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Tell Congress to support Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy

We have a responsibility and opportunity to advocate alongside Native peoples in support of examining fully and truthfully U.S policies that codified and encouraged these immoral actions.

Photograph of Capt. Pratt and students at the Carlisle Industrial School, black and white photographic print, 13 cm x 21.5 cm. Capt. Richard Henry Pratt served as the head of the Carlisle Industrial School, where Native Americans were sent. Photograph circa 1900 (undated). Pratt died in 1924. Courtesy of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph of Capt. Pratt and students at the Carlisle Industrial School, black and white photographic print, 13 cm x 21.5 cm. Capt. Richard Henry Pratt served as the head of the Carlisle Industrial School, where Native Americans were sent. Photograph circa 1900 (undated). Pratt died in 1924. Courtesy of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

As United Methodists, our church continues a journey of repentance and healing with Indigenous persons and communities. As part of that journey, we are called to a process of “self-examination, discovering the ongoing impact of historic traumas [and] confessing our own participation in the continuing effects of that trauma” (Book of Resolutions #3324: Trail of Repentance and Healing).

Recently, our denomination has begun to examine more deeply our institutional complicity in boarding school policies designed to erase the language, culture, and spiritual practices of Native peoples. As a statement signed by the General Secretaries of 11 United Methodist agencies explained: “We need to better understand our complicity in this form of cultural genocide and to bring the boarding schools more clearly into focus in our expression of repentance for the inhumane treatment to which the church and its members subjected Indigenous people in the past.”

As we examine more closely our own institutional responsibility for these historic and lasting traumas, we have an additional responsibility and opportunity to advocate alongside Native peoples in support of examining fully and truthfully U.S policies that codified and encouraged these immoral actions.

The Native American International Caucus and the General Board of Church and Society have endorsed legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress establishing a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy. This legislation would establish a commission in consultation and ongoing conversation with Indigenous communities to examine the policies and practices, and experiences of survivors of these boarding schools. The commission also would make recommendations to address the historic and present-day harms impacting Native people, Tribal communities, and Tribal Nations.

Contact your members of Congress today in support of the Truth and Healing Commission as important step on our journey of understanding, repentance, and healing.