The Plot Against Native America, page 23
In 1946 the federal government established a precedent for land reparations. The Indian Claims Commission Act was passed as a means of thanking the 44,000 tribal members who served in the armed forces during World War II, fighting in Europe and the Pacific. And more than 100,000 Indigenous people served the war effort on the home front by working in industry and agriculture. It might seem incongruous that they would support the foreign war of a nation that had mistreated them for centuries. But in a 2002 interview I asked Blackfeet author and novelist James Welch why so many of his tribe join the military. “The Blackfeet are warriors,” he said. “And this is still our land.” Paratrooper Ira Hamilton Hayes (Pima) was twenty-two when he joined five other Marines raising the American flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima, a moment captured by the most iconic photograph of the war. His story was told in The Outsider, a 1961 film starring Tony Curtis. U.S. forces finally prevailed at Iwo Jima against 20,000 Japanese soldiers entrenched on Mount Suribachi, a victory that would have been impossible without Diné “Code Talkers.” They passed 800 messages between military units during the battle, baffling Japanese cryptographers, who had no way to reference what linguists consider the most difficult tongue to learn as a second language. Many of the almost 500 Marine Code Talkers who served in the Pacific were conscripted as children by Indian boarding schools. Chester Nez, for example, was enrolled in the BIA’s Chinle School in Arizona, where President Chester Arthur’s first name was forced on him, and he was prohibited from speaking Navajo.
After adjudicating their requests for reparations the Indian Claims Commission awarded $1.3 billion to 176 tribes and bands. Many Indigenous people wanted land, not money, but the government was unwilling to give back any of the territory it had stolen. Tribes that accepted the cash had to agree that they would not pursue further claims. The per capita payout was only $1,000, and much of this money was held in trust by the notoriously inept Bureau of Indian Affairs.
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Indigenous families in America signed a waiver or put their mark or a thumbprint on a piece of paper in order to open school doors for their children. Some families were coerced into giving up their kids to White teachers, and others saw these institutions as the only hope for their survival. Paltry payments—if paid at all—were exchanged by the federal government for Native land along with promises to build educational institutions on the reservations. Sometimes the promises were kept, sometimes not. Because the schools run by the Bureau of Indians Affairs were dedicated to the forced assimilation of Native people and the erasure of their languages and cultures, often by brutal means, parents and guardians saw schools operated by religious denominations as less coercive. The government not only gave the churches land on which to build schools it paid them on a per capita basis for each student, a clear violation of the establishment clause in the First Amendment. But politicians and bureaucrats believed that the chief obstacle to assimilating Indians was their pagan beliefs, which could only be transformed by their conversion to Christianity. According to an 1886 report from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs converting heathens was “a work in which the Government cannot actively engage,” but the government should provide “encouragement and cooperation” to missionaries. By 1899, however, Congress had phased out the awarding of contracts to church-run boarding schools, most of them Catholic. Opposition to the policy came from Protestants and their politicians, alarmed at the rising tide of Catholic immigration from eastern Europe and Italy. But because Katharine Drexel could not fund every Catholic boarding school the Church conceived a plan that would keep them in business.
Why not use the money held by the government in Native trust and treaty funds to pay the tuition of Indians? After the scheme became practice three Sicangu men from the Rosebud Reservation filed a lawsuit against the government that finally reached the Supreme Court in 1908. In Reuben Quick Bear v. Leupp the plaintiffs argued that the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 promised the children of the Great Sioux Nation an education paid for by the government. “The United States agreed that, for every thirty children of the said Sioux Tribe who can be induced or compelled to attend school,” the treaty states, “a house shall be provided, and a teacher competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education shall be furnished, who will reside among said Indians, and faithfully discharge his or her duties as a teacher.” Defense attorneys argued that the real plaintiff in the case was not the government but the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions (BCIM), incorporated in 1894 to promote the Church’s boarding school business. The Court ruled that mission schools could ask tribes to pay for the schooling of their children because denying Indians the right to use their money as they see fit would deprive them of their rights. Author and history professor Vine DeLoria Jr. (Lakota) said Quick Bear had nothing to do with the law or treaties but was basically a “payoff” to Catholics for supporting Theodore Roosevelt in the 1904 Presidential election.20
Starting in 1908 the administrators of mission schools were required to seek permission from parents before petitioning the BCIM for trust and treaty money. A report from a journalism project called Type Investigations published by In These Times found that the Church drained at least $36 million in 2023 dollars from these Native accounts.21 A determination of the exact figure lies in the future because church and government boarding school records are scattered across the country in dusty boxes and battered filing cabinets. An effort has begun to find these records and digitize them so the information can be stored in a database and shared with researchers and families. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), a nonprofit organization, was awarded a federal grant to scan documents held in the libraries of two Philadelphia-area colleges. They include photos, financial records, letters, and administrative reports from at least nine Indian boarding schools across the U.S. that were operated from 1852 to 1945 by the Quakers. Although there are 20,000 pages in the two collections this figure represents a tiny fraction of the records it can be assumed were generated by at least 523 boarding schools across the U.S., including Alaska and Hawai’i.22
A large and important trove of documents is held by the Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquette University, a Catholic institution in Milwaukee. These records were given to the school by the BCIM, to which all boarding schools run by Catholics sent regular reports. Requests by researchers to digitize these records have so far been rebuffed by the staff, who maintain that permission must come from the BCIM. Archivist Mark Thiel, who for decades until his retirement in 2021 was in charge of the Bureau’s records, opposes digitization. NABS “is promoting a partisan agenda,” he said. “I don’t like the idea of combining the archives with a partisan agenda.” Thiel dismissed as “tough love” the harsh conditions and corporal punishment common at the Church’s Indian boarding schools. “When you’re looking at something from a past era and you’re applying contemporary standards, I think that there’s a bias there,” he told Mary Annette Pember, the reporter from In These Times. “I think you need to look at it from the lens of the past era.” Thiel’s remarks are a common refrain among conservative Christians and their political allies as they brace for the looming storm of demands from Native people for reparations.
