BLOOD MEMORY need not be rooted in violence. In the 2021 anthology, New World Coming: Frontline Voices on Pandemics, Uprisings and Climate Crisis, filmmaker and Indigenous rights and climate activist Jade Begay (Diné and Tesuque Pueblo) described blood memory as “an embodied remembrance passed down from generation to generation. … Sometimes they are good and joyful, and sometimes they are traumatic and rooted in grief.”
For Native children growing up in the Intermountain West in the wake of World War II, the link between trauma and blood memory is often tied to their experience in federally funded boarding schools. Children were rounded up, sometimes at gunpoint, and forced from their homelands to attend these schools, according to members of the Greyhound Generation, the Native elderly who can trace their ancestral blood memory of stories from the late 1800s to the present. The boarding school era, between 1819 and 1969, fractured families and communities. Unknown numbers of children went missing, either dying on the school grounds or running off
