Trauma Still Lingers

December 2, 2024

Investigating the history of Methodist-Run Indigenous Boarding Schools

“Many children only knew their Indigenous tongue, but when they spoke it, teachers placed a teaspoon of red pepper in their mouths for every Indigenous word they used.” Since 2022, Dr. Ashley Boggan has compiled research on how Methodists formed Indigenous boarding schools as part of a national effort to Christianize native communities and eradicate their cultural heritage. Working with The General Commission on Archives & History, she and her colleagues have released a new report, “The United Methodist Church and Indigenous Boarding Schools,” which lists the 44 Wesleyan schools and begins to describe the trauma students experienced. “They literally burned the interior of children’s mouths for speaking their own languages,” Dr. Boggan says. “The church must create an honest accounting of the harm that we have done.” Read amid rising Christian nationalism, the report also starkly reflects how theology can foment abuse when churches are wed to empire.

“The government and Christian denominations believed that Native Americans needed to be Christians, which also became an excuse for folks to take the valuable lands on which Native Americans lived for centuries,” says Bishop David Wilson, The United Methodist Church’s first Indigenous bishop, who also serves on Garrett’s Board of Trustees. “As a result, most every Native American today has ancestors—some living and most gone—who are products of boarding schools, a punishment that stayed with them throughout their lives.” Central to boarding schools’ ethos and identity was belief that exterminating Indigenous culture was essential to transform students into “proper” U.S. citizens—and for students’ own salvation. “It caused young students to be ashamed of who they were; created in the image of Creator God,” Bishop Wilson laments. “Today, so many Native Americans yearn to know their language. Native churches are leading the way to help folks learn and recover languages, but they are in grave danger of being lost in the next 25-30 years.”

Speaking with Dr. Barry Bryant, Associate Professor of United Methodist and Wesleyan Studies at Garrett, he is quick to name that we cannot fully understand this history without examining how Christianity became intertwined with nation-building. “Ever since Emperor Constantine, there’s also been a Christian aspiration to use the state to coerce populations into the Christian faith,” he says. “When that happens, the Church becomes an extension of empire, and follows economic motivations to maintain an exploitative caste of people.” Dr. Bryant also suggests it is crucial to understand Indigenous boarding schools as part of a broader genocide. “The boarding schools picked up where the military left off, both trying to attain the same objective: the subjugation of Indigenous peoples,” he explains. “If we couldn’t eradicate the people, then we could eradicate the culture.”

Indeed, one of the illuminating details that Dr. Boggan names in her report is how many boarding schools operated on former U.S. military bases. “These bases were built as the United States’ border expanded westward in wars against Indigenous nations,” she says. “After the Civil War, the federal government got more and more involved in relocating Indigenous populations and began to federally fund boarding schools and convert these bases to house them.” Links between schools and the U.S. military weren’t confined to retrofitting army barracks, they also shaped how missionaries ran them. “Teachers used military tactics,” Bishop Wilson says. “From the discipline they required to the military formations in which they marched kids from place to place, it was a core part of how teachings of Christianity were enforced.” Many of the schools’ practices were more reminiscent of army boot camp than an educational environment. “Upon arrival, students were stripped of their indigenous clothing, their hair was cut short, they were given and English name, and separated from other members of their tribe so they couldn’t rely on their own people,” Dr. Boggan says. “From the highly routinized schedule to the widespread physical, emotional, and mental violence, it was a militarized pedagogy.” 

Again, Dr. Bryant emphasizes that it’s crucial to understand this link between church-run boarding schools and the U.S. army not as an accident but as one of Christian Nationalism’s core features. “You really can’t have Christian Nationalism without militarism,” he says. “The hand that fit into this glove was a strident white nationalism that began to emerge around the turn of the 20th century, which would eventually manifest as the KKK and other organizations.” And this underlying reality has not changed: Pastors and churches who support current plans to have the U.S. military deport millions of people participate in just a new iteration of old collaboration. “It’s terrifying to think that the horrors of Indigenous boarding schools could easily happen again, that a particular understanding of Christianity could be thrust upon everybody else.” Dr. Boggan notes. Bishop Wilson shares this concern, observing how nascent efforts are alive in his home state. “Oklahoma has a superintendent who is forcing every classroom to have Bibles, and now plans to make students watch his videotaped prayers,” he says with alarm.

The powerful echoes between past and present give this archival work additional urgency, but the need to account and atone for boarding schools’ actions would be essential even if lawmakers were not attempting to legislate Christian identity. “They’re a source of generational trauma. Students returned from boarding schools to families who didn’t know their new way of life and often had immense difficulty relating to one another,” Bishop Wilson says. “Many students did not return home but were sent around the country, only to face racism and alienation. We need to know the role that early Methodists played in this sinful past.” Dr. Boggan notes that this initial report is only the beginning of this endeavor. The commission will now recruit a Ph.D. student or established scholar to deeply investigate schools where the UMC has extensive records, to get a fuller picture of why these schools were formed, how they operated, and the devastation left in their wake. “This need for scholarly work also includes other atrocities against Indigenous persons like the Sand Creek Massacre,” Dr. Boggan explains. “We have a long way to go before we’re done even naming this harm, let alone seeking justice around it.”