Boarding schools reconciliation continues

From the 1880s to 1945, St. Benedict’s Monastery operated industrial boarding schools for Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families to attend the institutions. Now, monastic members and the CSB community are working toward reconciling with the past.

CSB Campus Ministry, the Institute for Women’s Leadership and the McCarthy Center cohosted “Resilience and Reconciliation: Native American Boarding Schools and the Actions Crucial for Healing” on Nov. 11. Sister Pat Kennedy and White Earth Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Jaime Arsenault spoke about the past, present and future of St. Benedict’s Monastery’s relationship with Native communities.

“It moves beyond words and talking,” Kennedy said. “It’s about actions.”

Now, members of the community are working toward those actions. St. Benedict’s Monastery has opened their archives for Arsenault and her colleagues to use.

They are also applying for a grant from the National Foundation for the Humanities, which they expect to hear back about this spring. The funding would go toward digitizing non-restricted material in the monastery archives.

“The line of communication is more open now than perhaps what it’s ever been, and so that’s allowing people to have conversations or ask questions,” Arsenault said.

The materials in the archives include photographs of industrial schools and Indigenous children, documentation of student records and other documents used while the schools operated. While some of these documents include personal information that cannot be shared, the rest have been made available to the White Earth Nation.

These documents help members of Native communities find new information about their relatives. It also helps them gain a better understanding about the industrial schools themselves.

“Opening up their archives to us is huge, because we don’t have a lot of really detailed archival documents here [at White Earth], which will include the lists of students which could give family members answers and photographs,” Arsenault said.

In total, St. Benedict’s Monastery opened and operated four industrial schools throughout Minnesota. They ran an industrial school on what is now CSB’s campus from 1884 to 1896. The college opened in 1913, so there was never an industrial school in operation at the same time as CSB.

Even though these industrial schools were operated before Kennedy was alive, she still believes this work of reconciliation is important.

“People are hurting, and if I can do something, if the monastery can do something to help the people involved in that, why not?” Kennedy said.

CSB campus ministry made the initial push to host this event. It was the first public event that discussed Native boarding schools on campus, with 180 members of the CSB/SJU community in attendance.

CSB junior Anne Zweber is a member of CSB campus ministry who helped organize the event. She reached out to clubs and organizations on campus to draw in more people.

“I personally still think that it is our responsibility as students, faculty and staff to help and support with repairing those relationships and creating more change here to help our students who are Indigenous and our future students who are Indigenous to make sure that both of our campuses are inclusive, supportive spaces,” Zweber said.

CSB campus ministry plans on hosting an event on Nov. 18 based around conversations with Indigenous students and members of the Indigenous Students Association. The event is part of their “Tell Me More” series and is scheduled to take place from 5 to 6 p.m. in Upper Gorecki.

The Nov. 11 event is the culmination of a summer where St. Benedict’s Monastery issued an apology to the White Earth Nation for their involvement in operating industrial schools. The apology marked the first time a religious institution apologized to a Native community for involvement in industrial schools in the United States.

While White Earth Nation has not written a formal response to the apology, Arsenault indicated that it was an important step. However, she reiterated the importance of continued and consistent action to back up the monastery’s words.

“I think people are really looking for action in addition to the apology, and they’re starting to see it, which is encouraging,” Arsenault said.

Arsenault also indicated that discussions with St. John’s Abbey about their involvement in operating boarding schools have not started, although she is hopeful they will eventually have discussions similar to those with St. Benedict’s Monastery.

Integrations curriculum professor Ted Gordon has worked with Arsenault on researching industrial schools ran by St. Benedict’s Monastery since 2021. CSB graduate Belen Benway first uncovered photos of the industrial schools in the monastery’s archives in 2018.

Gordon is currently teaching a class about the boarding schools run by the monasteries, where students conduct research in the archives for a presentation near the end of the semester.

For him, this work is about making this history known in the hopes of future reconciliation.

“Doing the research that we’re doing is not about going and writing a book or getting in a bunch of publications and academic journals,” Gordon said. “It’s about learning about this history so that our institutions can know how to better support Indigenous communities on and off campus.”

Gordon has also helped coordinate summer research positions where students work in the monastic archives. Daniel Bachmeier, SJU ‘21, worked under Gordon during the summer of 2020.

He initially planned on reformatting and digitizing documents in the archives, but COVID forced the research into a virtual format and he compiled a database of documents involving boarding schools from the online archives.

For him, it’s important that people realize that these boarding schools haven’t been closed for long.

“It’s really not just history,” Bachmeier said. “It’s still having really important ramifications today and as far as it’s considered history, it really wasn’t that long ago. That really speaks to its importance that it’s not just in the past, but it’s really something continuing to be felt now.”

These steps toward recognizing wrongs are promising of a broader trend toward reconciliation.

“We’ve got the stories,” Kennedy said. “Let’s write a new chapter.”