Journey towards healing

On August 17, 2024, Episcopalians in the Diocese of Arizona toured the now-defunct Phoenix Indian School, the second-largest Indigenous boarding school in the United States, as part of a yearlong Indigenous boarding schools pilgrimage hosted by the diocese and its Council for Native American Ministry. Elena Selestewa, a member of the Hopi Tribe and the nonprofit Native American Connections’ Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center specialist, was the pilgrims’ tour guide. Photo: Shireen Korkzan/ENS

[Episcopal News Service — Phoenix, Arizona] Upon learning from a 2022 federal report that the state of Arizona had the second highest number of known Indigenous boarding schools in the United States—behind Oklahoma—the Diocese of Arizona and its Council for Native American Ministry responded by planning a Listening and Healing Pilgrimage in 2024.

The yearlong pilgrimage to each of the four regions of the diocese is an opportunity for Episcopalians to listen to boarding school survivors tell their stories and visit various relevant sites throughout the state. The pilgrimage’s structure emphasizes listening above all else, organizers said. 

“When I read the report, I could not believe it. …I’m a Native Arizonan, born and raised, and I had no idea that we had that many boarding schools in Arizona,” The Rev’d Debbie Royals, canon for the Diocese of Arizona’s Native American Ministry and a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, told Episcopal News Service. “I brought the report to the Council for Native American Ministry, and together with Arizona Bishop Jennifer Reddall, we decided to set up this pilgrimage. I think it’s important because Native people in Arizona are, for the most part, unknown and unrecognized.”

A mix of Episcopalians and ecumenical partners participated in the third of four pilgrimage events on August 16 and 17, visiting sites in Phoenix and nearby Scottsdale. The pilgrimage’s previous events took place at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Holbrook, located south of Navajo Nation and west of Petrified Forest National Park on historic Route 66, and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which houses special offices and organizations for Indigenous students, faculty and staff.

On the first day, they visited the Heard Museum—a nonprofit museum committed to the advancement of Native American art—to view the exhibition Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories. Wendy Weston, a Navajo Episcopalian who is the executive director of Cook Native American Ministries Foundation, served as the tour guide. Weston previously served as director of American Indian relations at the Heard Museum.

“You can see by the shoes and by the size of the dresses, these kids were kindergarteners, basically, that were taken away, and a lot of times they weren’t allowed to go home,” Weston told the pilgrims during the tour while pointing at a display of typical boarding school uniforms. “These Indian schools were run like a military school … and many did end up going to the military.”

Some federally run boarding schools still exist, but they fall under the Bureau of Indian Education, a federal agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The exact number of Indigenous children who attended boarding schools in the 18th and 19th centuries is unknown, but at least 60,889 of them were enrolled by 1925, according to a study conducted by historian David Wallace Adams in the 1990s. By 1926, nearly 83% of Indigenous children were attending boarding schools. The schools were designed to assimilate Native Americans into the dominant white culture and erase Indigenous languages and practices.

Nearly 1,000 Indigenous children are known to have died during the 19th and 20th centuries in boarding schools throughout the United States, according to a July report by the U.S. Department of the Interior. However, some experts estimate the number is closer to 40,000. In many cases, children faced physical, sexual and mental abuse. 

“Some of these children died from disease because there were foreign diseases that they had never been exposed to. Some died from mistreatment or starvation,” Weston said during the tour. “Some died from broken hearts because they didn’t have a will to live. We have no headstones for them.”

In its latest report from August 2023, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has identified 59 boarding schools in Arizona, which is home to 22 federally recognized Indigenous tribes. The Episcopal Church is known to have operated at least 34 of the 523 identified boarding schools in the United States. None of the identified boarding schools in the Diocese of Arizona were operated by the Episcopal Church, although the diocese is conducting its own archival investigation to make sure none were overlooked.

“We think that we did not have any boarding schools within the diocese, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t participate in them,” Reddall told ENS in an in-person interview. “I think it’s really important for the church broadly to take responsibility for and repent of the trauma we have caused, and we have caused trauma through boarding schools and through policies about Native peoples.”

