Great Plains Conference Photo by Eugenio Hernandez
Native American Bishop
Bishop David Wilson, the first Native American episcopal leader in The United Methodist Church, speaks to a crowd of about 150.
Great Plains Conference | Oct. 3, 2023
LAWRENCE, Kansas – Leaders of Indian boarding schools not only inflicted abuse on Native American children for decades, they “profoundly harmed the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health of Indigenous peoples, creating a legacy of chronic trauma and unresolved grief passed down across generations,” Bishop David Wilson said.
Bishop Wilson, the first Native American episcopal leader in The United Methodist Church, led services for the National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools at Lawrence Central UMC on Sept. 30, joining groups across North America.
A Choctaw and Cherokee, the 60-year-old bishop said his generation was not taught Native language, as their parents thought it would deter them. As a result, he said, Native people have to deal with historical trauma and the loss of cultural, language, identity and more.
Great Plains Conference Photo by Eugenio Hernandez
Closing song
Rod Stanley (San Carlos Apache) provides a song toward the closing of the day of remembrance event.
“Early missionaries would tell our people that in order to be a Christian, you had to leave your culture behind,” Bishop Wilson said. “There are countless stories of Native people destroying their ceremonial items such as drums and feathers. I recall being at a listening session about our past, and one of our young Native pastors said he and his siblings would dance as youngsters. They had beautiful regalia and loved it. His dad heard the call to be a pastor and was told again, that it was one or the other.
“The pastor said, ‘I hung up my dance regalia, and I never danced again.’”
U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, a Democrat representing Kansas’ 3rd District and a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, was to have attended the ceremony, but was detained in Washington, D.C., for a vote on the U.S. budget.
Emma Swinney, Davids’ community liaison, read a statement from the representative about how the boarding schools forced Native American children to take new names, haircuts, language and culture.
“We still feel those impacts today,” the statement said.
Great Plains Conference Photo by Eugenio Hernandez
Shawnee Chief
Ben Barnes, chief of The Shawnee Tribe, tells the audience that some believe the Indian boarding school tragedies should not be commemorated.
Ben Barnes, chief of The Shawnee Tribe, based in Oklahoma, told the audience of nearly 150 that Indian culture is similar to Judaism in that language introduces young people to the faith.
He said Native Americans have been told not to commemorate the sad chapter in history.
“We’re told not to remember it, not to talk about and not to make a monument for it,” he said.
However, “we are morally obligated to have conversations,” Barnes added.
The boarding school abuse left voids in the lives of Native Americans that many filled with substance abuse, he said.
“This is intergenerational trauma,” Barnes said. “This is what’s passed on from generation to the next. … We seek healing, we seek reconciliation; we see truth-telling.”
Rev. Tony Serbousek, pastor at Abilene UMC and earlier this year the first Lakota ordained in the Great Plains Conference, said Native Americans use stories to “transmit our values and understanding.”
“For far too long those stories have been silenced,” he said. “They haven’t been told of the pain, the shame and the anger.”
The event was presented by the Great Plains Conference Committee on Native American Ministries, which presented gifts of blankets to the speakers during the ceremony.
View a photo gallery with nearly 100 pictures.
David Burke serves as content specialist for the Great Plains Annual Conference. Contact him at dburke@greatplainsumc.org. This article is republished with permission from the conference website.