In a remote corner of Eastern Washington's Colville Indian Reservation, up a road that winds through sharp-edged, scrub-covered mountains to a plateau, sits a cluster of long, rectangular buildings. The site, once a thriving boarding school for Native Americans called St. Mary's, is mostly empty now, except for a white, steepled church that holds occasional services. Yet Kate Sanchez, a member of the Colville tribe, still feels revulsion when she comes here, remembering the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse she says she experienced at the hands of Jesuit priests at the school four decades ago.
Sanchez and 15 other former St. Mary's students recently sued the Jesuits and came away with a $4.8 million payout. But the settlement has done little to lessen her disgust. Nor has it softened her anger at the Society of Jesus, Oregon Province, which oversees Jesuit activities in five Northwestern states. The Province filed for bankruptcy protection a year ago in the face of hundreds of additional abuse claims from Native Americans like her.
Steven Miller
Steven Miller
Kosnoff: "a cash-and-carry kind of guy."
"They raped us when we were small, and now they're doing it all over again with this bankruptcy," says Sanchez, 54, a social worker on the Colville reservation who says she gave away her settlement money. She periodically breaks down in tears when she talks about the case. She believes that with access to "the Pope and the Vatican and the dioceses," the Province can hardly claim to be out of cash.
But that's exactly what the Jesuits are asserting. Their bankruptcy has set off a complicated, high-stakes fight over how much money the Province actually has, and who else's pockets the plaintiffs' attorneys can dig into.
As abuse claims against the Catholic Church have exploded in the past decade, attorneys have become ever more aggressive and adept at recruiting clients while raising their financial demands. In the case of the Oregon Province bankruptcy, attorneys have assembled roughly 600 alleged victims—most of them Native Americans—who lay claim to a share of the Jesuits' assets. One Seattle lawyer working on the case, Timothy Kosnoff, has set his sights on winning in excess of $1 million per person—or more than three times the amount paid out to Sanchez's group just two years ago.
This time, plaintiffs' attorneys are hoping to tap into the assets of two local Jesuit institutions—Seattle University on First Hill and Gonzaga University in Spokane—as well as the Jesuits' headquarters in Rome.
Litigation against the Catholic Church is "big business," observes Gonzaga's in-house counsel, Mike Casey. "In their perfect world, [trial lawyers] would take the keys from the Pope to the Vatican treasury and go in and help themselves."
In bankruptcies, most of the financial wrangling happens before the merit of the claims is even assessed. Later, after the press has moved on, a number of claims will likely be dismissed as invalid.
Still, the cases have revealed extensive abuse nationwide, unchecked by the governing structures of the Catholic Church. And the case against the Oregon Province—the first in the long-running church-abuse scandal to center around Native Americans—has cast light on a little-known chapter in the painful story of white/Indian relations.
On reservations like the Colville tribe's, former students still wrestle with the legacy of boarding schools and the religious institutions that ran them. Many, like Sanchez, view the schools as a crime against the Indian people—institutions that stole their culture and literally raped them to boot. They want that story finally to be told. Others say the schools were refuges from a host of social ills prevalent on reservations, providing basic necessities and the skills needed to succeed in mainstream America.
The town of Omak in north-central Washington is divided in two by the Okanogan River. One side resembles a small mountain town like any other, with a bookstore, a Best Western, and a Wal-Mart. The other side—with just a few scattered businesses bearing names like Buckshot Espresso and Beads and Things—marks the western edge of the sprawling Colville Indian Reservation.
Some 5,000 tribal members live on these 1.3 million rural acres. It is an impoverished place, especially so since the recent closure of two nearby logging mills, which put a dent in tribal employment. And while the tribe runs three casinos, the area's sparse population has made gambling less of a windfall here than it's been elsewhere.
The reservation's spare, undulating terrain is stunning in a stark, otherworldly way. It's exactly the sort of place you would expect a Jesuit missionary, in this case one Father Etienne deRougé, to set up an outpost in the 1880s.
Catholic, Protestant, and Quaker missionaries established some of the first boarding schools for Native Americans in the U.S. The idea was simple: "The schools were designed to civilize the Indians," says Jon Reyhner, a Northern Arizona University professor who co-authored the 2004 book A History of Indian Education.
The best way to do that, it was thought at the time, was to isolate children from their parents and their culture. The U.S. government, which provided early funding for religious boarding schools while also establishing its own schools, concurred with this plan. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the government forcibly removed Native American children from their parents and sent them to these schools.
