The post Engaging the Stories that Shape Us: An Evening with Kaitlin Curtice appeared first on Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary.

Join a public conversation with award-winning author Kaitlin Curtice 

The post Engaging the Stories that Shape Us  appeared first on Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary.

“Many children only knew their Indigenous tongue, but when they spoke it, teachers placed a teaspoon of red pepper in their mouths for every Indigenous word they used.” Since 2022, Dr. Ashley Boggan has compiled research on how Methodists formed Indigenous boarding schools as part of a national effort to Christianize native communities and eradicate their cultural heritage. Working with The General Commission on Archives & History, she and her colleagues have released a new report, “,” which lists the 44 Wesleyan schools and begins to describe the trauma students experienced. “They literally burned the interior of children’s mouths for speaking their own languages,” Dr. Boggan says. “The church must create an honest accounting of the harm that we have done.” Read amid rising Christian nationalism, the report also starkly reflects how theology can foment abuse when churches are wed to empire.

“The government and Christian denominations believed that Native Americans needed to be Christians, which also became an excuse for folks to take the valuable lands on which Native Americans lived for centuries,” says Bishop David Wilson, The United Methodist Church’s first Indigenous bishop, who also serves on Garrett’s Board of Trustees. “As a result, most every Native American today has ancestors—some living and most gone—who are products of boarding schools, a punishment that stayed with them throughout their lives.” Central to boarding schools’ ethos and identity was belief that exterminating Indigenous culture was essential to transform students into “proper” U.S. citizens—and for students’ own salvation. “It caused young students to be ashamed of who they were; created in the image of Creator God,” Bishop Wilson laments. “Today, so many Native Americans yearn to know their language. Native churches are leading the way to help folks learn and recover languages, but they are in grave danger of being lost in the next 25-30 years.”

Speaking with Dr. Barry Bryant, Associate Professor of United Methodist and Wesleyan Studies at Garrett, he is quick to name that we cannot fully understand this history without examining how Christianity became intertwined with nation-building. “Ever since Emperor Constantine, there’s also been a Christian aspiration to use the state to coerce populations into the Christian faith,” he says. “When that happens, the Church becomes an extension of empire, and follows economic motivations to maintain an exploitative caste of people.” Dr. Bryant also suggests it is crucial to understand Indigenous boarding schools as part of a broader genocide. “The boarding schools picked up where the military left off, both trying to attain the same objective: the subjugation of Indigenous peoples,” he explains. “If we couldn’t eradicate the people, then we could eradicate the culture.”

Indeed, one of the illuminating details that Dr. Boggan names in her report is how many boarding schools operated on former U.S. military bases. “These bases were built as the United States’ border expanded westward in wars against Indigenous nations,” she says. “After the Civil War, the federal government got more and more involved in relocating Indigenous populations and began to federally fund boarding schools and convert these bases to house them.” Links between schools and the U.S. military weren’t confined to retrofitting army barracks, they also shaped how missionaries ran them. “Teachers used military tactics,” Bishop Wilson says. “From the discipline they required to the military formations in which they marched kids from place to place, it was a core part of how teachings of Christianity were enforced.” Many of the schools’ practices were more reminiscent of army boot camp than an educational environment. “Upon arrival, students were stripped of their indigenous clothing, their hair was cut short, they were given and English name, and separated from other members of their tribe so they couldn’t rely on their own people,” Dr. Boggan says. “From the highly routinized schedule to the widespread physical, emotional, and mental violence, it was a militarized pedagogy.” 

Again, Dr. Bryant emphasizes that it’s crucial to understand this link between church-run boarding schools and the U.S. army not as an accident but as one of Christian Nationalism’s core features. “You really can’t have Christian Nationalism without militarism,” he says. “The hand that fit into this glove was a strident white nationalism that began to emerge around the turn of the 20th century, which would eventually manifest as the KKK and other organizations.” And this underlying reality has not changed: Pastors and churches who support current plans to have the U.S. military deport millions of people participate in just a new iteration of old collaboration. “It’s terrifying to think that the horrors of Indigenous boarding schools could easily happen again, that a particular understanding of Christianity could be thrust upon everybody else.” Dr. Boggan notes. Bishop Wilson shares this concern, observing how nascent efforts are alive in his home state. “Oklahoma has a superintendent who is forcing every classroom to have Bibles, and now plans to make students watch his videotaped prayers,” he says with alarm.

