‘WELL OVERDUE’
Remembrance event set for Native American boarding school youths
“The boarding school era has impacted many of our Native communities in Oklahoma. We still see trauma among families and a need for healing.” The Rev. David Wilson
OKEMAH — An Oklahoma child psychologist remembers hearing the oral histories about Native American children separated from their families and sent to boarding schools where they were surrounded by strangers and immersed in a strange culture.
“Some of them didn’t come back,” said Dr. Dolores Subia BigFoot, a member of the Caddo tribe and an associate professor directing the Native American Programs at the Center on Child Abuse and Neglect at the OU Health
Science Center.
“The parents and the children didn’t speak English so the parents had a hard time finding out what happened to their children,” she said.
BigFoot will pray and remember those lost children and other Native American youths sent to Indian boarding schools from around the 1820s to about the 1980s at a special remembrance service set for 10 a.m. Thursday near Okemah.
The event, to be held in the open-air tabernacle at Thlopthlocco United Methodist Church, is “well overdue,” BigFoot said.
The Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference of the United Methodist Church will host the remembrance service, joining many other groups across the U.S. and Canada for a day of remembrance for Native American children who died at boarding schools. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which has been working to educate the public about the boarding schools and their legacy, called for Thursday to be observed as National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools. This date coincides with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation that is dedicated in Canada to residential school survivors.
The Rev. David Wilson, assistant to Oklahoma United Methodist Bishop Jimmy Nunn, said the gathering will also be a way to remember those who survived their experiences at the schools, such as his own father and his father’s siblings.
Wilson, a member of the Choctaw tribe, said the remembrance service coincides with Canada’s first National Day of Truth and Reconciliation on Thursday, created after the discovery of 215 unmarked graves by Canada’s Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
The discovery prompted U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo Laguna tribe, earlier this year to call for a comprehensive review of the federal boarding school legacy.
“The primary goal of this work is to share the truth of this dark chapter in our nation’s history, so that we can begin to heal,” Haaland said at the time.
Thursday’s service will be part of the national reckoning regarding the trauma Native American young people experienced at Indian boarding schools, most of them federally run. Wilson said many of the schools were designed to strip the youths of their culture.
He said Oklahoma has more than 83 former and current boarding school sites, more than any in the nation, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
“The boarding school era has impacted many of our Native communities in Oklahoma,” the minister said. “We still see trauma among families and a need for healing.”
Monday, United Methodist leaders condemned church sponsorship of U.S. “abusive” Indian boarding schools and called for remembrance of victims and survivors
While authorized and primarily funded by government, some of these schools were also sponsored or operated by religious organizations, including several with Methodist affiliations, the United Methodist group said.
In a statement, the denomination’s General Board of Global Ministries and a host of other United Methodist entities, pledged to endorse and join the day of remembrance, welcome the investigation underway by the U.S. Department of the Interior, conduct the denomination’s own study and investigation of Methodist-related boarding schools, and work to embody the spirit of the denomination’s 2012 “Act of Repentance Toward Healing Relationships with Indigenous People.”
Recent discoveries and new reports in the U.S. and Canada “cast renewed light on one of the most shameful practices in the deplorable treatment of the Indigenous people of North America by European colonists across 500 years,” the faith group said in its statement.
As BigFoot indicated, large numbers of young people died in school custody without notice to families and were buried in mass schoolyard graves. Some of these burials have been documented internally in boarding school records, but others have not.
Meanwhile, Nunn, who is bishop of the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference as well as the Oklahoma United Methodist Conference, will take part in the remembrance event, along with Wilson.
The Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference is part of the United Methodist Church, with about 6,000 members in 84 churches in Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. The Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference is made up of two districts, Northern and Southern, with the conference headquartered in Oklahoma City. Wilson said the conference’s churches are mostly made up of Native Americans but they are open to all people.
In addition to BigFoot as a featured speaker, Thursday’s service will also include tribal music by the Cherokee Adult Choir from D.D. Etchieson United Methodist Church in Tahlequah and Muscogee singers from area churches.
CONTRIBUTING: Associated Press