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You know those family road trips, where too many people, with too much luggage, cram into a car and drive for hours on end? The ones always depicted as the stuff of nightmares in every movie or tv show ever made? The Griswold’s quest for Walley World? I miss those. I know my memory is being stupidly selective, that it’s glossing over the tediousness and endless bickering and often less than idyllic vistas. But I’ve never so desperately been looking forward to packing everything and everyone and hitting whatever road we may find. Besides: it yields moments worth remembering too. Moments forever bound to this tapestry we eventually hold so dear. Our friend Robert Catto just published a new story on KAGE, and it hit home. Literally. In this beautifully written essay, he addresses the recent horrific discovery of remains from 215 First Nations children, behind a former residential school in Kamloops, BC. The unmarked graves of generations of children who were forcefully abducted from their parents, from the only home they knew, to then suffer abuse at the hands of a system of institutionalized assimilation. It is an indelible stain, a dark mark on our country and not, unfortunately, the only one; but it is the darkest by far. We are facing a time of national reckoning. Humanity, as a collective, can be a cruel, soulless beast. Robert’s essay is called Broken Threads, and this multiplicity of threads, interwoven, all leads back to the one foundational element we all share: families. We will soon get our road trip. And Watson will bark and the kids—although older now—will still bicker a couple of times along the way. But we’ll be together. And it will be a privilege.
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