Episcopal Church grapples with 'transformative role' in Native American residential schools
Chiricahua Apache children pose outdoors at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, after their arrival from Fort Marion, Florida in November 1886. (Photo by J.N. Choate/Creative Commons)
For most Native American children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, education was neither a right nor a privilege. Indigenous children from Florida to Alaska were taken away, sometimes by force, to residential schools run by the government and often by denominations that operated under government contracts.
The aim of the education was to teach the children European American ways. Anything Indian, from language to clothing and dance, was forbidden. The system left a trail of trauma and death amid a quest for mass assimilation into white settler culture.
Now the Episcopal Church, which was involved in running at least 34 of the schools, has begun to reckon with the outsized role it played in this history. Last June, the church’s executive council allocated $2 million in a truth-seeking process aimed at documenting how Episcopal-run schools impacted lives for generations—and to explain why things happened as they did.
