What Role Did the Episcopal Church Play in Indian Boarding Schools?

At the July 2024 General Convention of The Episcopal Church, an important resolution was unanimously adopted by the body. As a member of the Wyoming Episcopal Church Deputation to this Convention, I was proud to support Resolution C032 – “A Prayer to Remember the Innocents.” This resolution expresses the church’s remorse for its role “in the irreparable harm suffered by Indigenous children who attended Indigenous boarding and residential schools in the 1800s and 1900s and acknowledges that the effect of that harm carries on in boarding school survivors and descendants.”

This work followed a resolution adopted at our 2022 General Convention – “A Resolution for Telling the Truth about The Episcopal Church's History with Indigenous Boarding Schools” (now called the A127 Mandate).

The Episcopal Church has a long and demonstrated commitment toward dismantling racism, which is essential to our spiritual life. If we are followers of Jesus, we are compelled to live into our Baptismal Covenant - “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? I will with God’s help.”

The church must acknowledge the intergenerational trauma caused by the Doctrine of Discovery and the colonialism that occurred through the operation of Indigenous boarding schools, along with other systems of white supremacy that have oppressed Indigenous peoples.

The Doctrine of Discovery, which originated with Henry VII in 1496, held that Christian sovereigns and their representative explorers could assert dominion and title over non-Christian lands with the full blessing and sanction of the Church. It continues to be invoked, in only slightly modified form, in court cases and in the many destructive policies of governments and other institutions of the modern nation-state that lead to the colonizing dispossession of the lands of indigenous peoples and the disruption of their way of life.

The Episcopal Church in Wyoming honors the land and the indigenous people on whose traditional territory the Episcopal Church in Wyoming is located. With gratitude, we acknowledge the Eastern Shoshone, Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people, whose home this land was for thousands of years.

The Episcopal Church formally repudiated and renounced the Doctrine of Discover in 2009, as fundamentally opposed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and our understanding of the inherent rights that individuals and peoples have received from God.

The Episcopal Church is now engaged in a multi-year effort “to retain independent historians to study and document the extent of the Episcopal Church’s complicity in the indigenous boarding school movement.” The Episcopal Church is known to have operated at least 34 of the 523 identified boarding schools in the United States, including at least 3 operated by the Episcopal Church in Wyoming. We have embarked on this research as it relates to our three identified indigenous boarding schools on the Wind River Reservation.

Unknown numbers, but perhaps thousands, of indigenous youth are estimated to have died during the 19^th and 20^th centuries while attending boarding schools, designed to assimilate Native Americans into the dominant white culture and erase indigenous languages and practices. There are horrific stories of indigenous children being taken forcibly from their parents and sent to boarding schools hundreds of miles away, where the children were forced to cut their hair, abandon their native clothing and were punished for using their native language. Survivors report being physically and sexually abused.

Indigenous boarding schools became headline news in May 2021, when a tribe in Canada announced it had found a mass grave of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.

That particular school had been run by the Roman Catholic Church, but it was widely known for years that other denominations, including the Episcopal Church, also had operated boarding schools on behalf of the American and Canadian governments.

Whether or not specific incidents of trauma emerge from any of the Episcopal schools, the church for decades participated in – and profited from – an official government effort that can be described as cultural genocide. There are truths that need to be told, and the church has made a commitment to telling them. We are committed to learning, growing, and finding new ways for meaningful, mutual healing as we move forward together.

A PRAYER TO REMEMBER THE INNOCENTS

Ohi?ni wi?hau?kiksuyapi kte.? "We will always remember them."

Dear Lord, Almighty God,?we pray for all Indigenous children who were in residential and boarding schools in Canada and the United States.? Some died there; we ask that you give assurance to ? their descendants that their souls are with you and their ancestors. Some survived there; we ask that you give your healing grace to all who endured hardship while there and are still struggling with those memories. Lastly, we ask you to help us guard our children against harm in this world. All this we ask in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever.? Amen.