Loretto ROOTS: Native American Boarding Schools

In December 2021, Loretto President Barbara Nicholas established a one-year research project, open to extension, on “the work in education that the sisters provided among Indigenous people” in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She hoped the study would help Loretto “to increase our knowledge and to claim any uncomfortable realities.” She wanted “to offer a sense of respect to those individuals with whom the congregation interacted and to share with their descendants any information that we may discover.” She noted that new information could lead to awareness and action.

This is a renewed initiative, shared by other religious congregations and dioceses, to take an updated look at our historical record. I have been fortunate to be learning from others: Loretto historian Eleanor Craig, Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious, Catholic Native Boarding School Accountability and Healing Project, National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, Toward Right Relationships with Native Peoples and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s Federal Boarding School Initiative. In Barbara’s words, this training is helping me learn “the value of developing trusting relationships that impact actions in justice today.” One important lesson is to heed the Native sense of “Nothing about us, without us.”

Following Eleanor Craig’s stellar lead with the Osage Nation, I am in the early stages of reconnecting Loretto with additional Native groups whose children our sisters taught from 1847 to 1935, intermittently and in four locations. It is important to realize that so-called Indian boarding schools of that era were decidedly NOT like the boarding schools that white settlers’ children sometimes attended. The articulated purpose of the government boarding school program “to solve the Indian problem” was to remove the children from the influence of their parents and culture and accelerate the expected demise of their peoples, opening more land for white settlers to claim.

As early as the First Continental Congress in 1774, the founders had decided that the best way to solve “the Indian problem” was to send missionaries to convert them. A perfect storm of church and state, we see where this has led. It is late, but at least we recognize now that removing children from their parents’ guidance and affection was against Catholic morals, as was teaching them that their culture was superstitious or otherwise inferior. The intergenerational trauma, especially the lack of any modeling of how to be a parent, has ramifications continuing to this day. Theft of Native land — well, that’s another and complex story. Within this system, even with individual sisters doing the best they could in hopes of helping the children deal with a catastrophic upheaval in their lives and culture, the harmful results reverberate.

I will be submitting a status report to the Loretto president at year-end. It will not be in the form of a narrative like “Grave on the Prairie,” which took Maureen Chicoine RSCJ more than half-time for one year to research and write. It will be a report of files located, scanned, and organized by date, summarizing as many as possible and with a detailed finding aid to expedite the next round of study by competent researchers. It will also report on the beginnings of reconnecting with the Native peoples with whom the Sisters of Loretto interacted under this system. I am coordinating with as many of those groups as time allows, to the extent they wish to collaborate and to be sure I understand and respect their privacy restrictions. I would not want my family’s stories told without my permission and neither do they. They have an open invitation to access our archives and to share with us what they know.

Loretto Boarding Schools for Native American Children

• 1847-1870 Osage Mission, Kansas
• 1885-1935 Bernalillo Boarding School for Indian Girls, Bernalillo, NM
• 1886-1889 St. Catherine’s Santa Fe, NM
• 1915-1942 St Louis School, Pawhuska, Okla.