Truth and Healing Between the Church and Indigenous Peoples
Having a faith conversation with old and new friends is as easy as setting the table.
TRUTH AND HEALING BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
CONTENTS
Introduction to FAITH FEEDS 3
Conversation Starters 8
• A Pilgrimage of Penance by Maka Black Elk 7
Conversation Starters 9
• After Francis’ Trip to Canada, Reconciliation Work Still Needed — and Not by Native People by Kirby Hoberg 10
Conversation Starters 12
• Pope Francis’ Visit to Canada Is a Time to Embrace an Indigenous Future by Damian Costello 13
Conversation Starters 15
• Gathering Prayer 16
Faith Feeds is an initiative by Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Program (C21), a Center that serves as a catalyst and resource for renewal of the Catholic Church in the United States. Faith Feeds was originally designed for individuals in Catholic parishes who are hungry for opportunities to talk about their faith with others who share it. Considering many Catholic schools are an extension of a parish, in partnership with the Roche Center for Catholic Education, a Center that forms Catholic educators to become agents of change who work to create excellent PreK-12 Catholic schools, a customized set of guides have been developed for Catholic educators.
Educators who strive for this excellence embody the following five virtues that allow them to transform Catholic schools: adaptable, joyful, attentive, visionary, and humble. St. Ignatius stated, “All the things in this world are gifts of God, created for us, to be the means by which we can come to know him better, love him more surely, and serve him more faithfully. As a result, we ought to appreciate and use these gifts of God insofar as they help us toward our goal of loving service and union with God.”
The development of Faith Feeds guides around these five gifts or virtues, challenges Catholic educators to reflect on how they are living out being adaptable, joyful, attentive, visionary, and humble in their everyday life. Together, C21 and the Roche Center hope to deepen one’s faith and bring communities of people together, especially during this time of social isolation, through these Faith Feeds reflections and questions. All authors in these special Catholic educator editions are committed Catholic educators who have a deep love for Catholic schools. Some authors currently serve as leaders in Catholic schools, others teach Catholic educators at the university level. Drawing voices from the United States and Ireland, all authors are connected by their love for Catholic schools and strive daily in their vocations to love and serve God.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Who should host a FAITH FEEDS?
Anyone who has a heart for facilitating conversations about faith, education, and leadership is perfect to host a FAITH FEEDS.
Where do I host a FAITH FEEDS?
You can host a FAITH FEEDS in-person or virtually through video conference software. FAITH FEEDS conversations are meant for small groups of 10-12 people.
What is the host’s commitment?
The host is responsible for coordinating meeting times, sending out materials and video conference links, and facilitating conversation during the FAITH FEEDS.
What is the guest’s commitment?
Guests are asked to read the articles that will be discussed and be open to faith-filled conversation.
Still have more questions?
No problem! Email karen.kiefer@bc.edu and we’ll help you get set up.
READY TO GET STARTED?
STEP ONE
Decide to host a FAITH FEEDS. Coordinate a date, time, location, and guest list. An hour is enough time to allocate for the virtual or in-person gathering.
STEP TWO
Interested participants are asked to RSVP directly to you, the host. Once you have your list of attendees, confirm with everyone via email. That would be the appropriate time to ask in-person guests to commit to bringing a potluck dish or drink to the gathering. For virtual FAITH FEEDS, send out your video conference link.
STEP THREE
Review the selected articles from your FAITH FEEDS Guide and the questions that will serve as a starter for your FAITH FEEDS discussion. Hosts should send their guests a link to the guide, which can be found on bc.edu/FAITHFEEDS.
STEP FOUR
Send out a confirmation email a week before the FAITH FEEDS gathering. Hosts should arrive early for in-person or virtual set up. Begin with the Gathering Prayer found on the last page of this guide. Hosts can open the discussion by using the suggested questions. The conversation should grow organically from there. Enjoy this gathering of new friends, knowing the Lord is with YOU!
STEP FIVE
Make plans for another FAITH FEEDS. We would love to hear about your FAITH FEEDS experience. You can find contact information on the last page of this guide.
