Is this still the 19th century?

One hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, pious Christian churches would gather donations to fund missionary work — they’d send people to Africa or to Indian reservations to ‘enlighten’ the heathen, which often meant chastising native peoples for living life without proper obedience to Christian authorities. These frequently had horrible consequences. Here in the US, we had boarding schools, forced separation from family, and vicious denigration of native culture. Kids died. Communities were trapped in poverty. And it was all to ‘save’ people from an imaginary hell.

It’s still going on.

The Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona spans 2,625 square miles – just a little larger than the state of Delaware, but with a population just over 14,600.

Based on our reporting and speaking with members of the tribe, there are over 80 churches on the reservation, representing 27 different Christian denominations. The tribe indicated that there was an official list the churches operating on the reservation but no list has been delivered.

East Fork Lutheran school was founded in 1951 by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (Wels), a religious group which has been active in Arizona since 1893 as part of its Apache Mission – an effort to convert “unreached tribes” to Christianity. This was one of many schools built on the reservation by Wels. The mission has shifted to now being focused on training Native American Christians to lead in the ministry and serve as missionaries to other Indigenous nations throughout the US and Canada.

Oh god. WELS. I grew up in a very liberal Lutheran church, where we learned that the Wisconsin synod was the wellspring of the devil — extremely conservative, tied tightly to hateful conservative politics, and consorting with them was even worse than hanging out with the Baptists* (isn’t sectarianism wonderful?). We’d get that message in between the Sunday calls to support our mission in Africa.

WELS is running a school in Arizona, and they recently expelled a couple of young Apache girls for…DANCING. It was satanic, don’t you know.

The way the school saw it, it was devil worship.

In October 2019, three teenage girls were punished for participating in a spiritual ceremony. Their Arizona school expelled two of them, and let the third off with a warning, citing their attendance as a violation of school policy and grounds for expulsion.

Caitlyn, now 18, says she and her friends were disciplined for participating in a Sunrise Dance, a traditional Native ceremony at the core of White Mountain Apache culture.

The Monday after the dance, Caitlyn’s parents told her to stay home that day. They had received a call from East Fork Lutheran school telling them not to send their daughter in. She didn’t know why. Then around noon, her mom got another phone call. The principal wanted to meet with Caitlyn, her parents and the local preacher. The principal and preacher also invited the two other girls and their families to their own private meetings with school leadership.

The Sunrise Dance was a very big deal for young women in their culture, but the church hated it. You’re not allowed to think differently in their church, and some of the stuff taught in the Apache community was competition with white Christian mythology, so it must be crushed.

For the first 12 years of her life, Caitlyn looked forward to having her own dance – a sacred coming-of-age experience celebrating the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It’s a great financial sacrifice for the family. Over four days, a girl’s community prays for her. They offer her gifts and witness her as she participates in rituals symbolizing her maturity and growth. A medicine man presides over the event, praying and singing with holy members of the community called Crown Dancers, who recite the creation story to the audience.

The idea meant the world to Caitlyn. But she didn’t have her own Sunrise Dance: if she were found out, she would be expelled from school immediately, a stain on on her permanent record that could affect her college opportunities.

At the time, her private school’s teachers were mostly white people who would often discuss the satanic nature of Apache traditions. When Caitlyn was in fifth grade, she was given an F on an art project for drawing the White Mountain Apache crest and including an eagle feather. An “A” student, she was devastated to be chastised this way. As Caitlyn remembers it, her teacher smiled and explained that this kind of project wasn’t allowed because it denoted “pagan worship”. Her father was furious but the family couldn’t do anything about it. It was what the girl and her family expected from the white people who worked on the reservation.

That Apache creation myth is wild. It’s longer and more detailed and far more interesting than what is contained in the book of Genesis, so I can see why Christians were concerned. If, in my youth, I’d been presented with Genesis and the Apache myth as alternatives, I would have rejected both, but I’d have been tempted by the far more appealing Apache tradition. I can see why stuffy old evangelical missionaries would want to stamp out the competition.

The problem here is that this exclusive attitude means depriving young women of an opportunity for a good education, because Christian schools tend to be better supported financially by their sanctimonious and devout external donors, while as usual, public schools limp along — especially reservation schools, which are usually woefully undersupported. I think these girls are better off being evicted from a religious school, and that the secular schools are going to be far more beneficial for their identity and progress.

When it came time for registration, Maria did not receive any notification from the school. It finally notified her two weeks before the school year started that her children would not be invited back. She had to move them to the public school. “Now that they’re in a public school, and they’ve adjusted to it, they are more proud of their traditions or culture, they’re more proud of who they are,” she said.

But there are 80 churches on that one reservation? I am reminded of how ticks can swarm and kill moose.

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*My wife was brought up Baptist. Neither of us are at all religious.