My Christian school social studies curriculum was called “Heritage Studies.” That title was chosen intentionally. Like liberty, family, and life, heritage is a word that has been pressed into service as a conservative dog whistle. And it’s a perfectly appropriate word to use here, because the Heritage Studies curriculum is not intended to provide an objective account of history, but rather to offer a “clear opportunity to see how God has had His hand on human events to establish His kingdom.” Just as the BJU Press science curriculum begins with the assumption that the Bible (including the stories of a 6-day creation and a global flood) is scientifically accurate, the Heritage Studies curriculum begins with the assumption that manifest destiny is a fact. Students are taught that God led his “chosen people”—a term appropriated from Judaism to refer to European Christians—to settle the east coast of what is now the United States and expand westward up to and beyond the Pacific coast.
Many of my Christian school classmates attended Heritage Bible Church, an extremely conservative church in my hometown. While the church’s website insists that the name refers to their shared religious past, it is difficult not to make other inferences about the “heritage” claimed by a church led by 4 white male pastors, 15 white male elders, and 10 white male deacons. “Heritage” has also been chosen as the name for dozens of Christian educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities. Some of these schools were founded in the 1960s and 1970s as segregation academies—private Christian schools that were opened in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education as public schools were being forced to desegregate. These schools were founded for the explicit purpose of ensuring that white children would not have to attend school with Black peers, due to fears of miscegenation.
I spent my entire childhood and adolescence in South Carolina, and my family took frequent vacations to Charleston—a city that I love, but whose history is inextricably tied to slavery. I toured the historic mansions and plantations of white people who had built their wealth by exploiting the labour of enslaved Africans. I visited the Battery at Charleston Harbor and Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. I walked down streets named after slaveholders, took pictures of monuments honoring Confederate soldiers, visited gift shops that sold replica Civil War uniforms (more gray than blue), and listened to tour guides describe the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.”
This framing of the U.S. Civil War—that it wasn’t really about slavery at all, but rather a gentlemen’s disagreement about the extent to which states should be allowed to govern themselves—is a manifestation of the Lost Cause myth. This myth was developed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War by white southerners that needed to make their defeat more palatable. In much the same way that evangelical Christians today insist that the United States is and always has been a Christian nation, despite explicit statements of its founders to the contrary, Lost Cause apologists deny the abundant documentary evidence that the primary cause of the Civil War was slavery.
At some point during my youth, my family owned a Confederate battle flag that had been flown over the South Carolina Capitol building. This was a trendy practice among our friend group at our Southern Baptist church. At the time, I assumed that the flying of the Confederate battle flag over the state Capitol was something that had started sometime around the Civil War and persisted uninterrupted ever since. Decades later, I would learn that this practice actually began in the 1960s as a sign of resistance towards desegregation and didn’t end until 2015. It was permanently removed after a white supremacist who embraced this symbol murdered nine Black people at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. I remember thinking it was a bit odd that we had this symbol of a country that no longer existed, and whose history was tied so closely to slavery, but I was told that the flag represented our “southern heritage.”
I have always felt a tension between my “southern heritage” and my understanding of the history of the southern United States. But what I failed to recognize when I was younger is that there is no singular southern heritage. The history of the American South isn’t the story of one group of people. It’s the story of Indigenous people that had lived there for thousands of years before European settlers arrived, and were enslaved, killed, or forcibly removed from their lands. It’s the story of Africans that were taken from their people and their homes, shipped across an ocean in deplorable conditions, and subjected to decades of abuse as their bodies were exploited to enrich those who enslaved them. And, yes, it’s the story of my ancestors who did those things.
The noble, idealized “southern heritage” that shaped my identity was a myth—one that downplayed historical atrocities, portraying white Americans as the protagonists in a story in which slaveholders were kind to the people they enslaved, and in which the net effect of slavery on Black people was positive, as they were introduced to Christianity and their descendants were afforded the distinct privilege of living in our great nation.
Given the dissonance between the stories I was told as a child and the historical facts as I have come to understand them, it was inevitable that my own heritage would be something I had to study. Where did I come from? What about my family’s history has made me who I am? And what, if anything, about my personal heritage is worth preserving? It’s a question that I feel guilty for asking—almost as if I am a traitor to my ancestors, living and dead, for even considering it. In many ways, that may be true. But it’s a question that I felt compelled to ask and obligated to answer.
