Native Americans Call on Churches to Lead Way to Healing from Indian Boarding Schools

This month (April, 2022), the U.S. Department of the Interior is expected to release a report into Indigenous boarding schools in that country. The investigation was spurred on by the discovery of unmarked graves at the former residential school in Kamloops. In 2018 I wrote this article for the Winnipeg Free Press about churches in the U.S. and their ties to boarding schools--and the desire of  Native Americans in that country for them to step up about them. 

Since 2008, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established, Canada has been wrestling with the legacy of the residential school system.

The topic has fueled discussion in the media, community meetings and in faith groups—especially in those churches that ran schools.

Some would say that things aren’t moving nearly fast enough, but there’s no escaping how this has become a topic of national conversation.

All this attention in Canada is quite unlike what’s happening in the U.S.

Like Canada, the U.S. also had a similar boarding school system for Indigenous children.

In fact, the Canadian residential school system was modelled on it; in 1879 Prime Minister John A. MacDonald sent Nicholas Davin to the U.S. to study its boarding schools for Indigenous children.

Davin’s Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds led to the creation of Canada’s system—the legacy of which we are still dealing with today.

In the U.S., over 250,000 children were removed from their families, some of the forcibly, and sent to over 500 schools.

The goal of the schools was to “kill the Indian and save the man,” in the words ofCaptain Richard Pratt, who helped create what was called the U.S. Indian boarding school system.

Many of these American schools in the U.S. were also run by churches—Presbyterians, Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites, Episcopalians, and others.

Like in Canada, the schools left a legacy of suffering, loss of language, family breakdown and alcohol and drug abuse.

Unlike in Canada, however, little attention is being paid to the issue in the U.S.

Some Americans are trying to change that. One person is Denise Lagimodiere, an associate professor in the school of education at North Dakota State University in Fargo and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Pembina Chippewa.

Lagimodiere—who traces her roots to Manitoba through her great-grandfather Jean-Baptiste Lagimodiere—is President of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit organization building a database of survivor accounts.

She became interested in the issue after learning family members, including her own father, were boarding school survivors.

“I never knew these stories existed because my family members had all maintained silence on their experiences until I began asking questions,” she says.

Her goal is to see something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission occur in the U.S.

America, she says, is “not even begun the truth-telling part, much less get to reconciliation.”

But with no media interest, or attention in Congress, she believes it is up to the churches in her country to put it on the national agenda.

“We need the churches,” she says. “We need them to research their schools, where they were, when they were established, how many students there were. It would be a recognition of what was done to us.”

She would also like to see more of them issue apologies, like the United, Anglican and Presbyterian churches have done in Canada.

“An apology to survivors would be a recognition of what was done to Native kids,” she says. “Many survivors need that as part of their healing.”

In her interviews with former boarding school students, she hears “wrenching, heartbreaking, and traumatic” stories of physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, forced labor, religious and cultural suppression, inadequate medical care, deaths and suicides in the schools.

“The majority had never spoken a word of their experiences to their children or grandchildren,” she adds.

When she asked them what they felt could help heal them from their boarding school experiences, many said they needed to return to their traditional Native spirituality.

They also said that they need to do “something most difficult—to forgive, to get rid of that hatred, after which they could truly be healed.”

That healing for many Indigenous Americans, she believes, will only be fostered and encouraged if the U.S. comes to terms with the way it wronged them through the boarding schools. And she hopes American churches will be among those who lead the way.

Photo above: Carlisle, PA Indian boarding school, 1900. From the May 5, 2018 Winnipeg Free Press.

Musically Speaking, Why is it OK to Mock Mormons?

The musical The Book of Mormon is coming back to Winnipeg this week for a repeat performance. Its return once again raises the questions: Why is it OK to make fun of the Mormons in this way? And how do Mormons feel about it? I asked that in February, 2015 in my column in the Winnipeg Free Press.

“Why, in a society that revolves around political correctness, is it socially acceptable to blatantly ridicule Mormonism?”

That was the question posed by Kate Wilson in the Salt Lake Tribune in 2014 about the musical The Book of Mormon.

Wilson, who is not a Mormon, went on to say that “such religious ridicule would never be deemed acceptable directed at other religions. Imagine what would happen if a musical titled The Torah or The Quran hit Broadway, similarly demeaning the beliefs and lifestyles of their respective religions. Protests and claims of anti-Semitism and racism would inevitably break out.”

