Last October, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration sold their two-acre Marywood Franciscan Spirituality Center in Wisconsin to the Lac du Flambeau Band of the Ojibwe people for its 1966 purchase price of $30,000, well below the market value of $2.6 million.
In a new article, U.S. Catholic described the transaction as “the first instance of Catholics in the United States returning land to the original Indigenous tribes in the name of reparations.”
“We dived into the aspects of what has happened to the Indigenous people, all of the treaties, and our part in the boarding school that was part of their forced assimilation and losing their culture, as well as our white dominance,” said Sister Sue Ernster, the religious institute’s president.
“There are opportunities for us to disrupt the current system with all the adversarial energy,” Sister Ernster added. “Hopefully, the intergenerational trauma can start to dissipate. It’s a real opportunity for others to see there is another way.”