Student group demands accountability, action on St. Thomas’ history with Native American communities

University of St. Thomas junior Morgan Whiting listed some of what she described as “attempts at erasure” committed against Native Americans by the U.S. government to a fluctuating crowd outside the Anderson Student Center Nov. 19. 

Whiting recounted how her family members — she traces her heritage to the Sicangu band of the Lakota Oyate — were mistreated in the St. Francis Xavier Industrial School in Avoca, Minnesota.

“While it was framed as a place of education and opportunity for Native girls, its true purpose was clear: to eradicate their identities,” Whiting said, “These schools operated under the chilling motto, ‘Kill the Indian, save the man.’”

Whiting’s speech was a part of Students for Justice and Peace’s Native American History Month demonstration, a five-hour event held at John P. Monahan Plaza outside the ASC. 

SJP is a student-led club “devoted to peace, equality, and recognition of human dignity,” according to its TommieLink page.

Students, faculty and staff came and went from the plaza throughout the event. SJP members mulled about and gathered signatures on a petition they plan to bring to university President Rob Vischer.

In the petition, the club outlined five demands it is making of the university: 

• “Establish a student, faculty and administrator supported Indigenous Relationships Advisory Council.”

• “Offer university spaces free of charge to local language revitalization groups and Indigenous community programming.”

• “Develop a transparent accountability system to track and report progress on these initiatives.”

• “Appoint a dedicated Indigenous Community Liaison to serve as a bridge between the university and local Indigenous communities.”

• “Reinstate our previous University Land Acknowledgement that was implemented in Jan of 2021.”

A key part of the demonstration focused on the petition’s last demand: the diminishing of the university’s land acknowledgment. Originally 292 words in its original form in 2021, its third and current iteration is just 62 words.

Whiting said she “wouldn’t be surprised” if the change was because of the language present in the original acknowledgement.

A comparison of the new and original documents reveals the elimination of words such as “evil,” “genocide,” “forced assimilation,” “white supremacy” and “colonization.”

“The first acknowledgement that we produced said a lot of hard things. It named things in terms that are stark, that kind of point at a very difficult story and that need context,” said Mike Klein, justice and peace studies department chair. “I think the next version of the acknowledgement was trying to simplify it, but also soften it.”

The Crest reached out to the university about the reason for the acknowledgement’s changes and was directed to this page, which said the changes came after “considering feedback gathered over the course of two-plus years.”

Klein said that it is important to revert the document to its original form, but he hopes the university will also focus on tangible issues, like strengthening relationships with nearby Native communities.

“We’ve been spending so much time trying to figure out the words that it’s time to move on. It’s time to figure out what we do, no just what we say,” Klein said.

Klein said university rules, like the no-tobacco policy, have not always been accommodating of Native American culture. He said he had a student from Red Lake Nation “a few years ago”  whose prayer involved using tobacco and that it took almost a year to figure out how to work around that policy.

“A lot of people come here, and if their religion is what the university is based on, then it’s just a foregone conclusion that you can do what you do,” Klein said, “For her, it led to fear, and it led to a concern that she would lose something powerful and sacred to her.”

Whiting gave her speech about 100 yards from the university’s statue of founder Archbishop John Ireland, the man who started the St. Francis Xavier Industrial School which her family was forced to attend. Ireland led white, Irish Catholic colonization across Minnesota.

“The harm caused by Archbishop John Ireland and institutions like St. Thomas is not just a historical matter — it is a living legacy. The displacement, assimilation and cultural destruction he championed have left scars that Native communities still bear today,” Whiting said.

Another school, the Catholic Industrial School, was once on the land that St. Thomas currently occupies and was created to teach immigrant children. Ireland’s Catholic Colonization Bureau of St. Paul moved the school to Clontarf, Minnesota. Here, 60 young Native boys attended, according to a 1935 volume of Acta et Dicta, a collection of historical data once published by the Catholic Historical Society of St. Paul.

An interactive map showing the former school’s position in regard to Lake Menith, the lake drained to build St. Thomas, can be seen here.

Catholic Industrial School was created in 1874 to teach immigrant children and was moved to Clontarf in Swift County, Minnesota, in 1877. It was one of 15 such schools in the state, according to the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. 

“If you can remove Native peoples from their environment as children, send them to Americanized institutions, you’ll be able to basically remove their Indigenous culture and forcibly assimilate them to white American ways of life,” St. Thomas history professor Jennifer McCutcheon said.

The Crest reached out to the archdiocese for comment and was pointed to this webpage of its Catholic Spirit website, which includes a 2022 statement from Archbishop Bernard Hebda.

“I am sorry. I am sorry for the role that our Church played as part of the U.S. government’s systemic separation of families, often leading to the intergenerational trauma experienced by so many of our sisters and brothers,” Hebda wrote.

Whiting said she has felt the disconnect from her family history created by the industrial school system in her own life. She is part Native American but said her mother’s side of the family is predominantly Irish Catholic.

“It’s easy for me to find records about my white ancestors. It’s not as easy for me to do that about my Native ancestors,” Whiting said, “And a lot of that can be seen in the role that churches and different private institutions had in these boarding schools.”

She said these two identities can conflict, especially when attending a Catholic university that sits on Dakota land.

“It was always one of those things where I knew I was Native because I would come back from summer break and go to my Catholic school, and the other kids would be like, ‘What are you?’ because I had a darker skin complexion than everyone else,” Whiting said.

Besides seeking support for their petition during those five hours on the plaza, Whiting and SJP also used the demonstration to raise awareness of issues facing Native communities. They painted handprints on shirts, a symbol for missing and murdered Indigenous people, and displayed signs and books on the Mnisina waterway that St. Thomas sits on top of.

Whiting closed her speech with a call for action to the St. Thomas community.

“Commit to this work, not out of guilt, but out of a shared responsibility to build a more just future. Let us move beyond words and take bold steps toward real repair. Today, let us choose truth, accountability and action,” Whiting said.

Adam Mueller can be reached at muel7541@stthomas.edu.