The oral history of my family that was passed on to me was limited. I knew that my father’s family was from Illinois and had moved to South Carolina when he was a child. My maternal grandfather had pastored several churches in the southeast U.S., and my grandmother had grown up in a family of poor sharecroppers that forbade her from playing with “the colored children.” I was aware that some members of my father’s family came from Germany, and that my mother’s family descended largely from English/Irish immigrants, but I didn’t know when any of them had arrived in North America or anything else about their lives.
I began my research into my family history on ancestry.com, tracing each line until there was no more information available or until I reached an ancestor that had immigrated to North America. Many of the lines that I followed revealed ancestors that had arrived during the colonial period, often in the 1600s. They were primarily English, with a fair number of German and Irish, and a smattering of Welch, Scottish, Swedish, and French. Many of them fought in the Revolutionary War, and many others in the Civil War—on both sides, but primarily for the Confederacy.
Through this research, I encountered anecdotes about several of my ancestors that were charming—if not in their content, at least in their presentation. My 5th great-grandfather Newbell Johnson (1776-1850), for instance, found himself in “an affray” with William Byars “in which Byars received a stab in the abdomen, which caused his death in 15 or 20 minutes.” The newspaper hesitated to comment further, adding only that “so far as we can learn, the parties were under the influence of ardent spirits at the time the unfortunate occurrence took place.” Then there was my 3rd great-grandfather, George Mullinax (1847-1913), who had settled in Illinois around 1880, and was known to his neighbors as “a good citizen, always kind and jovial.” Unfortunately, he was “overcome by the heat” one summer “while hoeing his sweet potatoes” and succumbed several days later.
I read about Reverend Jonas Leonard (1765-1837), who served as a fifer in the Massachusetts Regiment during the Revolutionary War before moving to South Carolina, marrying Sarah Lanford (1771-1855), and founding Sharon Methodist Church in 1803. Jonas and Sarah are both my 5th and 6th great-grandparents, in a coincidence of history that I found shockingly rare given the number of generations that my ancestors occupied the tiny township of Reidville, SC.
And then there were darker discoveries, like the will of my 8th great-grandfather James Foley (1708-1797), a Virginia tobacco planter, in which he specified how the “Negroes” he owned should be distributed to his wife and children upon his death.
None of this was particularly surprising. In fact, it followed very closely the narrative I was taught in my elementary school Heritage Studies classes. That story went something like this: Christians from Europe (particularly Protestant ones from English-speaking countries) sailed across the Atlantic in order to be able to worship God as they wished. They landed on the east coast of what is now the United States and did their darnedest to befriend the Indians, although there was some conflict with the particularly belligerent ones. They imported slaves from Africa, which wasn’t great, but they treated them well and taught them about Jesus. There was a bloody misunderstanding called the Civil War, and 100 years later, racism ended with the Civil Rights Movement.
(I’ve written before about the deeply racist history of Bob Jones University, the parent institution to my Christian school, but I’ll just note here that they failed to mention how hard the leaders of my school had fought against that last bit.)
Many of my ancestors followed this script. This was certainly the case for my 11th great-grandfather, Edward “The Puritan” Lloyd (1604-1695). Edward sailed to Virginia from his native Wales around 1636 and was granted 400 acres of land along the Elizabeth River in Lower Norfolk County, which had been the ancestral home to people of the Powhatan Confederacy. He served in public office in this county but rejected the colony’s official Anglican religion. Edward and his brother were ordered to appear before the General Court “for not attending the parish [Anglican] Church, and for refusing the [Book of] Common Prayer.”
Edward’s response to this persecution was to lead a migration of Puritans into Maryland, where he established Wye Plantation on the eastern banks of the Chesapeake Bay. He returned to England around 1668, leaving his plantation in the hands of his son Philemon Lloyd (1646-1685). Philemon was a cavalry officer that led “expedition[s] against the Indians of the Eastern Shore,” eventually attaining the rank of Colonel. Perhaps his most notable achievement was the negotiation of a peace treaty between the province of Maryland and the Iroquois Confederation in 1682.
At its height, Wye Plantation covered 42,000 acres which were cultivated by the forced labor of people enslaved by the Lloyd family. The original plantation house was looted and burned by British soldiers in 1781, and a new plantation house called Wye House was erected by people enslaved by Edward’s great-great-grandson, Edward Lloyd, IV.
Wye House was passed down to Edward Lloyd, V who served as a U.S. Congressman and Senator from Maryland, and also as the state’s 13th Governor. He made an arguably positive contribution in breeding the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and was considered to be "the greatest and most successful wheat grower and cattle raiser in Maryland.” But this success depended entirely on the people he enslaved—468 of them at the plantation’s peak in 1832.