CONVERSATION STARTERS
Here are three articles to guide your FAITH FEEDS conversation. We suggest that you select two that will work best for your group, and if time permits, add in a third. In addition to the original article, you will find a relevant quotation, summary, and suggested questions for discussion. We offer these as tools for your use, but feel free to go where the Holy Spirit leads.
This guide’s theme is: Truth and Healing between the Church and Indigenous Peoples
A PILGRIMAGE OF PENANCE
By Maka Black Elk
Pope Francis has made his pilgrimage of penance to Canada, which marks a pivotal moment in the Catholic Church and Indigenous peoples’ journey towards potential reconciliation. This was one of the 94 Calls to Action outlined by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the wake of their seven-year effort to document, inform, and seek justice for First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples across Canada. The visit from Pope Francis on Canadian soil to apologize for the residential school system marks another step in what is insisted upon by Indigenous peoples and the Pope himself to be an ongoing journey towards healing. In his apology, Pope Francis declared “that is only the first step, the starting point” for a long road toward creating a right relationship.
Last year, news outlets highlighted numerous reports of the rediscovery of unmarked graves at a multitude of former residential schools across Canada. Each grave represented an Indigenous young person who never had the chance to return home. Though many Indigenous people knew this history, it was retraumatizing to be reminded in such grim ways of those lost children. For many non-Indigenous in Canada and the world, it was the first time they were introduced to the magnitude of the devastation faced by Indigenous peoples as a result of the residential school system.
The reaction to this history from Catholics themselves, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, often fell into two categories. The first was a sense of devastation and even shaking of one’s individual faith, rooted in despair of the Church’s role in this history as an active participant and instigator. The other was often a reactionary defensiveness of the Church and its actions held onto by a notion that people involved in the residential school system believed they were doing good. Both of these directions fail in different ways to fully understand both the hope of the Gospel as the reason
for condemning Church involvement and the responsibility the Church has in addressing this history and holding itself accountable. For a deeper investigation of this theological approach to understanding the Church’s response to residential school history, I recommend reading an article by theologian Brett Salkeld entitled, “Guilt, Responsibility, and Purgatory: How Traditional Catholic Teaching Can Help Us Think about Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations.”
Salkeld helps guide us in building a theological platform to engage and understand this issue and how we might open the door for the healing necessary to move us forward as Pope Francis has now called upon the Church to do. His pilgrimage of penance should be instructive for us. When we seek atonement in the sacrament of reconciliation as Salkeld explained, we must do penance as well because “genuine sorrow over sin desires to make reparation.” That is the work moving forward from this pilgrimage. How does the Catholic Church desire to make reparation and what are some of the ways in which it can begin to do so?
The actual work of reconciliation will not be in the Pope’s hands. Through issuing his apology, Pope Francis has called upon the whole body of Christ to now take the steps necessary in order to face our history as a Church in North America and seek the right relationship with Inidgenous peoples. This is not to say that there isn’t more Pope Francis can do from his position on the seat of St. Peter. It is clear that Pope Francis must also now consider how the Church can decidedly renounce the Doctrine of Discovery. He must also direct the Vatican Archives to work with Indigenous communities to discern what artifacts should be repatriated to those native nations knowing that many of them were gifts from the native communities themselves while others may be the product of various forms of colonial theft.
Other areas of truth, reconciliation, and healing, however, must come from local communities, Catholic churches, and the dioceses themselves. In the calls from different Indigenous peoples, there have been various requests as to what “the Catholic Church” can do in order to atone and repair. It’s important to remember that Indigenous communities are not monoliths and thus there can be plenty of disagreement among the Indigenous themselves as to what these methods of repair should be. Broadly speaking, however, we can identify several categories of work that Churches can think about moving forward; 1) Church investment/involvement in revitalizing languages, spiritualities, and cultures of Indigenous peoples it once worked to destroy, 2) reasonable returning of land held by Churches to Indigenous communities, and 3) support for Indigenous communities in the recovery from various traumas experienced and passed on in the residential school system.
Bishops across Turtle Island would do well to build relationships with their tribal communities both within and outside of their diocese in order to address these areas. Meaningful dialogue at the local level would reveal the ways in which the Church can support these efforts and discern what is possible. Bishops’ conferences should support individual dioceses in these efforts to ensure every diocese can meet the needs of their communities.
