Presiding Bishop Michael Curry urged committees working ahead of the in-person gathering to focus on resolutions on “matters essential for the governance and good order of the church,” according to Episcopal News Service. The resolution on Indigenous schools rose to that level.
The federal Indian boarding school system was part of an effort by the U.S. government to assimilate Indigenous peoples and seize their land, according to the Interior report. Many children endured physical and emotional abuse in the schools, and some died.
Members of both the House of Bishops and House of Deputies spoke unanimously in favor of the resolution. Some shared their experiences officiating at funerals for children whose remains had been repatriated from the former Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Others spoke of pushing the city of Albuquerque to acknowledge that children had been buried beneath a public park constructed on the former site of a Presbyterian-run boarding school.
Still others shared their experiences as boarding school survivors themselves, or descendants of survivors.
Deputy Ruth Johnson of the Navajoland Area Mission attended two boarding schools — an experience, she told the House of Deputies, that is still hard for her to talk about.
At the first school, Johnson said, she was traumatized when she became ill and her long hair was cut. At the second, she was beaten. “I could have easily been one of those that didn’t make it home,” she said.
Gallagher, a member of the Cherokee Nation who serves the dioceses of Massachusetts and Albany, said her grandfather was a boarding school survivor. Her family still talks about a visit her parents made to a boarding school when she was a baby where children who hadn’t seen their mothers in years climbed into her mother’s lap, she said.
Some of those children never saw their families again, she said.
“For Indigenous people, listening is always the first step and really hearing the stories and living into the stories and working towards a consensus of what will be come next,” Gallagher told Religion News Service.
“Oftentimes, churches want to do some quick fix, and that is not going to get us anywhere.”
That’s why the resolution approved at General Convention is important, she said.
RELATED: Catholic, Protestant groups support commission on US Indian boarding school policy
