A couple of months ago, the U.S. 10th District Federal Court in Denver, Colo. let stand the fallacies asserted concerning there would be no damage to the grounds of a historical part of an Indian Boarding School and that the religious practices of indigenous peoples in the wetlands wouldn’t be affected by the road.
Did they consult any indigenous peoples about this noise issue … no. They assumed. The opponents of the South Lawrence Trafficway decided not to go to the U.S. Supreme Court to appeal the ruling of the highway to be built because the public display of anti-Native American attitudes is obvious in Judges Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and Clarence Thomas.
Mr. Roberts was tutored as a clerk by Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the historic tone of anti-Indian rulings going back to the Doctrine of Discovery and the SCOTUS case Johnson v. McIntosh of 1823. State rights judges do not rule on Indian cases objectively, so there was no reason to pursue this case in front of judges with an inferred prejudice against Native Americans.
What bothers me is how Baker University and the United Methodist Church chose to ignore the bad acts of the past and play historical amnesia in the present. Baker University sits on what was last Shawnee land in the 1850s. The Sac and Fox Agency (Sullivan House) sat between the lumberyard and the post office in Baldwin City during the 1860s.
Every denomination in Kansas did the dirty work of the U.S. government involving assimilation and tribal manipulation for purpose of acquiring lands. The Baptist Church tricked the Ottawa people out of 20,000 acres in an 1862 treaty for a school that only recently atoned for its past sins and gave free tuition to Ottawa tribal members.
The Methodist Church manipulated the Shawnee and Wyandotte Nations for land gains in the 1850s in Kansas. That’s why the late historian Brenda Day had a reconciliation ceremony on the Baker campus, which I attended.
When Baker University acquired the wetlands in the 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was run by white bureaucrats who gave out lands and favors to friends, much as their predecessors did in the 19th century. Only three Indian men were leaders of the agency dealing with Indian affairs between 1870 and 1970. Those three men were Samuel Ely Parker, Seneca; William Bennett, Oneida; and Louis Bruce, Mohawk-Sioux.
So Indians did not decide to sell away the wetlands. Paternalist white men did so for them.
If I was a religious person working at a Methodist college, would I knowingly accept lands taken from people subjugated to white men selling their lands without their consultation, or would I act with a conscience like my father was taught to do as a Baker student, graduate and future minister at Baker in the 1960s?
Sadly, I feel that conscience or social justice isn’t the issue anymore … money is. How would the late and beloved Baker art professor and Osage Indian, Alice Ann Callahan, feel about Baker University and its disregard of indigenous religion? She has a statue in her honor on campus and wrote the book “In Lon Ska” about her Osage tribe’s traditions, which the Methodist overseers at Haskell University tried to stamp out.
By building in the wetlands, Baker University is insulting the memory and history of the indigenous race and its struggle to retain culture in the face of Christian and American attempts to destroy it through forced assimilation. Just because this history is ignored does not make it false.