Friday, August 12, 2022

Putting the shoe on the other foot

 

Imagine, if you can, a time in the future where Muslims were elected to the presidency and most of the governorships in the country. Now, further imagine that within a year of the presidential election, all citizens were required to convert to Islam, adopt Islamic names, and to be assigned to a new occupation that had been chosen by the rulers.

Sounds far-fetched, doesn’t it?

Here’s a shocker for you.

A situation like those nightmare conditions has already happened in this country.

Twice.

First, let’s talk about Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan priest, whose canonization was fast-tracked by Pope Francis to coincide with a visit to the U.S.

Serra founded nine of the 21 missions in California. The Spanish missions, much like the so-called English praying towns of the Northeast and not so unlike the residential schools that would follow, were closed communities for Indigenous people who agreed to convert.

Six years ago, the author of the article in the link below went to the Gathering of Nations, a powwow in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that draws in thousands of participants and spectators from across the United States.She took a circuitous route there and back that brought us through much of the Southwest, and that is how she found herself going from mission to mission in San Antonio.

Plaques tell the story of these missions, how the Catholic Church provided work and shelter for the local native people. How the missions were a place of safety for some tribes against the violence of others. The website says: “after 10,000 years the people of South Texas were faced with drought, European diseases, and colonization. In the early 1700s, many Native people of Southwest Texas foreswore their traditional life to become Spanish, accepting a new religion and agrarian lifestyle in hopes of survival.”

This history is as whitewashed as those buildings. The Church, too, was something that had to be survived.

The missions were just one way Christians worked with the government to gather Indigenous peoples off of the land and into places where they could be transformed into citizens, into Christians, while making the land available for mining and agriculture and white settlement.

Around the same time as these Spanish missions took hold on the Gulf and West Coasts, praying towns on the East Coast filled villages with converts who were given access to housing and education. Then, in the late 1800s, Indian boarding schools (called residential schools in Canada) began when retired Civil War General Richard Pratt saw them as a way to “kill the Indian and save the man.” These schools proliferated across the U.S. and Canada. They were government funded and mandated but run mostly by churches — many of which were Catholic.

These Indian boarding schools were common in Arizona. There is a street in Phoenix called Indian School road, and one existed in Tucson less than a mile from what is now Pueblo High school.

According to an article in Vox, historians looked at the birth and death records on these missions and found that more natives were dying than being born in the missions under Serra’s control. There were reports of physical violence and forced labor. Conversion wasn’t mandatory, but refusal had consequences, and soldiers were dispatched to find and return runaways. The more the author read about these Spanish missions, the more they sound like the residential schools that would follow a century later. 

Eventually, the Catholic church started to atone for its past sins.

In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI met with Indigenous leaders and expressed sorrow for the experiences of survivors, though not an apology. Now 13 years later, Pope Francis recently traveled to the Indigenous communities of Maskwacis and Lac Ste Anne in Alberta to apologize for the Church’s role in the residential schools.

The apologies have been met with some relief and much outrage as survivors and their descendants balance their competing needs for resolution and reparation and as we analyze what was said and what was excluded.

Francis’ current trip was in response to pressure from survivors and one of many calls to action from a report published in 2012 by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a Canadian process that began in 2009. Yet, three years after the release of the TRC Report, which contained the demand for an apology, Francis rushed to canonize a man who perpetrated very similar harms.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/pope-s-apology-tour-has-some-conspicuous-gaps-let-s-start-junipero-serra

 

Will he apologize for the missions and for Serra, too?

In his first apology, delivered at Maskwacis, the pope apologized for the wrongdoings of individuals, for those who abused those entrusted to their care. In Lac Ste Anne he acknowledged the Church’s role in these schools and that the Church had “defended the institution rather than seeking the truth and preferred worldly power over serving the gospel.” This is what institutions do. They protect themselves at the expense of the people who inhabit them. They assure themselves that the institution serves some greater good.

In California, statues of Juniper Serra have been vandalized in San Rafael, Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In addition, the vandalism has not been limited to statues.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fire-destroys-249-year-california-church-71733620

In July of 2020, a fire early Saturday destroyed the rooftop and most of the interior of a Catholic church in California that was undergoing renovation to mark its upcoming 250th anniversary celebration.


Fire alarms at the San Gabriel Mission rang around 4 a.m. When firefighters arrived, they saw smoke rising from the wooden rooftop in one corner of the historic structure, San Gabriel Fire Capt. Paul Negrete said.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, Negrete said. He said the recent toppling of monuments to Junipero Serra, the founder of the California mission system who has long been a symbol of oppression among Indigenous activists, will be a factor in the investigation.

The church was the fourth of a string of missions established across California by Father Serra during the era of Spanish colonization. The Franciscan priest has long been praised by the church for bringing Roman Catholicism to what is now the western United States, but critics highlight a darker side to his legacy. In converting Native Americans to Catholicism, they said he forced them to abandon their culture or face brutal punishment.

Just as resentment against Father Serra and the Catholic church, Christopher Columbus has generated some controversy due to the (unfounded) belief that he brought slavery to North America. Several cities in America (including Minneapolis) now celebrate Indigenous People Day rather than Columbus Day.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/10/dont-shoot-messenger.html

 

I don’t have ax to grind with Father Serra, the Catholic church, or Christopher Columbus, but all of them are more examples of attempts in our society to be more tolerant of perceptions of inequality. That’s the reason that Aunt Jemima is now Pearl Milling Company, and the Cleveland Indians are now the Cleveland Guardians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment