Like many Catholic orders that operated Indian boarding and day schools, the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration have embarked on a campaign to examine their organization’s role in the assimilation process that aimed to strip away Indigenous culture and language. While heartfelt and sincere, their efforts seemed vague and overly cautious, however. As Sister Eileen McKenzie, president of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, said during an interview withIndian Country Today, “We are in a big learning curve about our history at St. Mary’s.”
Over the past two or three years, the sisters have begun to realize there are issues over their past work with Native Americans, she said.
“We’ve been doing a lot of webinars and research around the issues and thinking about what this means of our complicity in federal and church policies that were unjust and genocidal,” McKenzie said.
Historic oppression
My family’s boarding school experience of brutality, repression and shame for being Native plays an ongoing role in mine as it does in the lives of many Native people. There is an ongoing effort in Indian Country, predating by decades the recent media focus on discoveries of graves at Canada’s Indian residential schools, of trying to gain attention of church and government leaders on their roles in assimilationist boarding school policies.
The fallout of historic boarding school trauma dwells with many of us every day. Therefore, it’s difficult to believe institutions that played such a primary role in creating this trauma view it as a part of a distant past.
“We are learning and walking tentatively to see if we can help move to a place of healing while reconciling with the truth,” McKenzie said.
“We are looking at dismantling racism and learning how our church was complicit in colonialism,” McKenzie said, pausing briefly. “It seems like we’re not doing anything but we are learning; we want to be engaged and have a relationship with the Native community in order to ask what they need.”
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