Remembering 9/11

It’s been 24 years already, a generation, two decades: a lifetime.

Back then, on September 11, 2001, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, and with the crumbled buildings, almost 3,000 people died needlessly.

It was a terrorist attack on American soil, and as our Onkwehón:we men were there to help build them in the 1970s, we were saddened at such a senseless loss of life.

So many of our grandfathers and fathers, cousins, kin by skin and people we knew and loved, were on those towers risking their lives just to get them built.

So, we have a direct connection, which was furthered deepened when our ironworkers bravely volunteered at Ground Zero to aid in the cleanup and recovery of buildings that no one ever thought would fall.

Sadly, many contracted diseases that had long-term effects on their lungs, which led to a debilitating life, and for some it was their eventual cause of death.

If you have been to New York City you know the stories, the glitz, glamour and slum, the smells, the crime and the awesome feeling of walking in Times Square, with world class theatre at your fingertips.

It’s a magical city, with its grime and its never quit attitude. New Yorkers just keep going, and there’s a parallel with our own people, and the resilience we have had to demonstrate over 500 years.

We remember it well because we were there, but when more of those people die, the ones who can recall where they were on the fateful morning, what will a 9/11 memorial look like when there’s no one left who witnessed it or its aftermath?

We never forget as Native people and New Yorkers never will, either, and this tragedy has now become part of our history as well.

Forget the inside job sayers, the conspiracies and all the unproven drivel many have spewed. People died that day and some of our people suffered from helping out; so, no matter what you believe, the events on 9/11 have had a lasting effect on us – and will for many years to come.

We have to teach this chapter in US history as what it is: indelibly linked to who we are as Onkwehón:we. When those buildings were attacked and eventually collapsed, we felt it, even if some were too young to remember them going up.

You can’t walk around NYC without constant reminders of our men and women and their skills, their bravery, their hunger for a better life. It’s embedded in the skyscrapers.

It brought them to the city when it was a 12-hour drive and it still brings them down there, at 6 p.m. on a Sunday or via the infamous midnight run; a six-hour drive where sleep is hard to come by, but the work never stops.

We take our hats off to the brave workers who erected those towers; we bow our heads in sorrow for the ones who died or lost loved ones that day; and we hope for a future free of these kinds of heinous attacks that are driven by hatred, politics, fundamentalists and difference.

These kinds of threats will always be here, with unfair foreign policy, racist governments and the power grab all governments entertain, but without efforts to make a better world, this could be the rule and not the exception, as increased extremism is born out of the division that comes from so much of the disgusting vitriol we all have easy access to now.

Steve Bonspiel

The Eastern Door