American Indian boarding schools

[Shiloh Raven]

The Jesuits are giving 550 acres back to the Lakota Sioux.

I heard about this and I have mixed feelings about it.

 

[tadoflamb]

‘Reeling From The Impact’ of Historical Trauma

Excerpt from article:

As Bluecoat explained it, Christianity’s assumption that it has something better to offer, despite all it has taken away, “that’s what bothers Indians.”

 

[tadoflamb]

I heard about this and I have mixed feelings about it.

Why is that?

 

[Shiloh Raven]

Why is that?

What I meant was, while I am glad the 550 acres was given back to the tribe, what about the rest of the land that was taken or was the 550 acres all of it? I do not mean to sound petty, but I guess a portion of stolen land (whether large or small) given back to NDNs is better than nothing at all.

 

[Shiloh Raven]

Excerpt from article:

As Bluecoat explained it, Christianity’s assumption that it has something better to offer, despite all it has taken away, “that’s what bothers Indians.”

Yes, it is what bothers a lot of NDNs.

 

[tadoflamb]

Yes, it is what bothers a lot of NDNs.

I noticed that there's a lot of anger towards the Catholic Church in particular.

I also found this quote interesting:

“I’m a Lakota,” Bluecoat said. “I’m a real Lakota. I pray the Indian way. And I respect Jesus. I respect God. I respect the church. I love church. It is a place to go and worship. And I was taught by my grandparents, my dad and mom, respect that church, respect the God, because they’re praying to a God, some kind of a creator.”

I'm still working through all that stuff you posted. It's really difficult to read/watch, but I think it's important to know what happened.

 

[tadoflamb]

What I meant was, while I am glad the 550 acres was given back to the tribe, what about the rest of the land that was taken or was the 550 acres all of it? I do not mean to sound petty, but I guess a portion of stolen land (whether large or small) given back to NDNs is better than nothing at all.

I see what you mean. When so much has been taken away, it's hard to get giddy about 550 acres.

 

[Shiloh Raven]

I see what you mean. When so much has been taken away, it's hard to get giddy about 550 acres.

Exactly. And that was the point I was trying to make.

 

[dzheremi]

I'm kind of surprised that this is not a topic that is known about everywhere, but I guess I take for granted having grown up or otherwise lived in places that were basically founded on the missions and their associated schools, like California and New Mexico. So we learn that stuff as simply as learning the topography of our surroundings here. (Seriously; as a kid, we went on elementary school trips to the historically-preserved missions and learned all about them as part of learning about the founding of our state. I don't know if they still do that now, but if they've stopped then I can at least say with confidence that there is nobody older than mid-late 30s in this part of California who doesn't know at least the basics of how the Spanish colonization worked, even if the gory details weren't covered until later in high school, and then usually only in a fairly quick and sanitized way.)

As a linguist, I can't help but think about the many, many native languages that were lost (and are still being lost!) due to the deliberate actions taken by the invaders to stamp out the languages of the people and teach them Spanish instead, or to some degree Russian (this is particular to my area of the country, where the Spanish mission system runs up against the Russian outposts in the very southernmost tip of that country's historical empire, but it's important to note that this was much more the case on the Eurasian landmass proper; in Siberia, for instance, Russian is the 'killer' language akin to English, coming with the colonists, choking out small languages like Chulym, Yukaghir, Ket, etc.), or French, or whatever. It's horrifying, but even more horrifying is the fact that this is but one aspect of everything the native people have lost by being forced into boarding schools to learn the 'civilized' ways of the colonizers.

Maybe that's why you don't know about this stuff, OP? Part of me feels like I have no choice but to learn about it to some degree because you can't really work with minority languages like I do without learning how they came to be minority languages (maybe people who study French or Spanish or whatever never have to deal with these questions; I don't know), but I can imagine that if I were to look at it from some other perspective, it might feel a lot like wallowing in historical guilt for something I didn't personally do. The RCC (and not only them) would obviously like to make amends as best as it can for its past wrongs which it now recognizes as wrongs, but as the discussion about the relinquishing of X acres above shows, that's always going to be limited. Your priests are not all going back to Europe from whence they originally came, and that's not usually the point anyhow. So really under what circumstances would you have learned about this stuff? My own Church has far less blood on its hands than yours does (not bragging; see later in this very sentence), purely by virtue of the fact that we are the native Church of Egypt -- as in, made up of native/ethnically Egyptian people -- and you can't colonize yourself, but even then it's not like we memorialize the bad behavior we did engage in by including entries in our synaxarium praising the murder of the pagan polymath Hypatia or the beatings suffered by the peasants and acolytes at the White Monastery supposedly at the direction or by the hand of St. Shenouda the Archimandrite (my own baptismal saint...for other reasons, obviously!). Most people know about the former due to Hollywood depictions of St. Cyril as an extremist, but when I brought up the latter at the monastery of St. Shenouda the Archimandrite (because the beatings of the Egyptian peasantry was mentioned in the introduction to his Vita written by his disciple St. Besa), the monk there told me that he really wished they had gotten an actual Coptic person to write the introduction to the translation of the Vita, rather than some European guy. So truly no church, and I would extend that to say no group of people more generally, is immune from 'best foot forward' syndrome.

Given that, I would place a considerable amount of importance on what you do with the information once you do find it. It speaks well of your character, OP, that you are not just repulsed by the evil actions of your forefathers in the faith (as I would hope and expect that all Catholics would be, and all Christians and people more generally), but wish to learn more and to make them known through discussion. Truly every man save our Savior can be said to be a man of his time (the most frequent defense of this kind of thing, from what I've seen), so there's not much discussion to be had about that, but as they say those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. That does not mean that the Catholic role in the boarding school tragedy will necessarily happen again, but you yourself drew a parallel between that and the sex abuse scandals which were until very recently (until they broke in the mainstream/non-Catholic press, basically) at least tolerated by a culture which had its own rationale for what it did and did not do in response to them. And certainly no sane, caring person, Catholic/Christian or not, could ever want similar events to continue to happen or to happen in the future. Lord have mercy!