Photo from the Carlisle, PA Indian Boarding School
November is American Indian Heritage Month. It is an opportunity to lift up the culture, heritage, and racist mistreatment of indigenous people. On November 1, 1879 the first Indian Boarding School opened in Carlisle, PA. It was located on what now is the Army War College. The picture posted above illustrates the purpose of these schools which was summarized by Captain Richard Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, ““All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” This racist and destructive approach tore families apart, separated children from their culture, and even led to the deaths of many children far away from their homes. In recent years, reports of hundreds of graves at Indian boarding schools provided glimpses of the tragedy and suffering inflicted on these innocent children. The first video posted below is a dramatization of the trauma caused by this form of white supremacy.
It did not have to be this way. The following quote from a book by the Celtic Christian writer John Philip Newell offers an alternative that could have changed history but still holds promise for today:
“At the end of my talk [focused on John 1:9], a Mohawk elder, who had been invited to comment on the common ground between Celtic spirituality and the native spirituality of his people, stood with tears in his eyes. He said, “As I have listened to these themes, I have been wondering where I would be today. I have been wondering where my people would be today. And I have been wondering where we would be as a Western world today if the mission that came to us from Europe centuries ago had come expecting to find Light in us.””
-John Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts (Jossey-Bass, 2008), p. 14-15
The verse that inspired this quote says, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” (John 1:9 NRSV) White supremacy prevented most white Christians from expecting to encounter the light of God in Christ through indigenous people. Yet the sins of the past need not determine the present. We are called to recognize and honor the image of God in every human being. The second video posted below is a PBS News Hour report from a year ago. It features the story of an Indian boarding school in Minnesota that was run by the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict. The story shows both the tragedy of being complicit in this form of racism and the efforts of present day Sisters of St. Benedict to work with local indigenous people to confront this sin and share their history in ways that face the painful truth as the foundation for moving toward reconciliation. Their example provides a path forward that challenges all of us to confess the sin or racism and see the light of God in each other.