Among the hundreds of people Edward V enslaved was a young child named Frederick Douglas, who would later write of his experiences at Wye Plantation in his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:
When he spoke, a slave must stand, listen, and tremble; and such was literally the case. I have seen [Edward] Lloyd make old Barney, a man between fifty and sixty years of age, uncover his bald head, kneel down upon the cold, damp ground, and receive upon his naked and toil-worn shoulders more than thirty lashes at the time.
Another of my earliest ancestors to settle in North America was my 11th great-grandfather, John Cogswell (1592-1669). On May 23, 1635, John left his native England, where he had grown wealthy operating the textile mill he inherited from his father. He boarded the Angel Gabriel with his wife, Elizabeth Thompson Cogswell and eight of their children, to travel to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The ship’s ill-fated voyage happened to coincide with the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, and the Angel Gabriel sank off the rocky coast of Pemaquid Point, Maine. John was able to recover most of his possessions from the shipwreck, but it is estimated that he lost approximately 5,000 pounds sterling in the wreck, somewhat more than $1 million USD in today’s currency. He was granted 300 acres in Ipswich, the ancestral land of the Wampanoag people, where he settled with his family.
John’s son, William Cogswell (1619-1700), who had been 16 years old at the time of the shipwreck, married Susannah Hawkes, whose father, Adam Hawkes (1605-1672), had also emigrated from England. Adam had arrived in 1630, in a substantially more controlled manner, as part of a fleet of 11 ships and 700 settlers led by John Winthrop to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Through this union, both Adam Hawkes and John Cogswell would become 3rd great-grandfathers to U.S. President John Adams and 9th great-grandfathers to Princess Diana of Wales. John Cogswell’s descendants also include Julia Ward Howe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, President Calvin Coolidge…and me, apparently.
Five Cogswell men, all named variations of William or John—their propensity for naming their sons after themselves is both exhausting and confusing—signed a 1692 petition in defense of Elizabeth Proctor and her husband (also named John) during the Salem Witch Trials. The Cogswells and their fellow petitioners stated that they knew John and Elizabeth well and that they “never had the Least Knowledge of Such a Nefandous wickedness in Said Neighbours.” Despite their intervention, John Proctor was convicted of witchcraft and hanged. Elizabeth was granted a stay in her sentence due to pregnancy, which fortunately lasted long enough for her neighbors’ zealous campaign to rid Salem of witches to subside.
The Cogswell name in my ancestry ends with my 6th great-grandmother, Patience Cogswell (1754-unk), who was born in Connecticut and married Gideon Rufus Morgan (1751-1830) when she was 17 years old. Gideon was a Minuteman in the Connecticut militia during the Revolution. The couple lived in Washington Township, Connecticut during this time and operated a tavern where Patience hosted a meeting between General George Washington, Brigadier General Henry Knox, and the Count de Rochambeau on May 18, 1781.
Several of my ancestors immigrated from Germany in the mid-19th century, a time when overcrowding and poor economic conditions caused many German families to seek a better life in the United States. Many of these families made their way to what was then the western frontier where land was readily available, so long as one didn’t mind taking it by force and constantly defending it from the people who had lived there for thousands of years.
The Illinois Territory was established in 1809, and in 1814 Edwards County was created within it. The county covered 80,000 square miles, over half the land area of present-day Illinois, although it has been trimmed down quite a bit over the years and is now the 4th smallest county in Illinois, with a population of just over 6,000 people.
In 1815, two of my 5th great-grandmothers on my father’s side, Susanna Thompson Shelby (1796-1834) and Sarah Russell Greathouse (1785-1828), were among the first five white families to settle in Edwards County with their husbands Jonathan Shelby, Sr. (1788-1838) and Isaac Greathouse (1782-1843). Like most women in history, although their husbands’ accomplishments would not have been possible without them, little is known about these women aside from when their lives started and ended, who they married, and how many children they produced to carry on their husbands’ names.
Once established, the Shelbys and Greathouses helped to found Long Prairie Baptist Church. Isaac Greathouse eventually moved back to Kentucky because of persistent (and almost certainly justified) raids by the people on whose land he had settled, but the Shelbys remained. Jonathan Shelby, Jr. (1813-1876) and Dorothy Greathouse (1814-1885), both young children during the migration to Illinois, married and went about the process of being fruitful and multiplying.
