I recently watched a clip of a Native American elder in a wheelchair being jostled by New York police during a protest against ICE. Speaking to a reporter he said that it pained him to be there in a moment of conflict, because one of his jobs as an elder was to teach the young people of his nation love. 

This was necessary, he explained, because the generations of indigenous people who had endured the infamous residential schools in Canada and the US were so traumatised that when they came to have their own children they were incapable of telling them they loved them, or even hugging them.

I first heard about these terrible places more than twenty years ago when I interviewed the anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody about his book The Other Side of Eden. The book and our conversation have stayed with me: deeply moving and thought-provoking accounts of his time with hunter-gatherers in the High Arctic, a time that changed his life.

Among the darker aspects of the Eden he describes were the Canadian Indian residential schools. Children were forcibly removed from their communities to be brutalised in institutions where, among other cruelties, they were forbidden any manifestation of their own cultures, starting with language. Many did not survive the schools. Most of those that did were profoundly damaged.

The schools were brought vividly to mind again this time last year, when we visited our daughter Anna in Canada. She lives in Nelson, British Columbia, a small mountain town where the womens’ centre she helps to run was holding an anniversary event in the local library. In a space at the back of the library was a touring exhibition entitled the Witness Blanket.

Inspired by a woven blanket, it features a series of large free-standing panels which combine writings and images, artefacts, textiles and the spoken word, to bear witness to the inhumanity of the schools and the subsequent suffering of the people who survived them; the victims of what we know today to have been a ‘civilising mission’, a state-sponsored programme of racism, colonialism and genocide, aided and abetted by the Christian churches.

One particular piece of writing continues to haunt me. I think it was an excerpt from the transcript of an interview, and I can’t remember whether the speaker was a man or a woman, but it doesn’t matter. They said: ‘I was taken away from my tepee and my soft, warm rabbit-skin blanket and put in an iron bed with cold, white sheets.’

Substitute ‘eiderdown’ for ‘blanket’ and that is uncannily reminiscent of my own experience of arriving at boarding school, a couple of weeks short of my eighth birthday; an experience that has continued intermittently to plague me throughout my life. But it was only very recently that I had one of those moments of insight when another layer of the onion is peeled away, and a new level of understanding opens up.

What took place, I realised – and here the elder’s words take on a greater resonance – was the withdrawal of love. On the day I left home I woke in the bosom of the family, warmly loved by those around me. Twelve hours later (having, incidentally, surrendered my first name as we drove through the school gates) I found myself in an iron bed with cold, white sheets, in a place where no one loved me.

If that sounds overly dramatic, or, on the other hand, entirely obvious, the fact that I still feel compelled to write about it nearly seventy years later is testimony to the effect it had on me. And I was lucky. In my ten years of boarding nothing worse happened to me. 

When I think of those bewildered, terrified indigenous children, torn from everything they knew, innocents who never stood a chance, my heart breaks. The consequences for so many of them, and the generations that followed, were dire: alcohol, drugs, poverty, illness, loss of self-esteem, loss of hope. It is almost beyond belief to learn that the last Canadian Indian residential school closed only in 1997.

Children need love and they need it to be consistent, love they can trust. Only then can they become the emotionally rounded, empathetic adults that our troubled world so desperately needs, and that our future as a species depends on. Nothing is more important than the words of the elder at the ICE protest, the stories in Hugh Brody’s book, the message of the Witness Blanket: it all begins with the children.