These actions can and should be taken because the spirit of our sacraments calls us to do so. It is no individual today who is responsible for or should hold guilt for the sins of the Church’s past. We are, however, collectively responsible for how we repair relationships moving forward. To do so is to affirm the God-given dignity of Indigneous peoples and call us to a deeper relationship in order to create a new future together.
There was a moment after Pope Francis’ apology when Chief Wilton Littlechild of the Cree Nation approached the dais and gifted to him a feather bonnet, an item of deep spiritual and cultural significance to many tribal nations, by placing it on his head. This moment stirred immense emotions across Turtle Island for many Indigenous peoples, emotions that ranged from confusion, anger, horror, and joy. Regardless of one’s individual feelings about that moment and the image now captured for time immemorial of Pope Francis wearing this feather bonnet, the reaction from different Indigenous peoples represents the magnitude of the Catholic Church’s outsized impact on the colonial past as a representative of it. The chains of that colonial heritage may never be fully cast off. But
I want to note that connection because it names something that is also deeply challenging at this moment. The Church also needs healing from its own history.
The Catholic Church is the inheritor of a difficult legacy, nuanced as it is, that marks a deep stain on the integrity of the faith that clearly acted against its own core beliefs. Yet it is also the very realization of that fact that holds the faith together and reminds us that despite the failings of our past, this Church is full of goodness rooted in the Gospel truth. Our baptismal calling is at the root of our need not only to admit and atone for this history but to also deepen our faith and trust that God pulls us in the right direction by doing so.
Time and time again throughout the Bible, God demonstrates He stands with the poor and the marginalized. He is the God of the oppressed and the defender of the enslaved. How should His Church respond when it is realized that it acted as an oppressor rather than a liberator?
Along with the work outlined above, the Church can and should grapple with its own need for healing and use this opportunity to remind the body of Christ what our faith calls us to. Forgiveness is always a challenging task, perhaps one of the most difficult things our faith calls us to do. Indigenous communities will continue to discern how they approach forgiveness in all the ways they might do so, for being victimized in its own way can be a prison that only Indigenous peoples can free themselves from.
But forgiveness isn’t only for the victim. The legacy of the perpetrator also demands forgiveness in order to heal. In fact, forgiveness in this sense is only possible when the harmful act is acknowledged and named.
To be clear, Indigenous peoples do not need the Church to forgive itself and atone. Healing can be done even in the absence of the perpetrator. But we cannot deny that in situations where harm has been inflicted, the perpetrator of that harm has also wounded their soul. Has sinned. Has a need for contrition, forgiveness, and healing from within. To not do so means the sin may be repeated again. Pope Francis said, “We are speaking of processes that must penetrate hearts.” This moves us to a place of deep love rooted in Christ. I pray we find the many ways in which that love can be made manifest as we heal together. Maka Black Elk is the Executive Director for Truth and Healing at Red Cloud Indian School. He graduated from Red Cloud in 2005 and returned as a teacher and later as an administrator in 2013 before taking on his current role. Originally published in St. Cecilia Parish Bulletin.
A PILGRIMAGE OF PENANCE
“Time and time again throughout the Bible, God demonstrates He stands with the poor and the marginalized.”
Summary
Maka Black Elk, Executive Director for Truth and Healing at Red Cloud Indian School, reflects on Pope Francis’s pilgrimage of penance to Canada and what it means for truth, reconciliation, and healing for Indigenous peoples and the Church. He presents steps that the Church can take to work to atone and move forward in relationship with Indigenous peoples and emphasizes the importance of working to, “create a new future together.” The Church, Maka states, must grapple with its own history and move forward towards reconciliation and healing with Indigenous communities rooted in the knowledge that God stands with the oppressed and the marginalized.
Questions for Conversation
1. How does the truth of destruction and abuse of boarding and residential schools impact your faith? Do you find yourself reacting to this truth devastation and/or defensiveness as Maka discusses, or are there other reactions that you have?
2. Maka identifies the need for the work of reconciliation to take place not only on the level of the institutional Church, but in local communities. What are ways that you can enter into dialogue with Indigenous communities to support truth and healing efforts?
