Story has two sides to it. On one, you have a faith-based private school built on a native reservation with the explicit purpose of being as bigoted as possible toward the people living there, which is horrible, but on par for the behavior of such organizations. On the other, you have natives who continue to send their children to that school despite generations of this pattern because of better educational outcomes than the U.S. federal public school.
There are a few possible calls to action here. You're not going to convince the ministry to change their outlook -- you might as well ask an alligator to stop eating meat. As a religious organization they are exempt from many laws that would get government or corporate groups in trouble, particularly if the families signed a paper to enroll their kids. It comes down to biting the bullet and playing along with the school's BS, or biting the other bullet and seeking alternative educational providers. It would be great if as a community they could find their own path to creating better public schools (having the freedom to build casinos provides a readily-available revenue stream, if you can solve the leadership corruption issue), but failing that, I guess the U.S. federal government could throw more money at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
I can emphasize with the kids because I grew up atheist in an overwhelmingly Mormon backwoods town, where I was the "devil worshiper" and treated like garbage for it. On the other hand, the families have alternatives available to them. If the alternatives suck, they should look into how to make them better.
> The morning of Good Friday, Father John Cormack, presiding priest of St Francis of Assisi Catholic church in Fort Apache, agreed to an interview in his office. His ministry – a rarity on the reservation – is an example of the weaving of Apache tradition into Christianity. The chapel is decorated in Apache symbols and sacred tools. When he collects written prayers, Father John uses Apache traditional burden baskets, canes and other ceremonial objects. Above the door are Eagle feathers, a sacred symbol of strength.
What a cool guy.
Historically the Catholic Church has gotten up to all sorts of nonsense, but they seem to be doing a good job of keeping up with the times, to the extent that a church can be expected to.
The East Fork Lutheran school, on the other hand, isn’t looking so good.
"No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."
Key words: receiving federal financial assistance. It's a private religious school, meaning it is barred from receiving government funding.
If you meant Title VII, that is generally prohibited, but not in the case of religious organizations. Case law has found that they are free to discriminate in their hiring practices (https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/annotation08.htm...). It also doesn't stop a non-religious company from doing so but not disclosing their reason to the terminated employee, which they have no obligation to do in right-to-work jurisdictions.
Furthermore, reservations sit in a gray legal zone where they are considered semi-autonomous sovereign nations. In practice this exempts them from state law, but they are generally subject to federal law.
"The EEOC does not have jurisdiction over charges of employment discrimination against federally recognized Tribes if the alleged discrimination is based on race, national origin, sex, color, or religion (under Title VII), disability (under the ADA), or genetic information (under GINA)."
Who's "we"? This was about a private Lutheran school. It's ridiculous of course, but if you sign up for a private school, you have to put up with whatever ridiculous BS they want to push on you, no matter how medieval. My question is: why are these people sending their kids to this shitty school? This is the whole reason public education exists.
I would think that just about any school would be better than a school which teaches kids their traditional ceremonies are "devil worship". If the schools are that bad, you're better off resorting to home-schooling.
I'm not sure what your point is. "We" are collective humanity. These things seem to be happening more and more. Stories that sound like they're from 100 years ago occur today with growing frequency. It appears "we" are going backwards.
No, "we" are not. This kind of silliness doesn't happen in most civilized places. Even in the US. This incident is an outlier.
>These things seem to be happening more and more.
Go back 100 years and you'll see it was much worse. Sure, parts of the US seem to be backsliding a bit, but that doesn't mean every place is. 95% of the world's population lives outside the US, remember.
>Stories that sound like they're from 100 years ago occur today with growing frequency. It appears "we" are going backwards.
Maybe in some particularly backwards parts of the US. That doesn't generalize to everywhere.
>I'm not sure what your point is.
My point is that if you put your kid in a private, religious school run by a bunch of backwards religious nutcases, you shouldn't be surprised when they tell you insane, ridiculous stuff such as traditional Native American ceremonies being "devil worship". I'm sure there's other crazy religious schools in the US much like this, but we don't normally hear about it because the parents actually subscribe fully to the religious ideology, and because they're a small part of the population anyway: most people just send their kids to (secular) public schools.
I disagree. From my perspective, things that I could never imagine happening in the U.S. are happening with increasing frequency. I could cite an extensive list, but the list is already well known - I can only imagine you're in some kind of denial.
Add this item to the list and wait for the next, tomorrow.
I agree there's a lot of crazy stuff happening in the US these days, but this just isn't an example of it. This school, and these crappy christian churches trying to brainwash Native Americans out of their culture, is nothing new; it's been going on since the late 1800s. This particular place and what's happening there looks like nothing's changed in over 100 years. Why the Native Americans there continue to put up with this BS after all this time, and don't just kick these assholes out of their reservation, is beyond me.
It has absolutely nothing to do with things like abortion being banned in many states due to a SCOTUS decision, the ever-growing polarization, etc.
No, it really doesn't, when the exact same abuse has been happening for a century at this location. Do you think the FLDS is also a product of rising Christian nationalism? If you want to blame everything on current events, you can believe what you want.
Less emboldened in comparison with the 1900s - 1940s.
The heyday of Residential Schools and indigenous removal programs across Canada, the US, Australia, etc was mainstream and a slick industrialised pipeline of capturing children to beat the Indian from them (actual quote).
There might well be some recent uptake towards that direction, but back in the day these were not outliers, these were central government programs backed by church and "science" (eugenic based arguments).
How stupid, ignorant, and bigoted. Still, I mostly fault the parents for not paying closer attention before deciding to send their kids to these private schools. It's fairly vile that anyone would build an ostensibly educational organization on reservation land with a belief that tribal religion is "satanic" in nature, but the parents chose to send them to this school - There's a large dose of "Caveat Emptor" and a smaller dose of "Sue them for fraud" depending on how much they were paying attention before sending their kids there.
There are a few possible calls to action here. You're not going to convince the ministry to change their outlook -- you might as well ask an alligator to stop eating meat. As a religious organization they are exempt from many laws that would get government or corporate groups in trouble, particularly if the families signed a paper to enroll their kids. It comes down to biting the bullet and playing along with the school's BS, or biting the other bullet and seeking alternative educational providers. It would be great if as a community they could find their own path to creating better public schools (having the freedom to build casinos provides a readily-available revenue stream, if you can solve the leadership corruption issue), but failing that, I guess the U.S. federal government could throw more money at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
I can emphasize with the kids because I grew up atheist in an overwhelmingly Mormon backwoods town, where I was the "devil worshiper" and treated like garbage for it. On the other hand, the families have alternatives available to them. If the alternatives suck, they should look into how to make them better.