GAYLORD — Northern Michigan churches are inviting native communities to hear their stories and discuss potential reparations this weekend.
The conference is from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 5 at the headquarters for the Catholic Diocese in Gaylord.
The Roman Catholic Church played a large role in the abuse of Native American children sent to boarding schools throughout the 20th century.
FILE – A makeshift memorial for the dozens of Indigenous children who died more than a century ago while attending a boarding school that was once located nearby is displayed under a tree at a public park in Albuquerque, N.M., on July 1, 2021.
In June, bishops from around the U.S.wrote a letter apologizing for the church’s role in destroying Native American culture to assimilate the children.
“The family systems of many Indigenous people never fully recovered from these tragedies, which often led to broken homes harmed by addiction, domestic abuse, abandonment and neglect,” church leadership said in a 56-page document.
Sister Sue Gardner is helping to organize the event. She says it’s the fourth such gathering between tribal and church leadership.
“We’re just hoping to get the information out from the letter and to then dialogue with the Native Americans and see what they would see as possibilities to go forward,” she said.
Yvonne Keshik, an artist and member of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians, said it’s the first meeting to be called to discuss the legacy of the boarding schools.
Keshik said she’ll share her experiences of attending Holy Childhood School of Jesus in Harbor Springs with the diocese.
“The nuns beat me up quite a few times. They were totally ignorant about our culture,” she said. “They banned us from speaking our own language. I was not a fluent speaker, but I saw other fluent speakers getting knocked around for speaking their language, our language.”
Holy Childhood is considered the the first federally run boarding school in Michigan. It also was the last to close in the 1980s.
Keshik and other tribal members have asked for recognition of unmarked graves around boarding schools and for better acknowledgment of their ancestral land and culture.