Indigenous children at a Presbyterian boarding school in Sitka, Alaska, in the summer of 1883. U.S. Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries. Native American and Alaskan Native children were regularly severed from their tribal families, customs, language and religion and brought to the schools in a push to assimilate and Christianize them.
“An apology is the best way to start any conversation,” said Roy Callison, a Catholic deacon and Cherokee Nation member helping coordinate the Oklahoma Catholic Native Schools Project, which includes listening sessions for those affected by the boarding school legacy. “That’s the first step to trying to get healing.”
Red Cloud, affiliated with the Catholic Jesuit order, was for generations a boarding school for Lakota children. It’s now a day school incorporating Lakota leadership, language and traditions. Black Elk is guiding a reckoning process that includes archival research and hearing the stories of former students.
Church leaders are getting ready. The report “will likely bring to light some very troubling information,” said a letter circulated last fall to members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from two colleagues who chaired committees related to the issue. The letter urged bishops to build relationships with local Indigenous communities and engage “in a real and honest dialogue about reactions to the report and what steps are needed to go forward together.
There were at least 367 boarding schools across the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a Minneapolis-based advocacy group.The national healing coalition called Pope Francis’ comments a historic first step, but urged the Vatican to repatriate Indigenous artifacts in its museum collections and called on religious organizations to open their school archives.
Several church groups — including Quakers, Methodists and some Catholic religious orders — are backing pending legislation in Congress that would go beyond the Interior report. It would create a truth and healing commission, modeled on Canada’s, to investigate the boarding school legacy. “The yearly meetings voted to support, operate and finance” the schools, she said. “So it’s really the yearly meetings who have the responsibility to respond. They were the ones who also participated in the whole project of forced assimilation of Indigenous children.”
Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)
I want to respectfully point something out. ground-penetrating radar reported finding about 200 unmarked probable burial sites at a former school in British Columbia. There's as of yet no actual evidence these are graves. No bodies have been recovered.
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