What Thiel describes as a relic of the past is still very much part of the child-rearing practices of some Christians, who believe that corporal punishment is encouraged by a phrase from Scripture. However, “spare the rod, spoil the child” appears nowhere in either Testament. It was written by Samuel Butler in Hudibras, the mammoth 11,000-line satirical poem he published in three parts between 1663 and 1678. In the poem a Presbyterian knight named Hudibras argues frequently with his squire, a Puritan named Ralpho regarding the meaning of words. Although Butler was dismissive of Puritanism, the poem doesn’t mock doctrine or theology. But both knight and squire are portrayed as incompetent buffoons. Sallying forth to confront his enemies, Hudibras has trouble getting on his horse and staying there. And the duo is regularly defeated in battle, often by women, most notably the village prostitute. Many Christians to this day argue that spanking their children is an effective teaching tool. A fundamentalist Protestant organization, for example, called Focus on the Family advises that “spanking can be an important time of connection.” There is a spate of Christian parenting books that recommend assaulting children, including Spanking: A Loving Discipline to Spank Your Child, PLEASE! and Lots of Love & A Spanking. In Don’t Make Me Count to Three, Ginger Hubbard advocates smacking both puppies and kids, including sick children and infants under twelve months old. “There are many adults,” the author argues, “who could benefit from a good old fashioned whippin.’ ” Most of the Native Americans subjected to the harsh and physical abuse of boarding schools came from cultures that regarded corporal punishment as barbaric and counterproductive. This is not to say that their children were never punished. But the discipline was based on words or the silent treatment, and rarely was physical force employed.
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How do you put a dollar figure on the ongoing trauma caused by Catholic boarding schools? That’s a question the tribes will have to answer as more of the internal records of these eighty-seven institutions come to light. What is easier to quantify is the money skimmed from Indian trust and treaty funds. And land owned by the Catholic Church on Indian reservations has been and will continue to be a topic when the conversation turns to giving stolen wealth back to the tribes. As Ojibwe author and activist Winona LaDuke said, “The only compensation for land is land.” Echoing that idea, in 2017 the Church gave the Sicangu 550 acres it had owned on the Rosebud Reservation since the nineteenth century. “We’re out of the property business,” the president of St. Francis Mission declared, “and we’re out of a colonial approach to the work of mission.”23
While that may be the case for the Jesuits at St. Francis, the U.S. Church as a whole is still very busy managing the revenue stream from its enormous real estate holdings, allowing it to weather substantial financial losses. These include the decline in tithings and donations resulting from the dwindling number of Americans who call themselves Catholics, and the more than $3 billion the Church has shelled out by the end of 2023 as a result of settling 3,000 sexual abuse lawsuits.24 That figure would be much higher if not for the fact that thirty-six dioceses weaseled out of their liability by declaring bankruptcy, from which a dozen have emerged to start again. Financial losses as a result of closing churches and parochial schools during the COVID-19 pandemic were offset by the Payroll Protection Plan (PPP). An Associated Press investigation revealed that Catholic entities in the U.S. vigorously applied for PPP “loans” from the Small Business Administration and were granted between $1.4 billion and possibly more than $3.5 billion, federal money intended to rescue small companies that were shuttered because of the virus. Many millions of dollars went to dioceses that used bankruptcy to protect themselves from sexual abuse lawsuits. This bonanza made the Roman Catholic Church among the top beneficiaries of the government’s pandemic welfare scheme. Although churches are tax-exempt and prohibited from seeking federal funds distributed by the Small Business Administration, Congress allowed nonprofits to apply for PPP loans as long as they abided by the SBA’s “affiliation rule,” which restricts recipients to those business entities with fewer than 500 employees. Many parishes exceed this cap, but the Church convinced the Trump administration to exempt religious organizations from the rule. Trying to fend off criticism of the government’s clear violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, Bishop Lawrence Persico of Erie, Pennsylvania, told Forbes magazine that “The separation of church and state does not mean that those motivated by their faith have no place in the public square.”