Wilson’s question is an apt one for Winnipeggers now that The Book of Mormon is once again coming to town.

The award-winning play has been playing to packed houses across North America since it opened in New York in 2011. It follows two young Mormon missionaries who are sent to Uganda to try to convert people to their faith.

Reviewers have called it “the best musical of this century.” and “the funniest musical of all time.”

But while it has garnered rave reviews, others, like Wilson, have raised questions about its appropriateness, its language—it comes with an explicit language warning—and its accuracy when describing the Mormon faith.

According to the Deseret News, a Utah newspaper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the official name of the Mormon church), the musical contains multiple inaccurate representations of Mormon beliefs and practices.

Some of the errors, it says, are inconsequential, such as the specifics of how missionaries receive their proselytizing assignments and mission rules.

But other errors are less benign, such as misrepresenting the history of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, and church teachings about the afterlife.

So what? It’s just a play, a bit of entertainment. Plus, it’s all in fun.

That’s not what people were saying following the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Back then, there was a general consensus about the need to show tolerance and respect for the beliefs and practices of other religions—Islam, in particular—even in the face of a horrific crime.

But The Book of Mormon? That doesn’t seem to be a problem for many. But it is for Wilson.

“Such religious ridicule would never be deemed acceptable directed at other religions,” she wrote. “It’s clear that a double standard has been created in our culture when it comes to religious satire.”
  

What about people who belong to other religious groups; what should we make of this? Or maybe it doesn’t matter since we aren’t Mormons.

That’s not how Mollie Ziegler of GetReligion.org sees it.

According to Ziegler, all people of faith should be concerned since the musical "mocks general religious belief, using Mormon characters.”

David Brooks of the New York Times agrees, noting that "the central theme of The Book of Mormon is that many religious stories are silly."

The play’s main message, he added, is that "religion itself can do enormous good as long as people take religious teaching metaphorically and not literally."

And what about Mormons themselves—how do they feel about the play?

I posed that question to Josh Gruninger, President of the Manitoba & Northwestern Ontario Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Gruninger doesn’t plan to see the play himself, and he isn’t aware that many of the province’s 4,000 church members will go. But “we won’t discourage people from going to see it,” he says, adding that the church is not planning to protest the musical when it comes to the city.

All he hopes is that people who go to see it might take the time “to learn more about our church. I hope they will try to find out more about the real Book of Mormon.”

As for Winnipeggers in general, we’re still stinging from the charge that this is Canada’s most racist city. 

With the Mayor imploring citizens to treat everyone with respect, maybe we can start by not buying tickets to a musical that mocks the Mormons.

No Space for Hate in Canada

Vandalism at the Cold Lake, AB mosque in 2015.

What would you do if you witnessed a hate crime?

I have never been in that situation, so I don’t know what I would do. Bbut my friend Allison Courey has.

Allison is a 30 year-old white woman and chaplain at St. John’s College at the University of Manitoba. She was about to get on a Winnipeg bus in June when a man stepped back to let her board first—a fine and generous gesture, she thought.

When Allison saw another woman wearing a hijab walk toward her, she likewise motioned her to go ahead. That’s when the man stepped in front of both women and said: “Not her.”

Allison was taken aback. “Why?” she asked.

“It’s not safe” he said. “They’re Al-Qaeda. You have to be careful. We don’t want them.”

“There is no space for racism on Winnipeg Transit,” she said to the man.

He replied: “I used to execute them!”—a reference, Allison thinks by his accent, to the conflict that once raged in the former Yugoslavia.

Allison looked around the bus for support, but everyone else seemed to be looking away and not wanting to get involved.

So she said to the driver: “Do you have a policy about this or something? This guy’s talking about killing Muslims.”

Allison thought maybe she should take a picture of the man, in case he was dangerous and she should report him to the police.

But as she pulled out her phone, he became aggressive.

“He was clearly fixed on me, and my presence was upsetting him,” she says. “I was pretty sure that if I actually lifted the phone high enough to take a picture, he’d snap. That wouldn’t help anyone.”

Allison didn’t contact the police, but she did warn campus security. 

