Sunday go to meeting clothes

"Sunday go to meeting clothes."

I heard these words many times as I was growing up, but never knew the origin of these five words. It all became so much clearer when I heard these same exact words on a documentary.
My mother, Hazel Leona, was a pupil/survivor of the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, a place she and others referred to as the “Mush hole.”

In all my life my mother never spoke of her time at the Mush hole, I do not know what brutality she endured while she was there because she kept it locked away hidden inside her. I know that she was a fluent speaker of Mohawk when she first came to stay at the Mush hole, someone she went there with who is still alive recently told my sister this fact. I also know that when she left there she was no longer fluent; she never spoke to me or my siblings in her native language, which was Mohawk. What words or phrases I do know where taught to me by my grandmother, her mother. I do not know why she went there or how long she had to stay, nor what she endured.

The video I watched portrayed life at the Mush hole as a life full of loneliness and pain. My heart ached thinking of her there alone, separated from her own siblings and friends, perhaps locked in a dark room alone. I do know that because of her time there she had on some level a sense of skeptism about all things spiritual or maybe more accurately religious. I never questioned my mother; I usually took what she told me as her truth, for better or for worse.

Growing up she would tell us to get ready in our “Sunday go to meeting clothes” and she would take us to the Tuscarora Mission on my reservation. I had a strong belief in a higher power, God, Jesus, Creator, Lord, Sa dee a gwes oh, or just He who made me. I enjoyed going to church, I felt such peace and comfort there and always a sense of renewal inside myself. This feeling of peace didn’t seem to come to my mother often. Although she took us there to church where my father’s family attended regularly, it seemed to me that she there was sadness within her and sometimes a generalized scoffing or quiet sneering at some things that were preached.

I attributed her unhappiness or disbelief to the fact that her mother, had been an active member of the Seven Day Adventist Church and her father, had been an inactive member of the Anglican Church. As a young child I couldn’t even begin to understand the losses my mother and her family had already encountered and had survived. I only knew that something inside her was missing or locked up so tightly she didn’t know how to access it herself.

My mother was never a huggy kissy kind of a mother to me. I thought that maybe since I was the 9th of 10 children that she had that perhaps she was tired of mothering and nurturing and that she had already expended it on her other offspring that came before me. As I grew up it seemed that we grew even more distant. I looked to my older sisters for comfort and support. My mother wasn’t always there when I needed her, and sometimes I felt that she wasn’t there when she was. I remember a song called “Far away eyes” and it brought to my mind my mother who at times sat at the table with a cigarette in her one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, staring far away as she looked out the window towards the road.

She loved me I knew that, but it seemed sometimes she didn’t know how to or couldn’t show me her feelings for me. She seemed uncomfortable when in the morning I would get up and come to her and hug her or try to sit in her lap. I never understood her awkwardness and thought perhaps she didn’t really love me because of something I had done or maybe because I wasn’t born a son.

It wasn’t until I heard the woman on the film talk about her experience where she was locked in a cold, damp room at the Mush hole where they kept the “Sunday go to meeting clothes,” did I connect my mother’s pain and her past. Her indifference to me was not that she didn’t want to kiss me or hold me but that she had suffered so much in her own youth, separated from her own mother. Made to lose more than just her language and her culture the perhaps she lost her ability to love on some level. Perhaps she even felt unlovable because that is exactly what the administrators and staff at that school wanted her to feel. It seemed to me that she felt that she was less than, not good enough, second class, unworthy of respect, love, compassion and therefore she found it difficult e to love and nurture anyone else, including me.

My mother has been gone from me for over 24 years, and yet there are still mornings when I wake up and wish I could reach for the phone and call her. l long to be able to stand next to her and just lean my head against her arm, to feel her warmth and her strength flow through me.