Pope Francis and Chief Wilton Littlechild say farewell to each other July 29, 2022, in Iqaluit, Nunavut, as the pope prepares to return to the Vatican after a six-day visit. Littlechild, a 78-year-old lawyer, survivor of abuse in a residential school and former grand chief of the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations, had lobbied hard for the pope to visit Canada and apologize to residential school survivors. CNS photo/Vatican Media
As Pope Francis apologized to Indigenous people in Canada for the role Catholics played in uprooting lives, spiritualities and cultures through that country’s residential schools, his words reverberated among Native Americans paying close attention in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
For several parishioners of Gichitwaa Kateri in south Minneapolis, home of the archdiocese’s Office of Indian Ministry, the pope’s words and actions July 24-29 marked a beginning for healing and reparations that remain necessary across Canada and the U.S.
Rick Poitra
“I think it was good that the pope came to Canada and apologized,” said Rick Poitra, 74, an Ojibwe of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa based in North Dakota, who lives in Eagan and is a retired newspaper printer. “I think that was a good first step.”
“But a real apology needs to make Native lives better right now,” Poitra said. “Maybe to help the poor and suffering, or counseling. It’s hard for me to imagine what it would feel like if one of my children or a relative was harmed at a boarding school.”
Rose Nordin, 55, who lives in Fridley and is of Ojibwe and French descent, said she wrestles with anger and the need to forgive, even after the pope’s apology. Nordin grew up in northern Wisconsin, and her mother never talked about their heritage. Later, when Nordin was in her 40s and learning about Native American culture on her own, her mother said she didn’t talk about it to protect her, that it wasn’t good to be Indian because she would be snubbed and ridiculed.
Rose Nordin
“All my life people would ask me about Native culture, and I wouldn’t know what to tell them because I didn’t know. And I thought it was my fault,” said Nordin, a senior computer application developer in higher education. “I was taught Manifest Destiny and Christopher Columbus.”
Wiping out practices and knowledge of Indigenous cultures to assimilate Native American children into white society was one aim of many residential schools in Canada and in the United States, government officials in both countries have acknowledged.
The Canadian government estimates at least 150,000 First Nation, Inuit and Métis children were taken from their families and communities to attend residential schools between 1870 and 1997. Tens of thousands of Native American children in the U.S. were also encouraged, forced or coerced to attend boarding schools from 1819 to 1996, according to U.S. officials. Catholic and other religious denominations in both countries helped run many of the schools, including in the archdiocese.
The pope’s trip to Canada came after the discovery in May 2021 of what experts believe to be about 200 unmarked graves on the campus of long-closed Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. That same discovery prompted the U.S. Department of the Interior to launch a review last June of federal boarding schools in the United States.
The U.S. report, released May 11, identified 408 schools in 37 states or U.S. territories that Native American children were forced to attend. At least 53 marked or unmarked burial sites are associated with the schools, and about 19 of the schools accounted for more than 500 child deaths. The number of recorded deaths was expected to increase as more information surfaced, the Department of the Interior’s report said.
On the day the DOI report was released, Archbishop Bernard Hebda said it was an important first step in what he expects will be a painful but necessary journey for the country and the Church. He apologized for the role the Church played in U.S. boarding schools, and noted that the archdiocese has begun working with tribes on relationship building and records review.
Pope Francis began his pilgrimage in Canada by apologizing July 25 on treaty land of the Ermineskin Cree Nation, near the former site of one of Canada’s largest residential schools.
“The first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry,” the pope said. “I ask forgiveness, in particular for the ways in which many members of the Church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.”
The pope offered similar apologies throughout his pilgrimage, in Quebec City, along the shores of a lake near Edmonton known among Indigenous there for miraculous healings, and to Arctic Indigenous communities in Iqaluit, Nunavut.
While acknowledging the pope’s apologies, Nordin said that she thought Pope Francis did not do enough to note the pain people experienced as a result of the policies of the Catholic Church as an institution.
“I think he could have done a little better,” she said. “It seemed more like a prepared statement. Each time he stuck to the script.”
D. Richard Wright
D. Richard Wright, 73, a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and an expert in Indigenous spiritual health at the Indian Health Board of Minneapolis, said he closely followed the pope’s journey and has seen many reactions, including anger, in social media.
“It certainly is not a simple matter,” Wright said. “It’s incited discussion all across North America, in Canada and in the United States. … There is a spiritual need to heal.”
“It’s a start, right?” he said. “The head of the Roman Catholic Church has come here to apologize. … Tears are healing. I think that was one response for a lot of people when he actually said those words.”
Shawn Phillips, director and pastoral minister of the archdiocese’s Office of Indian Ministry and at Gichitwaa Kateri, said reaction to the pope’s journey in Canada has been mixed. For many, the Catholic Church symbolizes an evil thing, while others want land back, including from the Church, and other reparations. Others appreciate Pope Francis’ effort, he said.
Shawn Phillips
Phillips, 64, who is not Native American but who grew up on a Nez Percé reservation in Idaho and attended a Native American school, said Pope Francis’ ministry with Indigenous in the Amazon and in North America has emphasized ways people in the Church can be respectful missionaries by honoring and working with all cultures and backgrounds, rather than trying to change them.
“And they learn from you about God and creation,” he said. “They want to know your creation story, too.”
Nordin said people can do more to understand one another.
“If people would truly set aside, and stop and listen to each other, that would cure a lot of the problems,” she said. “I do believe there is good in the world, and I believe that in having conversations and learning about things and working toward forgiveness, there is a way to heal.”
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