By Rev. Margaret Gillikin & Shannon Brown Holland
Rev. Margaret Gillikin, Lead Pastor
Shannon Brown Holland, Communications
The Puyallup River with Mt. Ranier (Tahoma) in the background. The name "Puyallup" comes from the Lushootseed language for "puyaləpabš" which means "people from the bend at the bottom of the river."
The Puyallup Valley is a land rich in beauty and natural resources. Nestled in the lowlands of Mt. Rainier, the Puyallup River makes its way from the glacial headwaters of Tahoma and descends into the salty waters of the Puget Sound. The rivers run with salmon, and the soil of the surrounding floodplain is rich with nutrients from historic lahars and seasonal floods. These are the traditional homelands of the Puyallup Tribe, and until the early European American colonists began to arrive, their ancestors thrived here since time immemorial.
In the United Methodist Church, Bishop Cedrick Brideforth challenged us here in the Pacific Northwest to make anti-racism work a priority for our efforts in 2024. For us here in Puyallup, WA, we spent this past summer studying the history of race and racism in the UMC, particularly with a focus on the history of relationships between White settlers and the Indigenous tribes of our area.
Our summer sermon series—which we invite you to check out via our previous service recordings online—was called “Courage: Learning Our Past to Heal Our Future.” The goal of that series was to better understand the ongoing legacy created by the effects of European expansionism into the PNW. As a Protestant church, we particularly wanted to take the time to learn more about the role that religion played in this ongoing legacy between White settlers and Native Americans; especially where the use of boarding (or mission) schools was concerned.
Boarding schools were used throughout the nation as a practice of forced assimilation and cultural eradication by taking Native American children away from their families in the 1800s and as late as 1960 in the U.S. Regrettably, we’ve learned that the Puyallup Valley was no exception to this practice.
In recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day today, we offer you a brief history of the region here but urge you to remember that history books often only tell one side of the story.
Native displacement & Forced Assimilation
When Captain George Vancouver became the first European to explore the shores of the Puget Sound in 1792, he observed abandoned villages, human remains, and pockmarked Natives. The smallpox epidemic that was brought to the Americas by early European explorers had already made its way to the West Coast. By the 1770s, over 30 percent of the native population had been eradicated in the PNW. [Source]
As growing numbers of European American settlers made their way west, Native Americans were increasingly forced off their ancestral homelands and onto government reservations. “The government wanted tribal land for settlers and needed to justify taking it. If Native Americans adopted Western ways of education and farming, officials said they would need less land. But U.S. leaders concluded they needed to be more aggressive to fully eradicate their cultures” [Washington Post].
The government also began to establish day schools for Native children. It offered contracts to churches and missionaries to operate Indian Boarding schools to carry out their government assimilation policies through the Civilization Fund Act of 1819.
There was a great deal of competition nationwide between the various faith traditions (Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc.) over who could "convert” the most Native Americans to Christianity. In the Oregon Territory (later becoming the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho), Catholic missionary efforts were generally more effective than Protestant. This was primarily because the Catholic monks who ran those missions were more likely to add Christian teachings to First Nation peoples’ cultural teachings instead of using them to erase Indigenous identity.
“Killing the Indian to save the man.””
“Killing the Indian to save the man” was a common mantra and rallying cry for those seeking funding and governmental support for these schools. Because of this, boarding schools were often intentionally designed to be harsh environments. Children were clothed in military-style uniforms and served plain food—primarily bread and corn mush—which was vastly different from their traditional diet of fresh salmon, shellfish, roots, berries, and wild game. They were prohibited from participating in Tribal rituals or speaking their native languages.