Although very few of the dioceses issue financial statements “that would pass muster with a CPA,” according to Jason Berry, a reporter who wrote the book Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, the U.S. Church is estimated to be worth as much as $30 billion. Even a fraction of this figure would go a long way toward financing the purchase of reservation land by tribal governments from willing non-Native sellers. That dollar figure pales in comparison to what the Roman Catholic Church owns across the rest of the planet. It is probably the wealthiest institution in the world. But no one knows for sure because its finances are a secret. It owns gold, jewels, cathedrals, oil wells, art, museums, farms, and forests. According to one estimate it owns 277,000 square miles of land, a territory the size of Texas. Another estimate places the number at 312,000 square miles. Even the Church has no idea of the true figure.
A young American cartographer from Connecticut decided to find out. In 2015 when she was twenty-five years old Molly Burhans began using sophisticated geographic information systems software to produce a visual representation of Church properties that is interactive—digital maps employing color, shape and line that respond to a user’s questions. She soon learned that the data that would fuel such a project was almost nonexistent. The only maps showing Catholic holdings that she had been able to find were published in an old book entitled Atlas Hierarchicus and had not been updated since 1901. The boundaries of dioceses were hand-drawn guesstimates, and most of the information about real estate—schools, cathedrals, clergy residences, missions, etcetera—was so outdated it was of no use. She contacted parishes in Connecticut to ask about their real estate assets. “And what I found out was that none of them knew what they owned,” Burhans told David Owen, writing about her in the New Yorker magazine. “Some of them didn’t even have paper records.” A devout Catholic and an environmentalist, her goal was to convince the Church to use its real estate to heal the planet and help the victims of bad economic management. If the Holy See had an accurate accounting of its land and how it was being used, she decided, informed decisions could be made about its effect on climate change, displaced populations, and deforestation. “You should put your environmental programs where they mean the most,” she told Owen. “And if you don’t understand the geographic context you can’t do that.”
She traveled to the Vatican to find someone in the Church’s government who would let her examine its records and databases. When she met with two priests she asked them where they kept the Church’s maps. They referred her to the Gallery of Maps, a wide, arched hallway the length of a football field lined on both sides with forty huge topographical frescoes depicting the Italian Peninsula. Painted in the sixteenth century, they are no more than 80 percent accurate. “Then I asked if I could speak to someone in their cartography department.” The priests told her they didn’t have one. Although the Church began losing track of its land holdings in the early 1900s Burhans and the institute she founded, called GoodLands, used Vatican statistics to produce 100 digital maps of the Roman Catholic empire, many of which were released to the public in 2019.
Following Burhans’ lead I decided to compile a list of the Church’s assets in my home county of Missoula, Montana, whose population in 2023 was 120,000 people, most of whom live in the City of Missoula. This task didn’t require calling parish officials. According to the Montana Cadastral, which provides detailed information about private and public land ownership, the diocese owns eight churches in the county, three houses, ten acres of bare land, and a parochial school for grades K-12. The market value of these assets ranges as high as $50 million. That’s not counting the thirty large and small stained glass windows adorning St. Francis Xavier Church in downtown Missoula. Although canon law prohibits their sale to an entity that is not another Catholic Church, they may be worth as much as $500,000. All of these properties are on land that belonged to the Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles people before they were swindled out of it by the 1855 Hellgate Treaty and moved to the Flathead Reservation, which lies four miles from Missoula’s city limits. It would be a fitting gesture on Montana’s part to offer ownership of Council Grove State Park to the tribes who were its original caretakers. A tranquil 187-acre expanse of parkland, riverbank, and forest eight miles downstream from Missoula, this is where the treaty was signed. A precedent exists for the return of Native land. In 2021 the 19,000-acre National Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation was transferred from the federal government to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.25
The reservation was infected by two of the most notorious Indian boarding schools in the U.S. Ten years after Pierre-Jean De Smet and Adrianus Hoecken founded St. Ignatius Mission in 1854, an assimilation center for girls was opened there and staffed by the Sisters of Providence, who forced their conscripts to sew, keep house, and garden. In 1878 an industrial and agricultural boarding school for Indigenous boys was opened by the Jesuits to teach farm work, printing, and the mechanical trades. By 1892 there were 325 students enrolled at the two St. Ignatius schools. In 1941 the schools were combined into a coed facility that was operated by the Ursuline Sisters. By the 1950s corporal punishment and the sexual abuse of children at the Ursuline Academy were rampant. They were beaten with boards. Those who wet their beds were made to stand with the sheets over their heads until they dried. Others were fondled, penetrated, and raped. Runaways were common, and a string of fires was blamed on arson, one of which burned the boys’ school to the ground in 1896.
