Here's an article about years of priest pedophilia against Native American children in church-run boarding schools in SD and how the SD legislature has passed laws to protect the "Church" from litigants.
Tom Friess
Inquisition Update
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South Dakota Boarding School Survivors Detail Sexual Abuse
The Dakota expression for child, wakan injan, can be translated as “they too are sacred,” according to Glenn Drapeau, Ihanktonwan Dakota and a member of the Elk Soldier Society on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. “To us, children are as pure as the holy moving energy of the universe, and we treat them that way,” he says.
When Native children arrived at Holy Rosary Mission, founded in 1888 at Pine Ridge to help in the conversion of the Oglala Lakota, nuns staffing the school described them as having good “morals” and giving “a tenth of the trouble white children cause,” Raymond A. Bucko wrote in Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Nevertheless, corporal punishment was meted out at Holy Rosary—“apparently without scruple,” according to Bucko—and was an important part of the effort to cut the children off from their parents, their language and their culture.
Across the nation, in both the secular and church-run schools the federal government required Native children to attend from the late 1800s to the 1970s, the goal was assimilation—“kill the Indian to save the man”—seemingly at any cost. Court documents filed in recent lawsuits against the boarding schools in South Dakota allege that as recently as the ’70s children were beaten, whipped, shaken, burned, thrown down stairs, placed in stress positions and deprived of food. Their heads were smashed against walls, and they were made to stand naked before their classmates. Untold numbers of children died over the century during which the residential schools flourished: some while en route to the institutions or at the schools themselves; others died of exposure and starvation while trying to escape, according to www.boardingschoolhealingproject.org/.
Native parents forced to part with their children under threat of imprisonment and even at gunpoint came to understand they might never see their youngsters again, and if they did, the children had often become strangers to their own people.
As a cost-saving measure, the federal government eventually turned much of the boarding-school system over to churches, primarily the Catholic Church, which used it to help expand its empire through the West. Churches, abbeys, convents and monasteries were built on or near reservations, and religious orders were founded and flourished.
Recent court settlements reveal that the education the church offered Native children featured not just brutal corporal punishment but also rampant sexual abuse. Some 400 Native ex-students in the Northwest and Alaska recently shared in a $166-million settlement with the Jesuits’ Oregon Province for childhood sexual abuse suffered at schools in that region. In Canada, approximately $1.9 billion was set aside for payments to survivors of its residential schools; more than 20,000 ex-students have submitted claims.
Since 2003 in South Dakota, 100-some former students of the state’s half-dozen so-called Indian Missions have sued the Catholic Dioceses of Sioux Falls and Rapid City; the religious orders that ran the mission schools; and Blue Cloud Abbey, in Marvin, South Dakota, which provided priests and is the final resting place of several alleged predators. The former students charge that priests, brothers, nuns, and lay employees raped, sodomized, and molested them, often for years. Court documents, including testimony and church records filed during the lawsuits’ initial phases, reveal bizarre, violent, and humiliating sexual abuse, along with the horrific physical abuse described above.
In 2010, South Dakota legislators discussed the church’s difficulty defending against the suits and passed a statute—written by a church attorney and submitted as a “constituent bill”—blocking those over 40 from suing institutions (such as the Church for childhood sexual abuse, though they may still sue individual perpetrators. Since virtually all the Native plaintiffs are over 40 and some of the alleged perpetrators are dead, many observers, including Robert Brancato, director of the South Dakota chapter of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, have accused the legislature of targeting the Native cases. “The law was designed both to make things difficult for Native Americans and to help the church,” said Brancato. In March 2011, a judge applied the statute to dismiss 18 of the boarding-school lawsuits, which have been appealed to the South Dakota Supreme Court.
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