Native American Heritage Month
The last reflection for November prepared by WOC’s Anti-Oppression Committee recognizes another commemorative month, that for Native American Heritage. I will emphasize the “Catholic angle.”
Have you always known that there is a “Catholic angle” to the indigenous story in the Americas? Kind of around the corner, I’d argue, rarely straightforward. My story begins at Camp Tekakwitha in New Jersey, named for a then not-yet saint, a Mohawk girl at the beginning of European settlement. Heroic stories and fantastic legends surround her conversion by Jesuits in the 1670s; she took the name Kateri, pledged virginity, moved from New York to the Jesuit community near Montreal when her native village rejected her, and died of tuberculosis. She and others found meaning in her brief life but, looking backwards, we see the beginning of a far darker story.
In her story, Tekakwitha made a choice to go to the Jesuits; in the next four centuries, children did not have that choice. By the end of the 19th century, United States government policy became one of assimilation through education, education that often removed the students from their native communities over the objections of their parents. Those who ran the schools attempted to eradicate Indian ways, languages, and beliefs. Federal agencies recruited Christian organizations, and about a quarter were Catholic orders.
Some children died and never saw their villages again. Some suffered terribly and forever. Mary Annette Pember tells the story of her mother in The Atlantic. She verifies her mother’s worst recollections in the archives at Marquette University, reading the files of the Saint Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding School on the Ojibwe reservation in Odanah, Wisconsin.
It is especially poignant to me because last week two Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration spoke to the Catholic Organizations for Renewal meeting I attended. Their order operated the school in Odanah, and is now exploring how to express solidarity with former students and their descendants in the Bad River Indian Community. They presented an episode of Vox’s The Missing Chapter, in which survivors discuss their experiences in these schools and Indian scholars discuss their importance.
The other presenter was a Jesuit in training, missioned at Pine Ridge Reservation’s Red Cloud School, now operated by the Oglala Lakota. The school’s website addresses the history of the institution and its meaning for the tribe today, again with a focus on truth and healing. This year, the discovery of unmarked graves of Indian children in two Catholic boarding schools in Canada again ignited outrage, eloquently expressed by Tashina Banks Rama.
She writes:
“I have been tortured by the fact that I am an Indigenous person working at a former Indian boarding school.
At four years old, my father, Dennis James Banks from the Leech Lake Band of the Ojibwe in Minnesota, and his brother and sister were taken from their mother Bertha in Federal Dam, Minnesota. They were placed into an agency school bus and driven some 300 miles to Pipestone Indian Boarding School. Their experience at Pipestone was horrific.
I get emotional and angry when I imagine them taken from the safety of their home and relocated to a dormitory where they lived in fear for the next ten years. Their only “fault” was being born Indian, which meant, via federal policy, being assimilated into the very society that separated them from their family, home, culture, and identity.
This is the personal pain that surfaces for me when I think of boarding school history. When I imagine the 215 Indigenous children at Kamloops who were secretly buried so that no one would find them, I am sickened at how much fear they must have experienced during their short lives.
My personal struggle today is that Red Cloud Indian School, where my children thrive as students, where their brown skin is celebrated and their long hair respected, and where I serve as a leader, was once a boarding school.”
I choose her story, published in her city’s newspaper before all of the graves in Canada had been discovered, because of its openness and transparency. Banks Rama goes on to discuss the quandary faced by tribal leaders a century ago as the Jesuits were assigned to open a school on their reservation, and the present requirement of Mass four times a year, though most students are no longer Catholic. She’d like to change that, “giving parents and families a choice.” This letter is on the School’s website.
Catholic schools have a special responsibility to act ethically, and some have joined Catholics for Boarding School Accountability, a grassroots organization of orders that operated boarding schools. Right now this informal coalition has organized a webinar series to inform their members.
Others have urged Pope Francis to go beyond his mourning for the children and come to Canada to apologize in person, as Dean Detloff, America’s correspondent in Toronto, reports.
He points out the politics: the Bishops are not sure they want the publicity. I infer from that response what they understand about whose country and church it is, and neither belongs to the indigenous.
Which does allow me to pivot again, to the story of settler colonialism. Marian Ronan explains this worldwide phenomenon in NCR, and our Jesuit speaker from Pine Ridge also detailed. Ronan contrasts two patterns of settlement in the Americas:
“The Spanish colonizers of the Americas, who preceded the English, encountered densely populated Indigenous empires in Central America. The Spaniards focused on dominating these empires because they possessed well-developed systems for extracting resources and labor, though the Spaniards and the Indigenous imperial powers themselves did often enslave poorer Indigenous people to extract those resources.
The English colonizers, however, encountered much smaller populations in the north, already decimated by European diseases, and so spread out that they were harder to control. Rather than ruling the people they colonized, then, the English set out to eliminate them, and replace them with a white European population. Hence the forcing of the Indigenous off their lands, the massacres of tribes and the later efforts to force the total assimilation of Indigenous people through mission schools and the elimination of native languages. Even now, the massive poverty on tribal lands implicitly continues this extermination policy.”
So as we look at Native American Heritage Month, we see proud people recovering from terrible injustice, and we see new leaders emerging. US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has brought her Laguna Pueblo heritage to her position, mourning deaths in schools and, most recently, directing the agencies under her department to protect Native sacred sites, including cooperation with tribes to insure access. “Indigenous peoples have creation narratives tied to sites in every region of the U.S. and beyond, and maintaining a connection to those places is essential to their spiritual practice and existence, according to the memorandum.” I find it moving that a woman whose heritage combines Catholicism and native beliefs assumes responsibility for these sacred sites. That’s really the Catholic angle.