The powerful echoes between past and present give this archival work additional urgency, but the need to account and atone for boarding schools’ actions would be essential even if lawmakers were not attempting to legislate Christian identity. “They’re a source of generational trauma. Students returned from boarding schools to families who didn’t know their new way of life and often had immense difficulty relating to one another,” Bishop Wilson says. “Many students did not return home but were sent around the country, only to face racism and alienation. We need to know the role that early Methodists played in this sinful past.” Dr. Boggan notes that this initial report is only the beginning of this endeavor. The commission will now recruit a Ph.D. student or established scholar to deeply investigate schools where the UMC has extensive records, to get a fuller picture of why these schools were formed, how they operated, and the devastation left in their wake. “This need for scholarly work also includes other atrocities against Indigenous persons like ,” Dr. Boggan explains. “We have a long way to go before we’re done even naming this harm, let alone seeking justice around it.”

The post Trauma Still Lingers appeared first on Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary.

Dr. geran lorraine is the associate director of the Center for Ecological Regeneration at Garrett Seminary. Speaking shortly after the election, they reflect on how they’re processing the current moment, the movements that shape their ecological work, and epistemologies that nurture a different relationship with the land. Read a transcript of our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Benjamin Perry (BP): Your scholarship focuses on intersections between indigeneity, ecology, and queerness. Where do you situate your own identity in the middle of that work?

geran lorraine (gl): *laughs* Identity is always murky business. Mostly, I situate myself within a long history of involvement in activist circles. I grew up in a rust belt town on traditional Haudenosaunee lands—shaped by rural Appalachia, labor organizers and Native nations. My uncle died from AIDS-related illnesses when I was young, and my mom has been active in healthcare advocacy for people with HIV since I was young, working with doctors who would see HIV/AIDS patient and helping to dispel myths. At a very early age, I grew up with a great-grandfather who was a local labor union president and, when I turned 18, I got involved with the domestic workers union in New York City. I followed that work into what started as the Poverty Initiative and became the Poor People’s Campaign, to Standing Rock, to work as an environmental justice organizer in Virginia, fighting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline with the Freedmen Community in Union Hill. Activism, queerness, and Indigenous ways of knowing have always been circling around my work and have been constant forces pushing me to question the reality we think we know. Especially as someone who is bisexual and nonbinary, I’m always thinking about the in-between worlds, the liminal existences, that are being built, and how I’ve been shaped by the movements who are building them.

BP: There’s something deeply Queer about answering a question about identity with a focus on practice—contesting what it means to even talk about identity in meaningful ways amid broader systems that insist on everything being fixed and definable. And I love how you name fluidity in Indigenous and Queer ways of knowing. Where do you find overlap there?

gl: There’s a mode of thinking about kinship and relationality in Indigenous circles that is also present in Queer circles—a sense that, if kinship is at the root of building resistance, then all our work is relational. We save each other. Obviously, Queer folks are just as diverse as Indigenous folks and there’s no one unified way of thinking. But within that vast diversity, there is a model of, “We are here for each other.” These are communities that have had to outlast laws and policies. For Indigenous peoples that’s a sense of being before and knowing you will be after. For Queer people, it’s not as grounded in terms of place, but there is a similar sense that the people who came before us outlasted. They didn’t always find public ways to thrive, but they built kinship communities, networks of relationship, little pockets of safety and resistance. It’s the ongoing understanding that, for Black and Brown folks, Indigenous folks, Queer folks, and Women, this world is not going to offer what we need to thrive, and that’s why activism is necessary: We build those spaces for ourselves.