Jonathan Shelby, Jr. served as a private in the Illinois militia under the leadership of Champion Stewart Mading, who was described as “a large, powerful man, weighing 225 pounds.” Prior to moving to Illinois and serving as a minister at Long Prairie Baptist Church, Mading had fought under General Andrew Jackson in an unauthorized 1818 invasion into Spanish-colonized northern Florida. The goals of this incursion were to recapture formerly enslaved people that had fled Georgia, and to destroy the villages of the Seminole people that had provided a safe haven for them. Jackson’s brief rampage has been dubbed by historians, rather generously, the First Seminole War. Fourteen years later, as one account put it, Mading “was a captain in the Black Hawk War and led a company in the final attack which crushed the rebellion.” Which seems pretty straightforward, but perhaps some context is needed.
The Black Hawk War, as it has been named by white historians, was a conflict in 1832 between the United States and a group of Native Americans (primarily Sauk and Meskwaki people) led by the Sauk war chief known as Black Hawk (Mahkatêwe-meshi-kêhkêhkwa, 1767-1838). At its core, the war was about disputed land claims involving the 1804 Treaty of St. Louis, in which a delegation of four Sauk and Meskwaki men had allegedly forfeited all their peoples’ land claims east of the Mississippi River as well as a portion of what is now Missouri. The United States viewed this as a valid treaty; however, the delegation had not been authorized by their chiefs or tribal councils to cede any land. Additionally, it seems that—whether due to deliberate deception or an honest misunderstanding—the written treaty did not reflect what they understood to be the agreement. The area in dispute included Saukenuk, the primary town where the Sauk people had settled approximately 100 years prior, as well as the principal town of the Meskwaki people.
The treaty allowed the Sauk people to remain in Saukenuk while the land belonged to the federal government, but in 1829, settlers began to arrive and pushed the Sauk and Meskwaki out of their lands and across the Mississippi River. Black Hawk had crossed the river into Illinois in both 1830 and 1831 with a band of several hundred people that hoped to return to their home, and had left peacefully both times when it became apparent that this would not be allowed.
On April 5, 1832, Black Hawk again crossed the Mississippi into Illinois with around 1,100 people, roughly evenly divided between warriors and noncombatant women, children, and elderly people. A week later, Brigadier General Henry Atkinson arrived with his forces at Fort Armstrong on an unrelated mission and heard about Black Hawk’s band. On April 13, he wrote to Illinois governor John Reynolds asking for militia support. Governor Reynolds, who had already stated his desire to “place in the field such a force as will exterminate all Indians, who will not let us alone,” was all too happy to help. He quickly assembled a force of 2,100 militia volunteers, including a 23-year-old store clerk named Abraham Lincoln.
Over the next three months, Black Hawk attempted to surrender or peacefully retreat three times, but the militia—lacking interpreters and discipline, but brimming with bloodlust—would not allow it. They trailed Black Hawk’s band, killing the elderly and children that had fallen behind and were dying of starvation. On August 1, they caught up with the band on the banks of the Mississippi, as the warriors were providing cover for the noncombatants attempting to cross the river into undisputed territory. It was here that Black Hawk waded into the river with a white flag, only to be met with gunfire both from the river’s eastern bank and from soldiers on the steamboat Warrior, anchored just offshore. An article from the Northern Illinois University Digital Library describes the scene like this:
The slaughter on the eastern bank of the river continued for eight hours. The soldiers shot at anyone—man, woman, or child—who ran for cover or tried to swim across the river. They shot women who were swimming with children on their backs; they shot wounded swimmers who were almost certain to drown anyway. Other women and children were killed as they tried to surrender. The soldiers scalped most of the dead bodies. From the backs of some of the dead, they cut long strips of flesh for razor strops. Of the roughly four hundred Native Americans at the battle, most were killed (though many of their bodies were never found).
And it was here, “on the banks of the Mississippi,” in an event that would later be named the Bad Axe Massacre, that Baptist minister and Illinois militia Captain Champion Mading led my 4th great-grandfather Jonathan Shelby, Jr. and the other men of his company “in the final attack which crushed the rebellion” before being mustered out by General Atkinson on August 15.
These stories—stories of white supremacists who enslaved Black people and exploited their bodies for profit, and of settlers that participated in the genocide of Native Americans as they marched westward across North America under the belief that God intended for them to take this land—are my heritage. And while I don’t believe that anyone bears personal guilt for their ancestors’ actions, I do feel that there is a responsibility to acknowledge the past and work towards creating a more equitable society for everyone.
