Unorthodox Pleas for Contract Schools: Mother Mary Joseph Lynch and the Boarding School for Native Students in Morris, Minnesota

ABSTRACT: To better understand how Catholic women religious could participate in the "cultural genocide" of Native Americans perpetrated by boarding schools, this article considers Mother Mary Joseph Lynch, a Sister of Mercy, who founded Minnesota's Morris Industrial School for Indians in 1887. Using lenses provided by Susan Neiman and Mary Fulbrook, the article delves into the beginnings of the boarding school in Morris and considers what prompted the Sisters of Mercy to begin such an endeavor before analyzing several texts created by Lynch. The article begins with the assumption that the Sisters of Mercy wanted to be true to the values articulated by their founder, Catherine McAuley, as it also trusts the countless Native peoples who have conveyed the generational harm done to them by a process that systematically attempted to destroy their identities and their cultures.