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.
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.
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