Skin color as a proxy for race was a convenient marker that allowed white people to subjugate others for their own benefit, as it served—in their view—as a visible sign that non-white people were less valuable to God and therefore exploitable or expendable. The concept of whiteness is meaningless aside from the meaning it has been given, and in an effort to consolidate and maintain power, the definition of whiteness has changed dramatically over time. As Robert P. Baird wrote in an excellent piece for the Guardian,
In 1751, Benjamin Franklin could claim that only the English and Saxons “make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth”, and nearly 80 years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would insist that the Irish, like the Chinese and the Native American, were not caucasian. Over time, however, the definition of who counted as culturally white expanded to include Catholics from southern Europe, the Irish and even Jews, who for centuries had been seen as quintessential outsiders.
Baird goes on to point out that noted white supremacist Adolf Hitler granted “honorary Aryan” status to Chinese and Japanese people—a move that was clearly motivated by political alliances rather than any genetic relatedness.
In many ways, this phenomenon of expanding whiteness mirrors the way various Protestant denominations allied with Catholics in the late 1970s. Christianity is not a religion, but rather a collection of related religions, many of which are truly incompatible. The differences between various Christianities are sometimes so significant that in order to gain entry into one particular heaven, you’d risk being sentenced to a dozen hells. But when the Moral Majority was formed in the late 1970s, Catholics joined with various Protestant denominations, discarding doctrinal differences over which wars had been fought, and forming an alliance for the explicitly stated purpose of maintaining the desired racial hierarchy.
This reminds me of the fictional town Maysville in the brilliant western The Harder They Fall. When the town first appears, it’s accompanied by a title card that reads, “Maysville (It’s a white town.)” The set was designed to be the most boring town conceivable, bland in every way. But it wasn’t simply painted with a single shade of white. Rather, the designers used a palette of 70 or so different hues which are united only by their similar paucity of pigments.
The concept of whiteness does not exist apart from white supremacy. It was never that whiteness was superior; rather, superiority demanded the creation of whiteness—a fiction fabricated out of necessity by those who wished to justify their oppression of others. As the definition of whiteness has been expanded over time in order to serve the purposes of white supremacy, unique and valuable features of various cultures are often lost in the melting pot of assimilation. Positive aspects of heritage were sacrificed on the altar of power and privilege, leaving many people, like me, without a sense of connection to any particular personal heritage and forcing them to adopt the narrative of white supremacy as their own.
Space does not permit me to adequately cover the atrocities experienced by Indigenous North Americans at the hands of white settlers, nor am I the appropriate person for that job. But I can’t end this chapter without mentioning the institutions known as Federal Indian Boarding Schools—a topic that my Heritage Studies curriculum neglected to cover. Readers from the U.S. may not be aware of these schools, as our nation has done such a thorough job of ignoring and concealing the genocide of Native Americans. It wasn’t until 2021, after a Canadian anthropologist identified 215 possible unmarked graves near Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia—and importantly, after this discovery gained international media attention—that the U.S. Secretary of the Interior commissioned an investigation into the Federal Indian Boarding School program in the United States. Somehow, despite the U.S. having operated approximately three times as many of these institutions, and the fact that Canada’s residential schools were designed to replicate those in the U.S., we just don’t talk about it.
The 2022 Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report was an important first step in uncovering and acknowledging the harm caused by these institutions. The report revealed that 408 Federal Indian Boarding Schools were operated between 1819 and 1969, targeting Native American children from across the continental U.S. as well as Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native children. The guiding philosophy of these boarding schools was “Kill the Indian, save the man”—a quote attributed to Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer that established the first Federal Indian Boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The intent was to rid Native American children of what white Americans viewed as inferior languages, religions, and ways of living. The architects of the system knew it would take multiple generations. “The first wild redskin placed in the school chafes at the loss of freedom,” they acknowledged. But, comparing Native American children to caged animals, they promised that each “successive generation” would miss that freedom less and become more fully assimilated into white culture.
Not despite, but precisely because of the recognition that “the love of home and the warm reciprocal affection existing between parents and children are among the strongest characteristics of the Indian nature,” children were removed from their families. This was sometimes done by force and often by coercive practices like denying treaty-obligated rations to families that refused to send their children to the schools. The children were taken to boarding schools that were frequently far from their native lands—an intentional decision to minimize visits from family members, which might interfere with the eradication of their language and culture. They were placed in boarding schools with children from other tribes that did not share their language or their cultural or religious practices, which facilitated the eradication of these vital aspects of their heritage. Their heads were shaved, and their traditional clothing was replaced with uniforms, often militaristic in appearance.
