WIČHÓTHI ÉL / COMMUNITY
A Journey to Truth and Healing
This past year, Red Cloud embarked on a journey toward truth and healing—to confront our history as an Indian boarding school with unflinching honesty.
This critical moment in our own history has coincided with a wider international dialogue around Indian boarding schools, beginning with the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada. Since that discovery other school sites across Canada have reported more graves being found, often at great discrepancy to the previously understood official numbers. Many of these schools were operated, like Red Cloud, by the Catholic Church. And all were created to eliminate Indigenous cultures, languages, and spiritual traditions through the assimilation of Native children.
Many Indigenous communities have been re-traumatized through this news and have reacted with righteous anger at the historic injustice these unmarked graves represent. To be clear, they represent thousands of families who never got to raise their children, see them live, or sometimes ultimately never know of their whereabouts.
The international dialogue has increased scrutiny into Red Cloud’s history and current attention to this issue. Community members across the spectrum of this history are deeply hurt by the discoveries and the implications of them. In particular, our Lakȟóta Catholic community sits at the central cross section of this tension where many Indigenous communities’ activists have called for churches to be removed from reservations and for Catholic ministers to leave. We understand the feelings behind those calls. Our Catholic faith calls us to reconciliation, and we recognize the work for truth and healing is ultimately a sacramental journey. While these conversations have been difficult, this marks the beginning of our efforts to enter willingly into such dialogue in ways we have never done before.
We honor the courageousness of boarding school survivors and their descendents who now step forward to tell their stories. We welcome their calls for us to take action. We are honored that we can support those who step forward and believe firmly that it is our role to do so. While this story is not ours to tell, we acknowledge our institution is the inheritor of a legacy of both harm and empowerment. We can no longer stand in the way of the story being told. Our responsibility is to support the truth of survivors and the opening of our records. Above all, our responsibility is to take a stand and no longer remain silent. That is our deepest commitment going forward.
Learn more about the truth and healing work.