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I’m Glad No One Tried to Rescue Me From the Cult
Before we could be married in the cult, Man and I would have to have a counseling session with one of the Fathers.
The counseling was not to make sure that I loved this man and was not being somehow coerced into what — in our world — was a lifetime commitment without exception. I would be telling a different story today if it had been.
It was to make sure that I knew my place and he knew his rights.
The entire town of Saint Marys had been taken over by the cult’s members, and the heart of the life here was the old Indian Mission, now known as “Campus”. It was indeed a college campus laid out like many others, though somewhat decrepit due to age and the organization’s lack of funds. If you were to walk into the large open space we called the quadrangle, you’d be surrounded on all sides by old stone buildings full of dark hallways and dusty claustrophobic rooms where Native American children were once stolen away for indoctrination into European ways.
You’d be standing in the same space where I gave a speech in 1995, unknowingly echoing the sentiments of Harvard’s first Native American graduate Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck two hundred years before. If I had known and had the capacity to understand any of the campus’ history at the time, I might have thought the weight of hopeless captivity I…