The living conditions at the schools were abysmal, with many students sharing beds (and sometimes toothbrushes and other personal hygiene items) in overcrowded and poorly ventilated buildings that facilitated the spread of diseases like tuberculosis and influenza. There was little access to healthcare, and many children died from disease. There are at least 53 burial sites associated with these boarding schools, and when just 19 of the 408 boarding schools were sampled, at least 500 children were found to have died. Many of these children were buried in unmarked graves, and simply lost to their families.
While some education was provided in an attempt to assimilate students into white culture, the primary focus was on manual labor. This had the dual effect of preparing the students only for lower-paying, less desirable jobs, while also defraying the boarding schools’ operating expenses as the students were forced to sew uniforms, care for livestock, mill lumber and make bricks, build railroads, and perform other similar tasks.
Students who violated boarding school rules were subjected to corporal punishment, including “flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing.” Sometimes the older students were forced to punish their younger peers. “A whipping, administered soundly and prayerfully,” was promoted as an effective means of punishing any students who attempted to escape. Sexual abuse was also rampant, as it often is in hierarchical religious organizations with no outside oversight.
The funding for these schools came from a variety of sources, but perhaps the most insidious was the federal government authorizing the provision of funds to the religious organizations that operated the schools from Native American treaty or trust accounts held by the government. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1908 decision Quick Bear v. Leupp that this practice did not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause, because the money didn’t belong to the federal government.
It was this financial loophole, in addition to the widespread belief that Christianity was superior to Indigenous religions, that promoted the involvement of a variety of Christian denominations in the Federal Indian Boarding School program. The federal government delegated the responsibility for operating these schools to “the prominent denominational associations of the country, or the missionary societies representing such denominational views…and in and through this extra-official relationship” these religious organizations “assume[d] charge of the intellectual and moral education of the Indians thus brought within the reach of their influence.” The government provided per-capita payments to the Catholic and Protestant organizations that ran these schools, and the U.S. “military was frequently called in to reinforce the missionaries’ orders.”
The Federal Indian Boarding School program ended in 1969, but its harm persists. The students that survived the schools were left with the trauma of being taken from their families and losing their language, culture, religion, and identity. Many of them never returned home, and some would never know where “home” was. Many live, or lived, with the lasting scars of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. The physical health of former students also suffered greatly: “Now-adult attendees were more likely to have cancer (more than three times), tuberculosis (more than twice), high cholesterol (95 percent), diabetes (81 percent), anemia (61 percent), arthritis (60 percent), and gall bladder disease (60 percent) than nonattendees.” Former students are also at significantly higher risk for mental health disorders like depression or PTSD and often express a “prevailing sense of despair, loneliness, and isolation from family and community.”
This trauma is multigenerational. Parents of boarding school students had their children taken by the government, and frequently never saw them again; many of them were left to deal with PTSD, depression, grief, and dependence on alcohol or other substances. Children that were taken from their homes lacked parental role models, and as a result, often struggled to know how to parent their own children. Even the effects on physical health are generational: “Participants whose fathers attended Indian boarding school had on average a 36 percent greater [past-year chronic physical health problems] count than those whose fathers did not attend boarding school.” Researchers suspect that this is due to epigenetic alterations to paternal genes that were caused by severe stress and passed on their children.
Many of the atrocities committed by white people in the history of the United States, including the Federal Indian Boarding School program, have been done not in spite of religion, nor simply alongside it, but because of it. Religion is a powerful force on its own, and it is perhaps even more powerful in the way that it acts indirectly by guiding political, economic, and social policies. It can be a positive force or a negative one, but it is rarely neutral.
Today, there is an attack on acknowledging our history of white supremacy, largely by conservative white evangelicals. Across the United States, state legislatures are attempting to ban “critical race theory,” which they seem to define as “anything that makes white kids feel uncomfortable.” I understand the discomfort. This was a difficult chapter for me to write. Some of the information was new, but none of it was shocking. Still, I cried when discussing parts of it with my partner—specifically the Bad Axe Massacre and the role that my direct ancestors played in it. It’s difficult to accept and admit the atrocities committed by your ancestors. But I think about how uncomfortable it must be for a Black or Indigenous child to sit in a classroom and listen to a version of history that erases the atrocities that were done to their ancestors, and that are still being done today. Acknowledging our true heritage can be uncomfortable. But there can be no reconciliation without that acknowledgement.