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Harvard announces return of Native hair samples
Tucked in hundreds of envelopes is the hair cut from Native children as they arrived at boarding schools. Hidden away for nearly 100 years in the recesses of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, the collection of hair samples offers tangible evidence of the trauma of assimilation. According to the hygiene of the day, cropping […]
Supreme Court takes up the Indian Child Welfare Act
The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are inscribed above the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. The terse phrase powerfully underscores the conviction that the nation’s judiciary occupies a special plane of existence in which momentous decisions are made in a protected sphere of legal purity. For many Supreme Court watchers, however, the court’s […]
‘Our ancestors risked their lives and freedom’
ODANAH, Wisconsin — It was the blue ceiling that got me. Although St. Mary’s Catholic Church is tiny, its vaulted ceiling soars to an unexpected height. It’s an impossible robin’s egg blue or the hue of a blue sky that could never exist. Unexpectedly, it drove my heart into my throat, where it stayed for […]
Churches starting to face facts on boarding schools
Red Cloud Indian School is taking the lead among Christian-run schools in coming to terms with its assimilationist past. The Jesuits have given Red Cloud a $20,000 grant to help in the work, including conducting searches with ground-penetrating radar for unmarked graves, and have allocated $50,000 to hire an archivist for one year to examine […]
Deb Haaland talks offshore wind energy in Scotland
In her first news conference at the COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland described her global challenge for every applicable country to join in setting ambitious domestic offshore wind energy commitments. “Climate change doesn’t recognize territorial or political boundaries. It’s a global problem that requires a global effort to address […]
St. Mary’s Mission: ‘This place is the Devil’
It was a lifetime ago, more than 50 years now, that Jodine Grundy taught at the St. Mary’s Mission boarding school on Confederated Tribes lands in Omak, Washington. It was 1966. Grundy was 20, an idealistic, newly minted graduate from the Jesuit’s Santa Clara University in California interested in art and social justice. Energized by […]