‘But people can be silent, sometimes, Thomas. There’s such a thing as a comfortable silence.”

It had no effect at all: his face was the same. I thought: but he isn’t “comfortable.” He is in no position to be comfortable. And I found myself asking again — what was it, precisely, about silence which Thomas couldn’t tolerate? Was it the importance he ascribed to each trekking trip, elevated by an idea of the scarcity of trekkers in Kalaw? For the tourists around us in this valley were still few in number, given this was peak tourist season. I thought again of those would-be guides loitering by the café, desperate for business. Or was he genuinely searching for a human connection? He had moved only recently to Kalaw, I reasoned; he would be spending a lot of his life on trekking trips with strangers. Amid his disrupted, dislocated life, far from family and other anchors, did he, quite simply, want to talk?

“Do you have pets?” Thomas asked. I told him a dog and a cat. “Oh: great. In Myanmar, we keep mostly dogs,” he said. “I had a dog — here, in Kalaw. I had him for a while. Then, he got sick, and he died. I guess in Myanmar there is a lot of death. When I went trekking he would sit outside my house and wait for me when I came home.”

I asked to sit. We entered a banyan tree’s shade, rested our backs against its roots. I shut my eyes. Thomas sat pensively. I could feel his concern that I’d stopped speaking, knew he was interpreting it, again, as a setback. A cool breeze came from the lake. I could see he was thinking of a new topic. But it seemed to me that all his anxieties conditioned the one he now chose.

“Today in Myanmar,” he said, “we have a problem with the Rohingya.”

I looked around: at grey rock, yellow grass, the banyan tree’s fat trunk and leaves, the distant lake. I felt another quake in my bowels.

“Burmese people don’t like them because they are so violent,” Thomas said. “They carry out many terrorist attacks. They live inside Myanmar but they are not from Myanmar. They are from Bangladesh.”

The banyan tree’s enormous roots, knee-high, curled in all directions; to me, now, they resembled a tentacled monster rising from the earth. He asked — and I recognized the same sentence structure from our conversation yesterday — “Is it like that with Muslims in Australia?” Searching for a new point of connection between us, he’d settled on this. So many differences separated us. But he knew — from previous trekkers? — that our societies had this tension in common. He was looking at me expectantly, hopeful this would solve the problem of the silence between us.

I did no calibrating, no soft-pedaling; I did the opposite of what people do who want to make a connection with someone else: lobbed my own differing perspectives and values straight at him, unvarnished. “In my country,” I said, “it’s similar in that too many people believe ugly things about Muslims.” A butterfly floated past. “It’s unfair, because of course, all but a handful are as peaceful as you or me. But people like to have somebody to blame.” As I said it, I watched hurt spread across his face. He had suggested a commonality between us; I had pointedly denied it.

He clenched his lip. He said, “They have too many children. They will take everything. This country should be for real Myanmar people.”

I looked again at his Western-style hiking boots; I looked at his face, his South Asian-looking face. Three foreign backpackers, small in the distance, walked through the valley. Like the rest of Myanmar, he had been waiting a long time, with increasing impatience, and had sacrificed much — moving to Mandalay to mix bricks, leaving family and girlfriend behind. Now, guiding tourists to Inle Lake, he presumably felt himself achingly close to his goals. But could he already see, I wondered, that his goals were not quite being realized — and likely would not be? All this dislocation — and for what? I remembered his comment yesterday: I think the world is changing very fast. Alone in the hills with a tourist who’d gone mysteriously quiet, an event boding ill for his professional success, he had reached for another assertion that, like I am Burmese, like I am Buddhist, had a solidity to it. We have a problem with the Rohingya. In his pocket, his phone bipped. Perhaps a TripAdvisor notification. An ancient-looking farmer walked past us, carrying a full basket on her back. His phone bipped again. “It’s about defending the Myanmar culture,” he said. At this, I was entirely silent. One more uncomfortable silence. I could almost hear him say it: we are silent. But he didn’t say anything. His face was stony.

We walked towards a rocky hillside — the last ridge. Now Thomas did something drastic. He took out his phone and put on music. It was, of all things, the pop song “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz. Thomas clearly knew the lyrics, the ridiculously Californian lyrics. They rang out in central Myanmar. I fell right through the cracks/ And now I’m trying to get back. In this moment of stress, it was American pop he had turned towards.

We were approaching an enormous construction site. A luxury resort was being built. I saw my chance to use a bathroom. We entered a world of wooden scaffolding, pouring concrete, gaping muddy holes in earth. The scaffolding looked precarious. I found a beautiful modern toilet — which was not yet working. A sign warned against use. Another wooden shed it was. Sitting there, I had an impulse to take my own advice: I attempted a silence. I found myself listening to small birds, tiny rustlings, a wind. Then, those sounds were extinguished by a cement-mixer’s guttural chug. Then, I heard, faintly, Jason Mraz: Nothing’s gonna’ stop me but divine intervention/ I reckon it’s again my turn.

The final ridge. Another blue-black cloud. Another rainstorm approaching. I zipped up my jacket, but Thomas’s was still hanging at the silent old man’s homestay: he had nothing to protect himself. I looked at him. His face was now without anxiety, it was the face of a stoic, settling in for protracted discomfort, protracted disappointment. He got out a plastic bag, carefully wrapped his phone up in it. The last thing we heard before he turned off his pop song was: well open up your mind and see like me.

* * *

David Fettling’s work deals with the ways people of different cultures and countries meet, with a focus on Southeast Asia. His work has appeared in Griffith Review, Inside Story, Australian Book Review, The Guardian (Australia), and The Jakarta Post. His first book is Encounters With Asian Decolonisation. 

Editor: Dana Snitzky