3. In what ways do you feel God calling you to stand with the oppressed and the marginalized in your own context and vocation?
AFTER FRANCIS’ TRIP TO CANADA, RECONCILIATION WORK STILL NEEDED — AND NOT BY NATIVE PEOPLE
By Kirby Hoberg
I saw the headlines. Following the papal visit to Canada in July, most Catholic news outlets were running stories with headlines like “Pope’s Apology Was a Start. Now the Real Work Begins.” I sighed with heaviness, because we all know who will be shouldering this task: It will once again fall to survivors and their descendants to continue the work they have been doing for a long time. “Real work” has become the trump card that signals that white work here is done.
As a mixed Native and white Catholic woman in the U.S., I watched Pope Francis’ visit to Canada closely. I watched his apology to the First Nations, Inuit and Métis. I watched the various strong reactions many Native people expressed at seeing the pope wear a warbonnet and I watched the Twitter hot takes coming from all sides. I watched it all. My big takeaway? White Catholics still resent that Native people have any claim on the church.
As if reconciliation could ever work when centered on the comfort and norms of whiteness.
During this reactionary time I observed that Native and Indigenous people who continued to insist on their own humanity — and the humanity of the children who died as a result of church-run residential and boarding schools — were ignored or told we were using the wrong words by people seeking to
deny the horrors of the residential school system. If we took umbrage with the terminology argument, we were told we weren’t being charitable. Or perhaps we didn’t love the pope enough. Both assertions miss the very real concerns of Indigenous people regarding this important visit and apology.
I will not link to the worst offenders here; they’re easy enough to find online and I have no desire to give them more clicks and attention. But the overarching harmful reactions that predominated coverage of the intersection of Native life and Catholicism was disheartening. I want to expect more of my fellow Catholics. At the very least could their first instinct not be to diminish, dehumanize, contain or distance?
I am Ponca of Oklahoma. I am descended from a grandmother and great-grandparents who all experienced the U.S. Indian boarding school system — specifically Carlisle, Haskell and Ponca. I am also of white descent and am white presenting. I am a cradle Catholic. I grew up a city girl in Dallas, Texas, and now live in Minnesota after spending almost a decade in the San Francisco Bay area.
I say this because specificity matters if we want to have conversations in community. You as a reader need to know where I am coming from, both in terms of my people and my locations. My own personal history is also a history wrapped up in colonization.
Such a multilayered history is a truer story than the prevailing desire to tie up a “dark page of history” with a bow. The dark page is not actually a page at all, but a thick and continuing book.
The reality of being Native and Catholic is not as unusual as it may seem. We are a hugely diverse group and represent many hundreds of sovereign Nations. But most of us get the message in various ways that we are not Catholic enough, that our Native-ness is a barrier to true faith in Jesus, that we have to prove our loyalty in ways never asked of white Catholics. In the lead-up to the papal visit, erroneous information calling common Indigenous cultural practices “pagan” popped up in Catholic news, yet the many traditions taken from secular and pagan Roman practices are never questioned for their validity in Catholicism.
Much more concerning than non-Eurocentric cultural practices is the fact that Catholic churches were deeply involved in both the Indian boarding school system and other systems of family and national breakdown among Natives in the United States and Canada. The residential schools in Canada and the boarding schools in the U.S. are intertwined systems with a shared genesis. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, became the model for the Indian schools in the U.S. and inspired the Canadian residential schools. The Catholic Church was deeply involved in both systems, as were other faith traditions.
Catholics of the United States must realize that our church is also implicated, not just the church in Canada. The investigation into the horrors of the U.S. boarding school system has only just begun. Every Native person you meet is somehow connected to that experience. Survivors are still living. We can all hear you say you are tired of hearing about this. Healing is a slow process, but adding to the wounds will do nothing but slow it down and harm the Body of Christ. Healing might be a solo and varying endeavor, but reconciliation is a twoway street.
This papal visit was not a glory trip. It was not meant to make us feel good about Catholicism. I do believe the pope meant it to be an act of contrition and reconciliation. But I mourn that the
word “genocide” was not spoken until on the airplane back to Rome. The Doctrine of Discovery still stands in its blood-soaked legitimacy. Thousands of Indigenous items remain in Vatican museums and archives. The desperately needed records of the schools kept in the Vatican and by religious orders remain withheld.
