Healing Begins When Truth Is Faced Together

Why I Hesitated

I have hesitated to share a video from Papoose Meadows featuring Dean Barlese, his father and others speaking about a massacre of Northern Paiute people there, and about the ceremonies that continue today to honour those who were lost and care for that land.

I hesitated because many people already seem close to their limit, and this is painful material. It can bring anger, sadness, grief and a sense of hopelessness. I know that because I feel it myself.

Even so, I have come to think that our reluctance to face painful truths is one of the main reasons the damage remains. The damage is larger than one event or one community. At heart, it is about relationship.

The Larger Issue Is Relationship

My view is that we will only heal the earth and each other when we heal our relationships with each other.

Many of the problems we discuss separately — division, distrust, poor wellbeing, social fragmentation and damage to the natural world — are consequences of damaged relationship.

When relationship breaks down, trust is broken, communities weaken and people turn inward against one another. Societies in that condition struggle to act together or think beyond the short term. We see the results in public life, personal wellbeing and the health of our communities.

The same rupture appears in our relationship with the earth. Land becomes something to use, extract from or own, rather than something we are part of and responsible for.

In North America, one of the deepest unresolved relationships is between Indigenous peoples and the people who came later. It remains extraordinarily troubled, yet much of the pain within it is still ignored, suppressed or defended against.

Time passing on its own does not heal something people still refuse to properly face. What happened remains active while the truth of it is avoided.

Yet even within that history, not everything was broken.

What Indigenous People Never Lost

One of the most important things I have learned through my time with Northern Paiute people is that, despite everything done against them, something essential remained.

They did not lose their connection to ancestors, to one another, or to the land in the deepest sense.

I have seen this in Donna Cossette speaking about her work helping implement NAGPRA, the U.S. law requiring museums, universities and public institutions to return Indigenous human remains, funerary items and sacred objects to the tribes they were taken from.

When Donna explains that process, I have seen tears come when she reaches the actual moving and return of the remains. Others have asked why she is so upset, saying, “They are only bones from people who died thousands of years ago.” She cannot understand how they do not see it. “They are our ancestors.”

What I learned in that moment was that the connection she still carries is as deep and immediate as many people would feel for one of their closest loved ones today. That sense of belonging across generations was never lost.

I have also seen a relationship with land that differs sharply from the modern habit of treating land as property — something to own, sell, seize or hand back. I learned, and checked this carefully with them, that it is deeper than that. They experience themselves as part of the land.

Most of us can understand that intellectually. We are one of the animals that evolved within nature and depend entirely upon it. Many of us have lost the lived experience of being part of it. They never lost that connection.

If the land is experienced as part of you, knowingly harming it makes as little sense as knowingly harming your own body.

Why This Matters to Everyone

The wider world speaks constantly about loneliness, mental health, environmental decline, loss of trust and weakening community life.

At root, this is an expression of disconnection: from one another and from the land we are part of.

We spend huge energy trying to solve the symptoms, while paying far less attention to the disconnection beneath them.

The answers many of us are looking for already exist in people who have kept a stronger sense of connection.

My own experience is that the Northern Paiute people I have come to know are happy to share with those who come in a good way and are ready to listen.

The deeper issue is not willingness. It is whether people carrying so much harm have the freedom and strength to offer all they could.

Why They Need to Be Well

Indigenous peoples suffer disproportionately in all kinds of illness and hardship.

I believe a primary reason for this is the suppressed, ignored and denied damage done in the relationship between the Indigenous people of the land and those who came later.

The wider world needs what they never lost, but they can only offer it fully if they are well and able to be themselves. At present, many are carrying the effects of an injustice that still has not been properly faced.

Helping them be fully themselves requires us to face that denied history honestly.

That may sound like a great deal. I used to think so too.

I used to think healing depended on first completing all the right acts of repair.

What I Have Learned About Healing

Through my own spiritual and wellbeing practice, I learned something that surprised me about what is needed to heal.

What I am learning now is very different.

The key moment is when people face the truth clearly together.

After that, whatever still needs doing becomes work done together, rather than endless penance that never quite settles the wound.

Why I Am Sharing It Now

Here is the video from Papoose Meadows.

Dean Barlese, his father and others speak about the massacre that took place there and about the ceremonies that continue now to honour those who were lost and care for that land.

I am sharing it because now is the time to start taking these steps: to face painful truths more honestly, to build real relationship, and to learn from people who never lost what many of us are now trying to recover.

What To Do Next

Do not leave this as something you watched and then moved on from.

If you are not Indigenous yourself, find out who the Indigenous people are closest to where you live. Then, where there is a genuine opening, go and meet people. Have a conversation. Listen properly.

Too many people try to understand Indigenous issues from a distance while never meeting the people themselves.

For those who live in or visit Northern Nevada, the Pyramid Lake Spiritual Healing Center is available as a place to connect, learn and support this work.

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