In order for us to transcend the past, we first have to fix what was broken.
Since 2004, the Lienau family of Camano Island, Wash., has been traveling the world apologizing for slavery, hoping to repair some of the damage done by the transatlantic slave trade.
Michael Lienau is a filmmaker whose latest documentary, “Yokes and Chains: A Journey to Forgiveness and Freedom,” is about the Lifeline Expedition, a project started in England by a former teacher, David Pott.
The two men share a deep Christian faith and a concern about the impact of slavery on the present.
Lifeline brought together groups of Europeans, Americans and Africans who traveled together staging walks and other events at which they offered apologies for slavery — at a former plantation in Barbados, in a stadium in Gambia, along a path in Virginia where enslaved Africans once were marched from ships.
The Lienau family consists of Michael and Shari (who are white) and their nine children, five of whom are American Indian siblings adopted a year before the slavery project began.
Wednesday, during a Black History Month presentation at Everett Community College, Michael Lienau said that during the 1992 Los Angeles riots he wondered, “How can we still be in this mess?”
When Lienau, best known for his 1980 film documenting the devastating Mount St. Helens eruption, heard about Pott’s project he decided to document it, and he assigned his children, who are home- schooled, to research slavery.
That’s when it became a family project.
His two older children, Anna, 13, and Jacob, 16, were so moved by drawings of young children in chains that they asked to join the project.
All of the children made a trip to the East Coast in 2004, while Anna and Jacob also visited the Caribbean and South America in 2005, and Africa and England in 2006.
The Lifeline groups, sometimes 25 or 30 people, marched with white members from Europe and America in chains and yokes, led by descendants of enslaved Africans.
Sonya Barnett, a first- and second-grade teacher at Hope Charter School in Colorado Springs, and her daughter Shannon were on the 2004 journey that traversed major slave-trade ports in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia and South Carolina.
“I think as an African-American, if I did know my history, it was from books. I did the walk because sometimes, when you touch history, it is different than when you read about it,” says Barnett, who met Pott in England when she was working with Youth With a Mission.
One of the most emotional moments occurred as she stood in the home of Providence, R.I., slave trader John Brown and contemplated that her forbears may have been held in that home or on that plantation. “It was very moving.”
As the group pressed south, Barnett says she came to better understand the economics of the transatlantic slave trade, and that people of all races were complicit in its function.
As she walked a dark, riverside path from the port of Richmond to holding pens 2SEATTLE — VV-miles away, her then 6-year-old daughter in tow, she realized European traders likely had enlisted African scouts to lead slaves to the sale block.
In Charleston, S.C., a group of Africans apologized to descendants of slaves for their part in the slave trade. “When that happened, I went weak in the knees,” Barnett says. “In my soul, there was a place of abandonment.
“There were Africans who sold off their enemies, or their own people, for money, guns and cloth,” she says. “The Africans who were traveling with us, they knew where they had come from, and for them to make that apology, that was life-changing for me.”
In the film, Pott says he wanted to “do something that gets to the roots of bitterness and anger” that he saw damaging the prospects of some black people.
But maybe he also addressed some of the ailments lingering with white people.
Barnett experienced that, when she spoke with a man with an Irish last name who was handing out KKK literature in Marblehead, Mass. “I said to him, you should at least feel part of what this plight has been because the same sign that would say ‘No Blacks’ would say ‘No Irish Need Apply’ right under it. It was as if something opened up in him.
“I’ll tell you this, the reconciliation that I felt was bigger than me,” she says.
Post staff writer Dana Coffield contributed to this report.
