For most Native American children within the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, education was neither a right nor a privilege. Indigenous children from Florida to Alaska were taken away, sometimes by force, to residential schools run by the federal government and infrequently by denominations that operated under government contracts.
The aim of the education was to show the kids European American ways. Anything Indian, from language to clothing and dance, was forbidden. The system left a trail of trauma and death amid a quest for mass assimilation into white settler culture.
Now the Episcopal Church, which was involved in running not less than 34 of the faculties, has begun to reckon with the outsized role it played on this history. Last June, the church’s Executive Council allocated $2 million in a truth-seeking process geared toward documenting how Episcopal-run schools impacted lives for generations — and to elucidate why things happened as they did.
When Episcopalians gather next week (June 23-28) for his or her General Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, a panel event will bear witness to boarding school legacies still impacting families and tribal communities. Meanwhile, two Episcopal commissions overseeing the research are asking bishops churchwide to grant access to archives of their regions and to recruit research assistants of their very own.
The U.S. government operated or supported 408 boarding schools between 1819 and 1969, in response to a 2022 Department of the Interior report under the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. “The United States pursued a twin policy: Indian territorial dispossession and Indian assimilation, including through education,” the report says.
How the Episcopal Church used its considerable influence in crafting that federal policy have to be understood before restorative justice can occur, said the Rev. Lauren Stanley, a research commission member and canon to the abnormal for the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota.
“To simply say, ‘Yes, we participated in running schools’ without saying, ‘Because we helped formulate the policy’ denies truth, justice and the potential of conciliation which we hope will result in reconciliation,” said Stanley in an email.
In Canada, where the same boarding school system is blamed for eroding Indigenous languages and cultures, a truth and reconciliation process led to a $6 billion settlement with tribes in 2006 and multiple major settlements since then. Pope Francis, visiting Canada in 2022, apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in what he called “cultural destruction and compelled assimilation.”
But within the United States, where church records have not been made public and infrequently aren’t digitized or consolidated, Americans aren’t being taught what happened. Studies show only a handful of states include the story of Native American boarding schools of their history curriculum standards.
The research done already shows the Episcopal Church was no minor player within the boarding school system. The 34 known schools are excess of previously identified, but people involved within the research say the list is anticipated to grow.
Beyond the variety of its schools, Episcopalians and their church “played a uniquely transformative role” in creating the federal government’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in response to Veronica Pasfield, a Native American researcher and archival consultant. Carlisle became the prototype for U.S. residential schools under Richard Henry Pratt, an Army officer who’d fought Indians on the Great Plains. Episcopalians within the Dakotas reportedly helped recruit students for the college.
“Federal and Church power worked collaboratively to operationalize Indian policy via schools that removed children from home for indoctrination and extraction,” writes Pasfield in a May consulting proposal. She’s now helping guide the church’s boarding school research.
“Indigenous Episcopalians are leading the method to uncover and tell the story of Episcopal Church involvement in Indigenous boarding schools, and that work, as they note, is just starting,” said Episcopal Church spokesperson Amanda Skofstad in an email. “An apology before thorough research and understanding would fall wanting the truth-telling, reckoning, and healing we committed to as a church.”
© Religion News Service