White Catholics cannot opt out of learning about the harms that have been inflicted against the Indigenous community, even and especially if it makes them uncomfortable. Reconciliation concerning something that has occurred over such a long period of time, with still undetermined cost and casualties, requires the involvement of every single one of us.
Kirby Hoberg is a theater artist and member of the Ponca of Oklahoma. She lives with her husband and four kids in Minnesota. Originally published in the National Catholic Reporter, 9/16/22.
AFTER FRANCIS’ TRIP TO CANADA, RECONCILIATION WORK STILL NEEDED — AND NOT BY NATIVE PEOPLE
“Healing might be a solo and varying endeavor, but reconciliation is a two-way street.”
Summary
Kirby Hoberg shares her experiences as a mixed Native and white Catholic woman observing Pope Francis’ visit to Canada. She calls for white Catholics in the United States to learn about the uncomfortable realities of colonialism and genocide committed against Native Americans and the misconceptions about being Native and Catholic that too often circulate. Reconciliation is, “a two-way street,” and Kirby emphasizes the involvement of every person to work towards truth, reconciliation, and healing.
Questions for Conversation
1. Kirby discusses her identity and how it impacts the ways she responds to how the Church has inflicted harm on Indigenous communities. How does your own identity impact your perception of the impact of boarding and residential schools? How does that impact your response to these realities?
2. What surprised you from Kirby’s experience as a Native American Catholic? What are ways that you can continue learning about and engaging with the Indigenous Catholic community?
3. If reconciliation is a “two-way street,” what are the steps that you can take towards truth, healing, and reconciliation?
POPE FRANCIS’ VISIT TO CANADA IS A TIME TO EMBRACE AN INDIGENOUS FUTURE
By Damian Costello
Most obviously, Pope Francis is coming to Canada July 24-30 to face up to the Catholic Church’s involvement in the country’s abuse-ridden residential school system and the damage it inflicted on First Nation communities.
Many Indigenous peoples want Francis to make a clear apology for what happened on Indigenous land and commit to concrete action that promotes healing and right relationship.
That might be the easy part. The unseen work — and perhaps the more difficult work facing Francis — is with the rest of us, non-Indigenous.
We’re still grappling with the reality that “Indigenous issues” are Canadian and American issues. Or that our nations exist, whether we like it or not, because of relationships with Indigenous peoples.
From the first tentative encampments, non-Indigenous peoples would not have survived in North America without critical Indigenous assistance. We made treaty relationships with Indigenous communities and through them our communities became viable. We may have overwhelmed Indigenous communities and abrogated our responsibilities, but those relationships still exist.
For more than 500 years, these relationships have been one-sided. We’ve made Indigenous peoples enter into our societies and cultures and exist on our terms. It’s time for us to do the same and reciprocate. By coming to Canada to face the legacy of the residential school system, Francis can model this reversal.
Most of us are afraid to take our relationships with Indigenous communities seriously, as we are locked in a deficit paradigm. We fear that we will lose a lot if we keep our promises. Land. Money. Most of all, we fear that we will lose the moral high ground that we read into our national histories.
Francis can help us to overcome our fear and see all that we have to gain through authentic relationship. That’s what the concept of a treaty is all about, according to the Rev. Ray Aldred, a Cree theologian and director of the Indigenous Studies Program at the Vancouver School of Theology. In his April 27 talk “Indigenizing Canada: Reconciliation as Embracing a New Identity,” Aldred explained that a treaty is not the establishment of lines in the sand separating warring parties but a kind of adoption ceremony, or “making of relatives.”
Aldred points to Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk’s theology in The Sacred Pipe, who says the making of relatives is “a reflection of that real relationship which always exists between man and Wakan-Tanka,” the Creator. By becoming relatives with Indigenous peoples, Aldred argues, newcomers would be included into Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land, all the beings that inhabit it, and learn the ways of living in harmony.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s fleshes this out in her bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass. By honoring responsibilities to Indigenous communities and respectfully learning from Indigenous ways of knowing, newcomers can begin to enter into a “moral
covenant of reciprocity” with all of the natural world. This covenant leads to the flourishing of both humans and other-than-humans, where “people and land are good medicine for each other.”