BP: Talking about relationality in queerness and indigeneity, one place that immediately comes to mind is the personhood of nonhumans. If we talk about, for example, the personhood of trees, there’s a queering of anthropological hierarchies that many of our theologies are built on. How does acknowledging this call us to a different kind of relationality?

gl: At the core of the Center for Ecological Regeneration is a basic recognition that we do this for the land. The Midwest Bioregional Hub we are working to launch is about the Midwest Bioregion, knowing that the land fundamentally influences our basic work and knowledge systems. It’s why we use “kin” language, it’s why “all my relations” isn’t anthropocentric. Things don’t have value simply because they mean something to humans. So much theology rests on the notion that we do ecological work because we want to save humanity. I’m not minimizing that work—people are important. But it’s a knowledge system that relies heavily on not recognizing the inherent value of the more-than-human world, value that doesn’t come from humans’ relationship to it. Whether we want to recognize it or not, that value is already there in the land, influencing our lives, our desires, our food ways. When we talk about embracing Indigenous ways of knowing, it’s not just Indigenous methodologies—it’s reality. At their core, these Indigenous ways of knowing are observational. It’s just what the world is doing, maintaining balance. This is what we’re given, what we have, but we don’t have control over it. We are in relationship with it.

BP: Why is there such deep-seated resistance toward allowing theological anthropology to be queered in those kinds of ways?

gl: The easiest scapegoat is to blame colonialism and colonialist thought. I’m not denying that, but I think it’s an easy systemic answer. And the problem with systemic answers is they’re paralyzing, they place action in the realm of argumentative thought, debate, opinions. And yet, I also want to name that it’s hard to recognize something you haven’t named as human as a being—it’s not simple work. And not just trees—trees for me is the beginning. They look like people, right? Like they have arms and beautiful curly hair. We can begin with trees, but there’s harder things to think about as kin—how do you think about a lichen or a moss as a being? Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer had a talk where she invited theologians to rethink their rituals, and this is where I really want to invite theological education to change. We need to rethink rituals of beingness, because it keeps reinforcing the idea that only humans are beings.

BP: So how can Indigenous ways of knowing bring us closer to the truth about who God is calling us to become?

gl: As an ethicist, I would say “truths.” Indigenous ways of knowing are going to keep asking you what truths you know, why you know them, and how they came to you. And did they come to you from the place you live in? Especially in ecological work, it’s a question of how we can engage with difference in ways that aren’t destructive and oppressive. Because the world has its own agency. This place, the one you’re in; the grasses you walk on, the rivers, the lake beds—these places matter. They’ve always mattered. They don’t matter because you want them to, they just do and they will. As we think about communities of outlasting, they will outlast you. The land will continue. This principle of outlasting doesn’t just derive from human communities, it’s something we learn from what nature has always done. Humans are important, but we are also reliant upon the land to survive. We don’t survive without this place, but it survives without us. So the question becomes, “What can you do right now for your own locality? For the land where you live?”

BP: It feels resonant that you invoked the history of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and AIDS activism in your opening thoughts. The parallels between people who engaged in political work even as they tended and loved people who were dying, or approached death themselves—that embodied tension feels alive in this climate moment. How does that sit for you?

gl: ACT-UP is incredibly relevant here, because it also asks how we can resist nihilism, even if we knew that we were dying. I think of the poetry of folks like Craig G. Harris. “How do you live with an energy that ignites and irritates, burns and bubbles, soothes and inspires?” he says. Many of those organizers knew that there wasn’t something coming to save them yet still found inspiration in a moment where they could have been overwhelmed. Their answer wasn’t to wallow and be sad. It was, “Carry my body and put it on the steps. Let them see what they have done.” That’s deeply theological, and it’s the work we can do right now. Let them see what they are doing. Speak plainly, because what’s at stake is death. And if what’s at stake is death then, as Audre Lorde says, “go out like a fucking meteor.” Build communities that outlast even if you’re not part of the outlasting. All these circles, that’s what they teach you. It’s what Indigenous ways of knowing teaches you. It’s what Queer theology teaches you. It’s what Black and Brown folk teach you, what ballrooms teach you. They teach you ways to outlast.

The post We Build This to Outlast appeared first on Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary.

sustainGETS invites the Garrett community to learn about Native tea-making practices with Bonnie McKiernan of the Menominee Nation

The post Native Tea Making with Bonnie McKiernan appeared first on Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary.