The faith community — and lawmakers — must step up
Rev. Katie Sexton-Wood, published in the Arizona Mirror
As members of the Arizona Faith Network, we find strength in our differences. We are Sikh, Catholic, Jewish, Presbyterian, Mormon, Lutheran, Muslim, Quaker, and Buddhist. We are reverends, rabbis, imams, and elders. We come from all across the state, nation, and world, and we all practice our faiths differently.
Yet, despite those contrasts, a few core values bind us together. For instance, we believe in the value of every human being. We believe in honest dialogue. And crucially, we believe in confronting and addressing injustice wherever we see it.
That understanding is what compels us to speak out about a dark and often-ignored chapter in American history: the Indian boarding school era.
Between 1819 and 1969, Christian churches worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. government to create hundreds of boarding schools for Native American children. The stated purpose of these schools was education, but education meant forcible assimilation of Native children into a white, Christian dominator society, intentionally stripping them of their culture and heritage.
Richard Henry Pratt, an Army officer and driving force behind these schools, infamously stated that these institutions were meant to “Kill the Indian and save the man.” As horrific as those words are, they still fail to capture the full cruelty of this era.
According to a new report from the Interior Department released this year, abuse and violence ran rampant. Educators frequently renamed children with English names, cut off hair, prohibited the use of Native languages and religions, and demanded extensive manual labor. The report also found 53 burial sites at boarding school locations, with more expected to be found as investigations continue.
Arizona, in particular, was a hub for these horrors. Our state was home to 47 boarding schools, second most in the nation behind only Oklahoma. Indian School Road cuts right across the heart of Phoenix, and if you follow it to the intersection of North Central Avenue, you can see a piece of boarding school history for yourself: the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center lies on the former site of the Phoenix Indian Industrial School. When the school opened in 1891, Indian Commissioner Thomas Morgan said that “it’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them.”