On day of remembrance, churches confront their role in Indigenous boarding schools
Several US mainline denominations — including the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Methodist Church — encouraged their members to observe a day of remembrance for US Indian boarding schools on Sept. 30. Read the article from Religion News Service.
Jody Roy, center, fans smoke during a prayer to the four directions at the Prayer Service for Truth and Reconciliation, Sunday, Aug. 29, 2021, at St. Benedict Parish in Chicago. RNS photo by Emily McFarlan Miller
Worshippers at a prayer service for truth and reconciliation late last month at St. Benedict Catholic Parish in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood prayed in English and in Ojibwe.
They prayed to the four directions, the smoke from a smoldering bundle of sage curling skyward in the church’s sanctuary. They prayed as each person made their way down the church’s center aisle to leave a pinch of tobacco — one of the four sacred medicines in many Native American cultures — in a shared bowl to be burned. They prayed for healing, for forgiveness and for their eyes to be opened to injustices committed against Indigenous peoples by what was known as the federal Indian boarding school system in the United States.
“It’s important because Native people can’t heal if nobody knows the truth,” said Jody Roy, director of the St. Kateri Center, housed at St. Benedict Parish.