After visiting the Heard Museum, the pilgrims toured two remaining buildings of the now-defunct Phoenix Indian School, the second-largest boarding school in the United States. Elena Selestewa, a member of the Hopi Tribe and the nonprofit Native American Connections‘ Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center specialist, was the pilgrims’ tour guide. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a still-active federal agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, operated the school, which is located on the grounds of what’s now known as Steele Indian School Park. They learned about the everyday life of a student at the school, which included hours of hard labor.

The next day, the pilgrims gathered in Scottsdale at the Franciscan Renewal Center, a Franciscan Order of Friars Minor-operated retreat center and worship community, to listen to boarding school survivors share their stories and how their experience has shaped their lives. Speakers included Wanda Frenchman, a Lakota seminarian at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in the newly launched Theological Education for Indigenous Leaders program in Berkeley, California; and her mother, Mary Louise Frenchman, who is Lakota and mission developer for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Native American Urban Ministry. They co-pastor the Native American Urban Ministry in downtown Phoenix. Hopi elder Pershlie “Perci” Ami, who is both a boarding school survivor and a descendant of boarding school survivors, also shared her story.

“I would ask my father why we were not taught the language, so I don’t speak Hopi,” Ami told the pilgrims. “I was not able to learn my language and not able to participate in my Native culture because of Christianity and the boarding schools.”

Sarah Augustine, a Tewa descendant, is co-founder and executive director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, a Mennonite Church-affiliated nonprofit committed to mobilizing Christian church communities to follow Indigenous leadership and seek reconciliation through nonviolence. She and The Rev’d Joe Hubbard, rector of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Rapid City, South Dakota, are both members of The Episcopal Church’s fact-finding commission that focuses on researching and documenting the church’s historic involvement and complicity in Indigenous boarding schools. Augustine and Hubbard both explained the commission’s work, goals and progress made in the last year. General Convention enacted the fact-finding commission through Resolution A127 in 2022.

“What does it mean for the Episcopal Church to be ready? Who knows? Some of us are ready now. There’s now a national platform, and we’re going to use that platform to the greatest extent that we can to address injustice in the nation and within the church itself,” Augustine told ENS.

“I’m here as part of our commission to recognize that the entire church is called to right our mandate, not just the mandate from General Convention, but our mandate from Jesus—this work to speak the truth, to reckon with the wrongs and to journey together towards healing is something that will take all of us together,” Hubbard told ENS. “We have only just begun this work, and we are trying to help coordinate this ministry for the entire church across dioceses, between congregations, amongst communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous.”

Hubbard’s wife, Ashley Hubbard, is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and currently serves as canon for formation for the Diocese of South Dakota, which is home to the largest Indigenous ministry in North America, serving the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people, according to the diocese’s website.

Also in 2022, Executive Council formed a committee to focus on Indigenous boarding school advocacy work. The two Indigenous boarding school groups are working together under a $2 million budget allocated to them by Executive Council, although they have distinctive mandates. The endgame of the two groups’ research and advocacy efforts is healing by eliminating the intergenerational trauma caused by Indigenous boarding schools, which lingers today in various forms, including poverty, violence and substance abuse.

Some uncomfortable, though well-meaning, discussions during breaks and mealtimes made it clear that there’s a need for the dominant culture to come to a better understanding of how centuries of systemic racism and oppression continue to harm Indigenous people today. Still, Augustine said, the fact that people showed up to the pilgrimage to listen and to learn is “a hopeful sign.”

“We’re embarking on a relationship where there’s a power imbalance,” she said. “We’re going to bump into each other, and that’s hard, so we have to try and do that with the posture of loving kindness.”

It’s these conversations, however, Royals said, however, that serve as a learning opportunity for the dominant culture.

“We are all still learning. Hopefully, we can take these moments to learn better and to be better, and we continue these moments with grace,” Royals said. “Nobody is claiming to be perfect, but we are claiming that we are intentional with our thoughts and our words and our actions.”

The fourth pilgrimage listening and learning event will take place September 7 at Grace Episcopal Church in Lake Havasu City, which borders California. On November 23, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Phoenix will host a traditional Native American healing ceremony, which will include a traditional Ceremony of the Burning of the Tears, also called a Wiping of the Tears ceremony, where gathered tissues pilgrims and presenters used to wipe away tears throughout the pilgrimage will be burned as a symbol of healing from grief.

—Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service based in northern Indiana. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.