Instead of fear and loss, Francis can show us this beautiful vision of possibilities. By recognizing relationship and building patterns of atoning for our failings, we can grow out of our cultural limitations, such as our tendency to reduce land to a resource, how we make the economy the final arbiter in decision-making, and our disconnection from relationship with all the life around us.
We can go from being immigrants in a foreign land to becoming, in the words of Kimmerer, “naturalized to place.”
At first glance, this may seem like an impossibly tall order. But look around and you’ll see a growing number of examples of how church organizations are starting this shared journey of right relationship. The Jesuits in South Dakota returned 525 acres to the Lakota in 2017 and have started a Truth and Healing process at Red Cloud Indian School, a former boarding school, led by Maka Black Elk. The Sisters of St. Joseph, of Brentwood, New York, are finding ways to use their 200-plus-acre campus to partner with the Shinnecock Indian Nation.
There is a lot of work to be done on the Vatican side — meaningfully addressing the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery for example — but Francis should be confident in the assets of the papacy.
Pope John Paul II began this reversal on a global stage with his visits to North America and Australia in the 1980s. “Christ, in the members of his Body, is himself Indian,” John Paul proclaimed during his 1984 visit to Canada. He also allowed himself to be smudged, or ceremonially purified with the smoke of a sacred herb such as sage, a revolutionary act that affirmed Indigenous spirituality within a church that once participated in its persecution.
Francis can push this further and affirm that the church, despite contradiction and complici-
ty, has always been Indigenous. The true church in Turtle Island, an Indigenous name for North America, is not that of the residential schools but of the often ignored, even persecuted anti-colonial church that grew among Indigenous peoples from the very beginning.
Many know the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother of Jesus who appeared as an Indigenous woman to an Indigenous man who brought the message to the colonial church. Less know the story of her contemporary, the Taino Cacique Enriquillo, a devout Catholic who led a successful 15-year rebellion against the conquistador occupation of what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
An Indigenous future is dawning across the globe and Francis can show us we are called to be a part of it by highlighting the witness of Indigenous Christians.
Black Elk had a vision of Christ in the Ghost Dance who has the medicine to heal all the wounds of the land yet stays with us forever in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the Creator’s treaty with us, the great making-of-relatives ceremony that promises to raise us up to Divine life, what Aldred describes in his article “The Land, Treaty, and Spirituality: Communal Identity Inclusive of Land” as the model for Treaty Spirituality.
There will be a whole range of responses, but Indigenous peoples will be listening to Francis. May the Spirit open the hearts of the rest of us to embrace our identity as Treaty People and the promise it holds for the future.
Damian Costello is the author of Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism (Orbis Books). He is director of post-graduate studies at NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community and the American co-chair of the Indigenous Catholic Research Fellowship. Originally published in the National Catholic Reporter, 7/18/22.
POPE FRANCIS’ VISIT TO CANADA IS A TIME TO EMBRACE AN INDIGENOUS FUTURE
“An Indigenous future is dawning across the globe and Pope Francis can show us we are called to be a part of it by highlighting the witness of Indigenous Christians.”
Summary
Looking ahead to Pope Francis’ visit to Canada, Damian Costello appeals to non-Indigenous Catholics to enter into relationship with Indigenous communities as “Treaty People.” Cree theologian Rev. Ray Aldred presents treaty as a way of “making relatives,” and Damian argues that this type of deep relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is needed to work towards atonement and reciprocal healing. When we embrace our call to be “Treaty People,” Damian argues, we will acknowledge the witness of Indigenous Christians and more fully embrace an Indigenous future.
Questions for Conversation
1. Considering the witness of Indigenous Christians as a way to embrace an Indigenous future, what are ways that you can learn more about Indigenous Christians and share these stories with others?
2. Damian discusses movements to create right relationship between the Church and Indigenous peoples such as returning land, tribal partnerships, and truth and healing efforts in modern-day Native American Catholic schools. What are ways that you can support these efforts in your own context?
3. What are ways that you can enter into deep relationship with Indigenous communities in your context in the spirit of “making relatives”?
