Part one is here and part two is there. Read or listen to them both–difficult but important.
A 2 Part NPR Series on Boarding Schools for Indians
Posted in * Culture-Watch, Education
Part one is here and part two is there. Read or listen to them both–difficult but important.
A sad chapter in our history. Even sadder in Canada where the Church committed the injustices. Here is a summary of what they went through and what destroyed them financially:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/sch_resid3.htm
A few years back I used to facilitate a therapy group at a halfway house just north of Gallup, NM. Most of the men there were Navajos and Pueblo Indians from NM and AZ. Some of the Navajos spoke of Christian mission schools at which they were forced to have very short haircuts and were corporally punished for speaking even a word of Navajo. I was always impressed with the philosophical and even dryly humorous way they reminisced about these things, although I know the pain must run very, very deep. We really managed to botch our credibility as Christians in these schools. Jesus must weep. It takes a great deal of dedication, understanding and simple personal friendship even to begin to undo the damage. I pray we may exercise these whenever an opportunity presents itself.
Sad history and likely there is still much ill treatment of Native students in both private and public schools. Yet there are good things happening too. I support the children at St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, SD. The faculty, staff and students try to live up to the motto: “We serve and teach. We receive and learn.”
The biggest problem these students face is what to do when they graduate from High School. There are too few opportunities. One way to help is to fund college scholarships and grants for Native students. Now there’s something TEC could do were it really concerned about diversity and about serving people.
BTW, As Father Fountain notes at his blog Northern Plains Anglican: “The National Church… recently cut $400,000 from programs to support ministry on the Reservations in South Dakota and three other states.”
When I was taking “Kiddie Lit” in Library school, we studied a bit about this subject, and used the book “My heart is on the ground” by Ann Rinaldi, part of the American Diaries series, about a young Sioux forcibly taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
The problem was, explained the teacher, is that Ms. Rinaldi shows this as a positive thing, where as Native American groups like [url=http://www.oyate.org/books-to-avoid/myHeart.html]Oyate[/url] firmly dispute this view, stating that the philosophy of the head/founder of the school, Capt. Richard Pratt was “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
Not good at all.
I’m all for evangelism, but stealing children from their families is not acceptable. We had an incident in Panama City, FL where a church sent a bus around to pick children up from poor neighborhoods for Vaction Bible School. What the parents didn’t know was that they baptised the children at the end of the program, without informing the family that this was to be done! IMO, inexcusable.
One correction: it is the “Dear America” series, not the “American Diaries”. My apologies.