For 120 years, Canada took Indigenous children from their families and forced them into residential schools run by Christian denominations — a practice that didn’t end until 1996.
Now, the discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves at two former residential schools have rocked America’s northern neighbor, and the aftershocks have spread to the U.S.
Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that it had found the remains of 215 children near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. And this week, the Cowessess First Nation reported locating more than 600 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.
The discoveries have brought a national reckoning over what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterizes as “a dark and shameful chapter” of the nation’s history.
“I’m ashamed as a White Christian. I’m ashamed of what we did,” Kevin Vance, a minister in Regina, Saskatchewan, told me earlier this month. “I’m ashamed of all the racism and genocide that we concocted and that we did it in the name of Jesus. That’s just unbelievable to me.”
But the dark history isn’t limited to Canada: The news there “has magnified interest in the troubling legacy both in Canada and the United States,” according to The Associated Press.
As Susan Montoya Bryan of the Associated Press reports, the U.S. government “will investigate its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to ‘uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences’ of policies that over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities.”
In the U.S. — as in Canada — Christian denominations are an important part of the story, notes veteran religion writer G. Jeffrey MacDonald, who wrote about American church-run boarding schools in 2018.
“The churches were not just complicit. They were participatory,” Christine Diindiisi McCleave, chief executive officer of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, told MacDonald then. “They received federal funding and helped carry out the policy.”
In a opinion piece for Religion News Service this week, Kaitlin Curtice, a Potawatomi author and speaker, makes the case that the American church “will not be able to hide from its history of complicity in the treatment of Indigenous peoples.”
Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads
1. For one Los Angeles Catholic church, meeting indoors is ‘historic’ after wave of COVID-19 deaths: Religion News Service’s Alejandra Molina reports on the reopening of a Spanish-speaking congregation that during the winter hosted at least one coronavirus-related funeral each week.
For a different Southern California take, the Orange County Register’s Susan Christian Goulding delves into the “Holy haircut!” of Steve Ranney, a Presbyterian pastor who avoided a trim while his congregation met online.
“People joked that I looked like Jesus, if he’d lived a lot longer,” Ranney, 62, tells the Register. Now it’s back, the newspaper says, to what he calls his “business-style look, right above the ears.”
2. ’The rabbi said it was OK’: Hasidic mother of 10 becomes doctor: Dr. Alexandra Friedman “believed that pursuing medicine would augment her spirituality, not detract from it,” writes the New York Times’ Corey Kilgannon writes.
“In Judaism, there’s a belief that if you don’t use the gifts given to you by God, you’re not really honoring God,” Friedman tells the Times.
3. No more ‘Evangelical Vatican’: Christians rebuild relationship with Colorado Springs: In a fascinating feature for Christianity Today, Colorado-based writer Liam Adams explores “the story of evangelicalism in Colorado Springs, the city of 464,000 that celebrates its 150th birthday this July.”
“Evangelicals were really successful in the city starting in the 1980s, earning it the title of the ‘evangelical Vatican’ as Colorado Springs became a platform for high-profile Christian leaders,” Adams explains. “Then there were some broken appliances — some dislodging — and the city’s evangelicals rediscovered the importance of caring for their local community.”
CONTINUE READING: “Generations Of Indigenous Children Were Snatched From Families, And Churches Helped,” by Bobby Ross, Jr., at Religion Unplugged.