“I have too many dearly-beloved Muslim friends to allow a man like that to just wander through the campus at will,” she says, adding that the woman, who didn’t board the bus, “could have been a newly-arrived Syrian refugee.”

Unfortunately, the incident Allison witnessed is not unusual.

According to Statistics Canada, there were 1,295 hate crimes reported to police in 2014 (the year for which the most recent information is available). 

As for the groups most likely to experience hate, they are Jews, Muslims, and members of the LGBTQ community.

Checking the information from Statistics Canada, it was good to see that Manitoba had the third-fewest reported number of hate crimes in Canada that year. But even one is still too many.

As a white, straight, Christian male, the world feels pretty safe to me. I realize that isn’t the case for many others. It puts the onus on me to look out for any who might be in danger of hate because of their religion, race or sexual orientation.

And if I ever witness hate, I hope I can be as brave as my friend Allison.

You can get an up-to-date report of hate crimes against Muslims in Canada from the National Council of Canadian Muslims Hate Crime Map.

According to the Council, there have been 27 hate crimes in Canada against Muslims since January, double the number from a year ago at this time (June).

From the July 2, 2016 Free Press.

G.K. Chesterton, Pimlico and Canada's "Most Racist City"

Whenever I need inspiration about how to address huge challenges facing Canada's inner cities, I turned to G.K. Chesterton. I like his suggestion that fixing social ills has as much to do with the heart as the head. And so it's great to recall his sage advice from over 100 years ago as Winnipeg faces charges of racism. 

Is Winnipeg Canada’s most racist city?

That was the charge leveled by a Maclean’s magazine article in January.

The article prompted a lot of response, starting with the obvious: Who decides which is the most racist city, and how do they decide?

It’s not like there’s a scale out there that anyone can use to determine which city has the most racial challenges.

The truth is that every Canadian city has racial issues. As Winnipeg Police Chief Devon Clunis put it: “I don’t believe racism is strictly a Winnipeg issue. It’s a human condition.”

But it is also true that Winnipeg does have a problem when it comes to relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal residents.

Said Winnipeg’s Mayor, Brian Bowman:  “We do have racism in Winnipeg . . . You can’t run away from facts.”

In response to the article, various people and sectors to step up and address the issue—government officials, civic leaders, the private sector and educators.

To date, nobody has asked people of faith what they might do.

People of faith are also challenged by racism. But there is possibly no other sector in Winnipeg that is more involved—financially or as volunteers—in tackling this issue and other issues like poverty, homelessness and addictions.

Through organizations like Siloam Mission, the Salvation Army, Youth for Christ and a host of other organizations supported by places of worship, people of faith are practicing what Christians call The Golden Rule: Do to others as you would be treated yourself.

So it’s a bit strange, on the one hand, that nobody has asked what this pool of energy and resources could do—is already doing—to bridge the divide.

On the other hand, it’s perfectly understandable in our increasingly secular world that nobody thinks there might be a spiritual dimension to this problem.

And there certainly is a spiritual dimension, as British author and Christian philosopher G. K. Chesterton noted over 100 years ago about poverty in his hometown of London.

In his book, titled Orthodoxy, Chesterton drew attention to Pimlico—a nice place to live today, but a foul London slum in 1908, filled with poverty, disease and despair.

But how to fix a problem like Pimlico? The only way, he said, was not to just address the economic, housing and social issues that made it such a terrible place to live.

The answer, he suggested, was a change of perspective.

“The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico,” he said. “To love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason.”

If that happened, “then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles . . . if men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.”

Some people, he noted, “will say that this is a mere fantasy.”

His answer? “This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great . . . men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

In other words, it’s a matter of perspective. Or, as people of faith might say, a change of heart, a spiritual view of the problem.

We need to roll up our sleeves and practice what we preach, of course. 

But our work starts with the belief that God loves this city despite its flaws, and wants the best for it—just as God loves each and every human being.

In 2004, I attended a convention in Pittsburgh. At the time, the city had severe economic problems. It had applied for, and received, distressed community status from the state government. 

The city had, as once city councilor put it, “hit rock bottom.”

One convention speaker was a pastor and community activist. He acknowledged the problems, but said there were two ways to look at Pittsburgh. 

One way was to only see it as “bankrupt and suffering under a lousy provisional administration.” The other was to take a God’s eye view and “see what it can be.” 

