Woven with Unconditional Love: Reweaving Healing through Ancestral Pathways and Memory

• In Event: Imagining and Enacting Indigenous Futures: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Education

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose. Catholic missions and Mission Indian boarding schools in California left deep wounds—wounds that were meant to sever us from our ancestors, our teachings, and ourselves. But what they sought to destroy was never truly lost. This presentation weaves together oral histories, archival records, and community-based research to illuminate how descendants of St. Boniface Indian Industrial School (SBIIS) not only survived these institutions but also carried forward sacred knowledge, memory, and love in the face of generational disruption. Rather than centering trauma alone, this work foregrounds the active and ongoing labor of healing—what it means to return to ancestral pathways through love, refusal, and ceremony.

Perspectives and Modes of Inquiry. This relational historical study centers stories. The stories in this research emerge from years of relationship-building with SBIIS students and descendants, including the presenter’s own relatives. Across these stories, a powerful throughline emerges: Schooling was not just a site of harm, but also a site of refusal and survivance. Students sang prayers under their breath in their Native languages, passed down stories in secret, and dreamed of futures where their descendants would be free to remember. These memories now live in the voices of descendants—descendants who are reclaiming language, returning to the land, and teaching their children what was once forbidden.

Unconditional love—offered by Creator, ancestors, and community—is the thread that binds these stories together. This framework refuses the institutional logics of compliance and assimilation, instead centering ceremony, silence, memory, and kinship as sovereign practices of care. Through this lens, healing is not linear or individual—it is intergenerational, reciprocal, and often quiet. It lives in stories told over kitchen tables, in baskets woven with remembrance, and in the daily decisions to love ourselves and each other through inherited pain.

Significance. The presentation outlines seven pathways toward healing that have emerged from this work: acknowledging history and trauma, reconnecting with culture and ceremony, storytelling, cultural revitalization, building community support networks, seeking trauma-informed care, and grounding all of this in the practice of unconditional love. These pathways are not prescriptions but invitations—ways we might reweave the future from threads once frayed by colonial violence.

As Master Weavers often share, “When you weave a basket, you don’t just weave for yourself. You weave for those who will hold it when you are gone.” In that spirit, this presentation is both an offering and a commitment—to hold space for what was never truly lost, to speak the truths silenced by harm, and to continue weaving futures where Indigenous People thrive not despite education, but because of the love they carry into it.

Author

• Kelly Leah Stewart, University of California, Los Angeles