This Story of Forever

The moving and haunting story of discovering a family history and heritage that was forced into secrecy.

Many of us never know much about the people we come from. Our ancestors, our grandparents, perhaps our parents—even if we know them intimately as a presence in our own lives, we may know precious little about who they were before us.

This was certainly the case for Marianne Jacobbi. Marianne was seventy-two years old when she came across a collection of boxes in her attic. Inside one of them sat a small bundle of envelopes bound with a dried-out rubber band. These were from her grandmother, her long-ago penpal, and the woman she called Om. Holding these, she gasped. She slipped one of the letters out of its sloppily torn envelope. It was dated July 18, 1978, and when Marianne did the math, it was as if she had time traveled: Om was seventy-two ears old the day she wrote the letter, which made them age mates. But that was the smallest of the surprises to come. Marianne didn’t know it then, but finding Om’s letter would lead to truths about her grandmother’s life that had been buried for the better part of a century that had relevance to her own life today.

From 1831 to late 1997, Indigenous children in the U.S. and Canada were forcibly taken from their families and placed in federally funded residential schools, where they were stripped of their culture. Their hair was cut, their Native language forbidden. They were forced to pray even as they were told that an Indian had no chance of going to heaven. More than 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada alone were sent away during those years. The numbers are even higher in the U.S.

These institutions were marked by widespread physical and emotional abuse, sexual violence, starvation, and the deaths of more than 10,000 Indigenous children. In many cases, children’s bodies were never sent home to their families and there are unmarked burial sites at schools across the U.S. and Canada, including on the grounds of the Mohawk Institute.

Which, Marianne learned, is where Om was sent as a girl. The school was located about fifteen miles from the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Ontario, where her grandmother was born and raised.

Her family kept all of this a secret. The silence was likely driven by many things: shame, the fear of being judged, the desire to shelter loved ones from upsetting truths. Who wouldn’t want to forget? But now, Marianne knew, it was time to remember.

This Story of Forever is part memoir and part investigation as Marianne seeks to uncover the most important truth of all: the story of who she comes from and, consequently, who she is. Beyond that, it is about the gap inside you when you don’t know the lives of those you come from: a feeling so many of us know, and which Marianne captures here with candor and eloquence.

This Story of Forever promises to be illuminating and affecting, delivering both haunting historical lessons and poignant reflections on family and identity. This is a story that will stay with readers long after the final page.