He preferred the latter.

So how do we see Winnipeg? How do you see your city? As full of problems, or full of potential? As what it is, or what it can be?

In what Christians call the Old Testament, the ancient Israelites were given some advice by the prophet Jeremiah about Babylon, where they had been taken in captivity.

“Pray to the Lord for it,” he said. “Because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

It’s still good advice today.

A Newfoundland Story: Lanier Phillips and Healing the Wound of Racism

When I checked the Winnipeg Free Press online today, I found that one of my old stories from 2012 was the fourth most popular on the site--just below a report about Justin Bieber but above one about Michael Jackson's hologram. I can't imagine any reason why; maybe a class somewhere in the U.S. has been given an assignment about Lanier Phillips, an African-American sailor who had an extraordinary experience with racial understanding in Canada in 1942. You can read about his experience from that 2012 column below.

There's an old adage for journalism that bad news always travels faster and farther than good news. That's why stories about crime, accidents, terrorism and other tragedies are more likely to make the headlines, while other stories often get less attention.

That was certainly true last month for a good news story involving an African-American sailor, a Newfoundland outport community, and a case of colour blindness that took 70 years to make the headlines.  

Lanier Phillips, who died March 12 at the age of 88, was born in rural Georgia, the great-grandson of slaves. 

As a child, he was told by his great-grandmother to never look a white man in the eye or, as he recounted her words, he'd "get a whipping, or maybe lynched."

When African-Americans in his community built a school for their children, the Ku Klux Klan burned it down. It was then, he said, he knew he had "no future" in Georgia.

In 1941, during the Second World War, the 18 year-old Phillips enlisted in the U.S. Navy. 

Life as a sailor was not much better; the U.S. Navy in the Second World War was deeply segregated. Phillips served as a mess attendant on the USS Truxton--the only position African-Americans were allowed to hold on ships. 

"The navy was as racist as the state of Mississippi," he said in an interview.

In February 1942, the Truxton and another ship, the USS Pollux, were caught in a storm off Newfoundland. The fierce waves smashed both ships against the rocks; more than 200 of the 389 sailors on board the two vessels died. 

Phillips was the only African-American to survive.

Covered in thick, dark oil, the survivors were helped ashore by people from the nearby mining town of St. Lawrence. From the beach, they were taken to the first-aid station, where women from the town gently scrubbed the oil off their skin.

As Phillips's later recounted the story, none of his rescuers had ever seen a black person before. As they scrubbed him, they thought the oil wouldn't come off. 

"Oh my, it's gotten into his pores," he remembers a woman saying.

"It's the colour of my skin--you can't get it off," Phillips told them, fearing the worst now that they knew he wasn't white. 

But they didn't stop; they treated him just like the other sailors, speaking kindly and warmly as they gently removed the oil from his skin.

Phillips was amazed. "I had never heard a kind word from a white man in my life, and I had hatred for white men," he told the Washington Post in 2010.

The experience took away his hatred of white people. 

"They just rained humanity on me," he said. "It just changed my entire philosophy of life. They changed my way of thinking and it erased all of the hatred within me."

After he recovered, Phillips went on to spend 20 years in the navy, becoming the first African-American sonar technician. He cited the kindness of the people of St. Lawrence for inspiring him to be all he could be.

After retiring from the navy, Phillips worked as a civil engineer. He also joined the civil rights movement and marched with Martin Luther King--again, citing his experience in Newfoundland.

"I just had to join up with Dr. King and that's because of the change they did for me in St. Lawrence," he said.

Recalling King's words, Phillips said that a child exposed to racism was "wounded in mind and soul. But the people of St. Lawrence healed that wound and I have hatred for no one."

Phillips's story entered Newfoundland lore, being featured in songs, books and a documentary. But it was pretty much unknown outside of that province until his death. 

After his passing, St. Lawrence Mayor Wayne Roswell said "Lanier never forgot his unconditional welcome, love and acceptance in St. Lawrence some 70 years ago. His pursuit for a just and equal society has been a lasting effort."

Although well known in Newfoundland, it took a long time for Phillips's story to reach the rest of Canada. But even though it happened many years ago, it still speaks loudly, reminding that even the seemingly simple and small things we do for others can have important and lasting consequences.