You may have planned that this month, I will write a praise for Pope Francis, who died on April 20. True, I am sad at his death – sometimes when my heart remembers that he left, I feel the void. But more than sad, I am grateful for the gift of his life and the witness of his ministry. The world is better because he said yes 12 years ago to a job he never wanted, when he was already an old man, and probably thinking that he was finished with the heaviest of his work.
But it is not only Pope Francis in my mind. I also think of its call to the peripheries – among its most prophetic and perhaps the least assisted warnings. Admittedly, what he called the “peripheries” is only for those of us who perceive us in a “center”. To understand the periphery, it is therefore necessary to understand the center.
In our anti -racism work, we use a tool developed by the formation of Carrefour anti -racism called Center / Borderlands. It is a way of understanding the impact of racism. The political, economic, social, technological and cultural power in any society tends to be in the hands of a certain demographic group. In the United States, overall, power is monopolized by educated and rich white men (extremely rich!). The others of us are, more or less, on the peripheries of this power, depending on our position compared to the “center”.
So when I sat with friends recently to discuss the day of indigenous peoples, I learned how those from us close to the center perceive as peripheral women of the American Indian and Alaska (AI / An). Previously, before, during this meeting, I learned that on May 5 was “the indigenous day of indigenous women”.
I learned from our sister Barbara Ann Bogenschutz, who gave almost 25 years to the Ministry of American Indians, whom American women with Indians are confronted in a disproportionate manner with sexual violence, homicide and human trafficking. I did not know how shocking disproportionate was.
According to a study on the website of the National Congress of American Indians:
• Homicide is the third highest cause of death for women and daughters of the American and Alaska Indians (AI / year) aged 15 to 24, almost three times the rate for non -Hispanic white women.
• 96% of women victims of sexual violence suffer this violence in the hands of the authors NO AI / NA.
• In 2018, 5,712 AI / NA women lacked in the Urban Indian Health Institute report. Only 116 of them were listed in the federal database of the missing people of the doj.
Do we even worry, here in Illinois, where the Indian dismissal law of 1830 was so successful that until this March, there was not a single tribe recognized by the federal government with land in our state? Although the American Indian population here is almost invisible for most of us, Illinois has the sixth largest Amerindian population in the country, around 280,000 people.
You may be wondering how it happened. Partly, it was the consequence of a project from the XXth century Indian Affairs Bureau. From 1950 to 1972, the “voluntary relocation program” of the BIA provided native families a few hundred dollars and one -way tickets for a city, where, thought went, there would be better access to jobs and schools. Of course, this has also meant the more in -depth dilution of the culture and life routes of indigenous families. A BIA commissioner later called on the program “a underfuncted and poorly designed program … essentially a single-way from rural to urban poverty”.
“The real measure of any society can be found in the way it treats its most vulnerable members,” said Mahatma Gandhi.
“I prefer a bruised, injured and dirty church, because it was in the streets, rather than an unhealthy church to be confined and cling to its own security,” said Pope Francis in his encyclical, The joy of the Gospel.
Heaven knows, many religious groups and the US government have a lot of genocidal history to be in exemption. At least, we have stopped subscribing to the erroneous policy of Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who said: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man”. But it is not enough.
We can’t get out of it saying “But it was so long ago. I had nothing to do with that. Isn’t it just time to move on?” Finding these sentences on our lips implies that we are much closer to the center than the peripheries, where trauma, poverty and structural violence continue to injure. To reference the Reverend Robert Schreiter, a Catholic theologian who has spent decades facilitating reconciliation in the nations torn by the civil war, it is only authors, or perhaps the heirs of the power of the authors, who believe that the suffering ends in war.
We have to worry, because not to worry about decreases our own humanity as much as the humanity of murdered, missing – or any other groups that we have relegated to the margins of our society. What we could discover, if we align ourselves with the suffering of those who are chased, abandoned, ignored, abundant and forgotten, this is what Pope Francis wanted us to learn: the wounds heal and the real joy can be found, by a deep encounter, a sincere atonement and a humble and active repair.
Sister Beth Murphy, OP, is the director of communication for the Dominican sisters of Springfield and member of the anchy House anchor team, where the Dominicans have an awareness program for young adult women.