These children were isolated from their families. Sometimes letters sent home went undelivered. Discipline was militaristic and many were subject to abuse and bullying. Often they were taught a sub-standard curriculum not intended to prepare students for gainful employment. Girls were treated more as unpaid servants than students. Truancy was rampant. Exceedingly small numbers of students graduated. These conditions combined with events like epidemics of influenza and meningitis made the schools truly dangerous. Many died. [Source]
The first known Methodist mission school north of the Columbia River here in Washington State was the Nisqually Mission. This small day school, which opened in 1840, was located near the Nisqually Fort operated by the Hudson Bay Company in modern-day Dupont, WA. It was led by missionary John P Richmond, a medical doctor and Methodist Episcopalian priest, with one teacher on staff. The mission closed after just two years, with Richmond observing that the Indigenous population was “fast sinking into the grave. Extinction seems to be their inevitable doom..." [Source].
In 1850, Congress’ Donation Land Grant Act allowed White settlers in the Oregon Territory to dispossess the traditional homelands that Native Americans had occupied and lived on for thousands of years. All the settlers had to do to claim their acreage was to reside there and cultivate the land for four years. The caucasian population in the territory exploded. The government was forced to enter into treaties with the Indigenous Tribes and relocate them onto reservations.
In 1854, the tribes in the South Puget Sound area ceded most of their lands as part of the Medicine Creek Treaty in exchange for money, designated reservation land, and permanent access and rights to their traditional fishing and hunting grounds. However, the signatures of all 62 tribal leaders in that treaty were marked by X’s, and there’s historical evidence that not all those named truly signed; many had objections. [Source] Many of the treaty guarantees were unmet or inadequate, and war broke out the following year with the Treaty Wars of 1855-1856.
Puyallup Indian School 1889 courtesy of 1928.111.1, Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma (Wash.)
The Puyallup Indian Cushman School
Just a handful of years later, the Puyallup Indian School (later renamed the Cushman School) was opened on the Puyallup Reservation in 1860. “The teacher's name or where he had lived, legend does not tell, but he was a white man. This [government] day school was the result of the treaty, entered into by the Puyallups before the Indian War of 1855 and 1856, whereby this tribe insisted on two things; first, that an Indian school be established within the bounds of their land to educate their young, and second, [that the tribe] be left where they had always lived.” [Source]
This school, located where present-day Portland Avenue and East 29th Street intersect in Tacoma, started with five children in a one-room day school and eventually grew to become one of the largest Indian boarding schools in the United States. Native American children from various tribes from all over the coast, including Alaska and Eastern Washington, were brought here to Puyallup to attend this school.
We don’t know to what extent the Puyallup Indian School shared the egregious history of forced kidnappings, systemic abuse, and documented deaths that occurred in places like the Canadian residential schools or the infamous Carlisle School in PA. Regardless, the harm was done to First Nations people. The founding purpose was to strip Native peoples of their culture and identity; to “civilize” them and force them to assume white cultural mores.
Robert Milroy, the superintendent of Indian Affairs in Washington Territory from 1872 to 1885, believed the main purpose of schools like the Puyallup Indian School was to assimilate Indian children into white society. He constantly butted heads with Congress over funding to keep Puyallup and other Indian schools open, claiming that, "Stopping the schools is really stopping the machinery of civilization and is a calamity," and that the schools were used to "stop raising generations of worthless and costly savages." [Source]
In 1903, prominent Puyallup Tribal members, Henry Sicade and William Wilton, founded an alternative public school in Fife, WA featuring competent teachers and a curriculum designed to advance students into genuine careers. This decreased enrollment at the Puyallup Indian School, which then implemented a more vocationally oriented curriculum at the behest of Congressman Francis Cushman in 1910. This resulted in a name change to The Cushman School for the school’s final decade. [Source]
Our Response
104 years have passed since the Cushman School’s closure in 1920. Here at Puyallup UMC, we are unaware of any action that might have been taken by United Methodists—at any level of the church organization—to acknowledge this history and its damaging impact. It stands to reason that this means we, the UMC, have never formally offered an apology or sought reconciliation with the Puyallup Tribe.
Our church was founded here in the Puyallup Valley in 1854—four years before the Puyallup Indian School. Truthfully, and with all transparency, we don’t know to what extent, if any, our church was involved in the history of the Puyallup Indian Cushman School.
