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  • Teaching Smoke Signals:Fatherhood, Forgiveness, and "Freedom"
  • Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval (bio)

How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often orforever when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all. Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers? For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning, for shutting doors, for speaking through walls, or never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it? If we forgive our fathers, what else is left?

—Dick Lourie, "Forgiving Our Fathers"1 [End Page 123]

Introduction

These are the final lines from Smoke Signals, the Sherman Alexie–directed film (1998) that stars Adam Beach as Victor Joseph and Evan Adams as Thomas Builds-the-Fire.2 Thomas recites this poem while Victor dramatically scatters his father's ashes and screams, pouring out his emotions. This is an extremely poignant scene because Victor hated his father (Arnold Joseph) for years. Why did Victor hate Arnold? He hated him because he was an alcoholic who hit him and his mother (Arlene). He hated him because he ran away and left them behind. He hated him because he made him hate all Indians, including himself. When Arnold, for example, drunkenly asks Victor, "Who is your favorite Indian," he defiantly replies, "Nobody, nobody, nobody." Despite this deep animosity, Victor, after much soul-searching and endless conversations with Thomas, not only forgives his father, he forgives himself for his own transgressions.

Forgiving—a parent, relative, minister, corporation, or political organization—is not easy. Retributive justice—disciplining and punishing people (through incarceration and/or death) for their misdeeds—remains much more popular today than restorative justice. The rapid expansion of the nationwide "prison–industrial complex," combined with the emergence of California's "golden gulag" (the state currently has more prisons than public universities) illustrates this point.3 Echoing British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum about there being no alternative to neoliberal capitalism, most voters and politicians seemingly feel there is no alternative to the carceral state.4 Today's hegemonic logic is clear and concise—"lock them (prisoners) up and throw away the key." Based on this reasoning, forgiving a person for mentally or physically abusing children, torturing human rights activists or "detainees," or systematically targeting and killing a whole group of people seems unjust and immoral. People must be prosecuted and punished; they cannot simply walk away "scot-free" because if they do, more criminal activity will surely take place. The same thing could be said about massacres and genocides—we must never forgive the people responsible for those actions nor must we ever forget the victims—because if we do, history will supposedly repeat itself.

Forgiveness thus has been largely demonized within the United States, which is fairly ironic since most people who reject it call themselves Christian and evidently ignore or overlook well-known biblical exhortations such as "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34) and "you shall forgive them seventy times seven" (Matthew 18:22). Several prominent Christians, including Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu, in contrast, have embraced forgiveness, nonviolence, and liberation theology or a "preferential option for the poor."5 During Romero's penultimate homily, for instance, [End Page 124] he ordered Salvadoran soldiers to "stop the repression." The next day he was assassinated. He previously stated that he would "forgive and bless" those who killed him because "a bishop may die, but the people will never perish."6 King believed people should have the "strength to love" and forgive one's enemies—even those who beat and killed civil rights activists.7 Tutu chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the panel that was created to investigate human rights abuses during the apartheid era.8 He claimed that there was...

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