The Jesuits are sorry. Last fall, Jesuit-founded Georgetown University apologized to the descendants of 272 slaves sold by the institution in 1838. In addition to the formal apology, the school announced plans to rename some buildings, construct a public memorial, and possibly offer scholarships or preferential treatment to those descendants. Now, the Jesuits have started to consider other aspects of their behavior in 19th-century America and have announced that they plan to give 525 acres of land that they own in South Dakota to the Rosebud Sioux tribe.
The parcels, which were given to the Jesuits in the 1880s by the U.S. government for use in their work as missionaries to the Indians, do not currently house any church facilities. And there are certainly no plans to build any. In a YouTube video announcing the transfer, Rev. John Hatcher, president of the St. Francis Mission, explained, “the mission is not in the property business. .  .  . [W]‌e are out of a colonial approach to the work of mission.” He says it is time for the order to have an “adult relationship” with the Lakota people.
The Jesuits, like other religious orders and churches, have come in for plenty of criticism in recent years for the way they treated natives, and especially for the Indian boarding schools they ran. These schools, which were charged by the American and Canadian governments with educating natives, abused untold numbers. In 2015, Pope Francis reiterated the church’s apologies for its role in crimes against indigenous people. “I say this to you with regret: Many grave sins were committed against the Native people of America in the name of God.”
Today, though, most Indians are Christians, and some of the only functioning institutions on reservations are those run by churches. Catholic schools like Red Cloud on Pine Ridge and St. Labre, which educates Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indians in Montana, are the only places where kids have a chance of learning basic academic skills and in many cases going on to college. In addition to offering stability and hope to the children of these chaotic and often violent communities, these schools are also doing everything possible to preserve the language and culture of the locals.
The Jesuits will no doubt pat themselves on the back for this land transfer and outsiders will applaud what they see as a new, enlightened attitude toward native people. But this gesture will do absolutely nothing for the Rosebud Sioux.
Which, by the way, is really saying something. Todd County, S.D., home to the Rosebud Sioux, is the second-poorest county in the United States. The unemployment rate is over 80 percent, and three quarters of those who are employed live below the poverty level. Along with the Pine Ridge reservation, also in South Dakota, the Rosebud Sioux have the lowest life expectancy rate of any community in the country. So why not give them more land? Surely such a gift could improve things on the margins at least.
Responding to the announcement of this gift, Harold Compton, deputy executive director of Tribal Land Enterprises (the Rosebud Sioux’s land management corporation), said that this “is a plus for everybody.” He estimates the land may be worth as much as $2,000 per acre. But it’s not as if the Jesuits are just handing over $1 million to the tribe. In fact, by handing over the land to the tribal government, it will be placed “in trust” and thus be rendered all but worthless.
While many Americans think that a reservation is a way to protect native lands from greedy white people, reservations were originally set up to get Indians out of the way of westward expansion. Today the reservation system continues to keep many American Indians in abject poverty.
Because the land is held in trust by the federal government, individual Indians cannot buy or sell it even among themselves without the permission of an agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Indians cannot get mortgages because a bank could never foreclose on the property, so there is essentially no collateral. Indians cannot use their land to get a home equity loan, which means they don’t have the access to capital that many Americans use to start small businesses. Land that is held by the tribe is even worse. In order to determine how to use communal land, some tribes require near-unanimous votes, a process that has halted any kind of economic development. Reservation land has become what the famed economist Hernando de Soto calls “dead capital.”
If the Jesuits really wanted to improve the situation of the Rosebud Sioux, they would take the land, divide it into smaller parcels, and deed it over to individual natives, chosen by lottery or some kind of entrepreneurial competition. In this way, the Jesuits could actually give the Sioux the land they need to increase their wealth. The Jesuits have the chance to do for the community what no amount of government subsidies has been able to accomplish—give them property rights.
Individual Indians might choose to use the land for grazing cattle. Or they might decide to use it to build a home. (Because of the difficulty in getting a mortgage, there is a severe housing shortage on many reservations, and large extended families are forced to share small trailers.) Perhaps the recipient of such a parcel might decide to start a business—a pizza place, a convenience store, etc. There is so little commerce on the reservations that residents drive hundreds of miles for the most basic supplies. After a few years, perhaps it would finally be obvious to observers both inside and outside of the native community that the people who received these parcels—who now own their land outright—are much better off than those whose land is ostensibly protected by the government.
If that were to happen, then the Jesuits would truly have begun to atone for their sins—and for ours.
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, is the author of The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.
