Unearth
By Alicia Elliott, first published in Grain
The body of a sixty-three-year-old Mohawk woman's little brother is uncovered at the construction site of a fast food company fifty years after his death, which prompts her to grapple with questions of assimilation and memory.
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Plot Summary
Beth, a sixty-three-year-old Mohawk woman, receives a call from the police that the body of her brother has been found at a construction site of a fast food restaurant. It has been fifty-five years since Henry's death, and the police have not officially identified the body, but they know it is him. When Beth was eight years old, her mother converted to the Anglican church, which made her one of the "good Indians." The priest instructed Beth's mother to rename her children with Anglican names, and the mother herself became Mary. He also told Mary to send her children to a mission school. Mary did not want to take Beth out of school in the middle of the school year, but she sent Henry to the Iroquois Residential School. The family never heard from Henry again. When Mary tried to contact the priest who told her to send her child away, he was gone. When the priest finally returned, Mary attacked him out of anger and grief and was sent to prison for ten years. Young Beth was then sent to a white Anglican family and attended the same Iroquois Residential School that Henry was murdered at for a year. When Beth visits the construction site, everything looks as she remembers, save for the blue tape. She wonders if the families that live there know about the young Indian children whose bodies are buried in that area. She assumes that those families would have forgotten, the same way she tried to forget Henry. After Henry's death, Mary immortalized a romanticized version of her son, always comparing Beth to the dead child. Beth calls her daughter, Lindsay, after she leaves the site to ask her if she ever made her feel inadequate, or if she herself was a bad mother. Beth tells her adult daughter about Henry and about the residential school for the first time and reveals to Lindsay that she does not even remember what Henry looks like. Beth then drives around the Mohawk reservation, and finally stops at a smoke shop. When she talks to the cashier, the girl calls her "auntie" in Mohawk. Beth asks how she knew she was Mohawk, and the girl responds that Beth has the look about her. Beth ponders the fact that despite all of the assimilation she has undergone, her people still recognize her. When she gets home, she makes the corn mush her mother used to make as a treat before Henry died, and it tastes just how she remembered.
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