As we do the work of learning how to become increasingly more anti-racist in our teaching and behavior, we see that one of the problematic aspects of colonialism was the idea that only White Europeans had a culture, knowledge, religious teachings, economic system, values and ways of life worth spreading…by the sword if necessary. The “we’re right/you’re ignorant and in need of ‘saving’” attitude was dismissive of the wisdom and ways of other peoples and deprived all parties of the gift of sharing ideas and receiving the blessings of diversity.
That this was done in ways that were denigrating, dehumanizing, and violently oppressive, is a source of great sorrow and shame to us now. We regret the past actions of white colonists and Christians, in general, and Methodists in particular. We repent of the condescending attitudes and exclusive ways that sought to destroy through cultural and physical genocide Nations who had and have every right to exist without interference.
After our initial attempts at research, we discovered that many of the history books and articles we have access to were written solely from a White settler perspective. Many of the primary source documents came from locations like the Meeker estate and other landowners, and the U.S. government with its official policies in support of expansion and occupation across the West.
We discovered, and would highly recommend to all, this resource from the Puyallup Tribe offering their perspective and experience of the Cushman School online: www.puyalluptriballanguage.org/history/cushman.php. The Boarding School & Cushman Project began almost 10 years ago in the Puyallup Tribe’s Historic Preservation Department. We would encourage all our church members to watch those videos and do the work of becoming more informed and understanding neighbors. Some of the information contained in them will be painful to learn, but it is important.
We also recommend listening to the Indigenous Voices “Boarding School” podcast series out of the Fort Nisqually Living History Museum with Metro Parks Tacoma.
You can learn more about the general history of the Puyallup Tribe in their video “We are Puyallup: A Brief History of the Puyallup Tribe” or visit their website: www.puyalluptribe-nsn.gov/about-our-tribe.
We thank the Tribe for sharing these stories and making these resources available to us. We are saddened by the history of the harm experienced by your ancestors inflicted by our ancestors. We welcome the opportunity through humble learning and growing relationships to become friends who might, over time, even aspire to the status of trusted allies.
As followers of Jesus who seek to walk in ways of love and forgiveness, who also seek to do all the good we can according to the teachings of John Wesley, we hope to become a people of blessing to the Puyallup Tribe.
We admit that we’re not sure of how to go about this. We are learning. Undoubtedly, we will make mistakes, and can only apologize for our blunders and seek to correct those mistakes and act with greater sensitivity and wisdom in the future.
We suspect that we might learn from the example of our neighbors to the north and will study the Truth and Reconciliation processes being conducted in Canada as descendants of white settlers in Canada seek to begin healing with First Nations in lands claimed by Canada. We hope to find appropriately humble methods of inquiry, discovery, and relationship building that have helped other communities build trust and create new possibilities for partnership, learn from them, and employ them.
We also intend to reach out directly to the Puyallup Tribe and ask if they might be willing to help us do and be better. We understand the sensitivity in anti-racism work that White people need to do, to do our own work, and not demand that marginalized communities take care of us or protect our sensibilities.
Ultimately, our desire is to build healthy relationships between the descendants of White settlers, Methodist missionaries, Puyallup boarding school student legacies, and all Puyallup Tribal members. This will include asking what “health” means to all involved rather than taking for granted that “we know best.” We acknowledge that we do NOT know, and would endeavor to discover what life-giving friendship between neighbors might be.
We hope to form now a just and genuinely supportive relationship that would recognize Tribal Nationhood and autonomy and advocate with other white organizations (religious communities, government, etc.) for creating collaborative initiatives in support of shared teachings and values such as communal health, quality education, job creation, affordable housing, and creation care.
As part of this process, we welcome involvement and commentary from Puyallup UMC members, other Methodists, residents of Puyallup and other Pacific Northwest areas, Puyallup Tribal members, as well as First Nations people of other Tribes.
Additionally, we commit to praying about these things, that the Spirit of all that is holy, by whatever names known, might guide our steps and assist us in walking gently and tenderly where others have stomped so destructively.
We dream this dream and envision a future of peace and connection that becomes a gift across the generations.