Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation made a grisly discovery of 215 children’s remains at a burial site next to the former Kamloops Indian residential school in British Columbia. The news sent shockwaves through Indian Country. On Tuesday, the US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, announced that her department would lead an investigation into “the loss of human life and lasting consequences” of federal Indian boarding schools. Although it’s unclear whether the scope of the investigation will include church-run schools, it should because many of the Catholic-run schools received federal trust money set aside for Native education.
On Thursday morning, a relative calls me as more terrible news breaks: the Cowessess First Nation has discovered 751 unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian residential school in Saskatchewan, Canada. Both Marieval and Kamloops began as Catholic-run schools.
For my relative (who wishes to remain anonymous) the death and grief came after he left St Joseph’s Indian school in Chamberlain, South Dakota, which he attended from 1968 to 1977. “A lot of people ended up killing themselves,” he says of friends and classmates who attended the Catholic-run school. My uncle, also a survivor of St Joseph’s, took his own life at the age of 23 in 1987, when I was just two.
My relative calls St Joseph’s “a smorgasbord” for pedophiles and rapists who preyed on and terrorized Native children. He describes beatings and nights of terror as priests took their pick of the children as they slept. The abuse was worse for the girls, who were sometimes impregnated by their rapists, he tells me. His experience was not unique and has been documented elsewhere by journalists and scholars.
Despite the evidence, there is an active conspiracy to silence survivors and whitewash history. South Dakota passed laws to prevent survivors from seeking damages against the church.
Eight plaintiffs sued the Sioux Falls diocese in 2010 for alleged rape and sexual abuse they had experienced in the 1970s at the hands of multiple members of the clergy and one staff member. (The photograph of one of the men still hangs on the wall of St Joseph’s in the hallway of its school museum, visible to the children and visitors who pass it.)
Just days before the survivors were set to go to court in 2010, the then Republican governor of South Dakota, Mike Rounds (now a US senator), signed a bill into law prohibiting anyone 40 years or older from recovering damages from institutions responsible for their abuse, except from individual perpetrators themselves. The act crushed the lawsuit, effectively shielding the Catholic church from any responsibility or accountability.