Between Saddles and Saints: Finding Political Theology at an Indigenous Boarding School

This article assesses political theology at residential schools from several angles. Scholarship on residential schools for Indigenous youth has powerfully critiqued their inherent racism and profiteering, but has yet to recognize the massive influence of religion. By using the lens of political theology, this impact becomes apparent. At St. Francis Mission School, Catholic immigrant staff members used children as evidence of their own theological and political capacities. Students were seen as characters in stories that superficially concerned their future citizenship, but were ultimately about the teacher's assimilationist. Lessons promised children economic success and spiritual gains in exchange for their religious and political subservience. They also ignored children's own agency as subjects capable of making sense of their own experience. I look towards playtime and craft as moments and spaces where children articulated an alternative vision of their civic and spiritual futures, one which remained unseen by self-concerned pedagogues.