The-Ave.US

CNN blew the whistle today on a Catholic-run Indian boarding school in South Dakota for soliciting donations with fictional stories.

St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota, sends out 30 million mailers a year that raise about $50 million a year for the 200-student school. The mailers feature personal stories of Indian children who don’t exist. The school defends the practice by saying the made-up stories about fake children describe real situations. But CNN says it’s received complaints about the marketing tactic for over two years, and says some Native Americans consider the mailers “disparaging.”

CNN said that, as far as it could see, the money is being used for “the right reasons,” and the school’s students appeared to be “happy, well-fed, and well-housed.” But CNN, although given a tour of the campus, wasn’t allowed to film and school leaders refused to be interviewed.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/17/us/south-dakota-indian-school-fundraising-investigation/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

I smell a rat. Divide $50 million by 200 students and you get $250,000 per year for each student. That’s the school’s income from its charitable solicitation mailers with the fictional stories about fake students. Does any boarding school have legitimate costs that high? Even the snobby elite boarding schools for children of the ultra-rich?

The BBB Wise Giving Alliance is a reputable charity-rating organization affiliated with the Better Business Bureau and several other charity watchdog groups. Their website, give.org, says St. Joseph’s Indian School passes 17 and fails 3 of their standards. The “fails” are for (1) board oversight, (2) program expenses, and (3) truthful materials. Give.org said the school made “emergency” appeals to prospective donors for heating expenses in South Dakota’s “brutally cold winters” when it had over $64 million of assets. You can read more details of their rating here:

http://www.give.org/charity-reviews/national/american-indian/st-josephs-indian-school-and-missions-in-chamberlain-sd-675

Privately-run Indian boarding schools, often by religious missionaries, have a checkered history. Most were established in the late 1800s and early 1900s (St. Joseph’s was founded in 1927), and became a major part of the U.S. government’s failed Indian “assimiliation” strategy, and received government funding for that purpose. Indian children were effectively kidnapped from their families, forcibly divorced from their tribal cultures (e.g., punished for speaking their native languages), and taught the white man’s ways. The idea was to get rid of Indians by abolishing their reservations and absorbing them into white culture. It didn’t work and had disastrous impacts on Native American communities. And the Indian boarding school system became rife with corruption, neglect, and abuse. These problems were a major factor in Congress eventually passing the Indian Child Welfare Act, which restricts authorities in removing Native American children from their families and communities.

I’m not suggesting that St. Joseph’s Indian School participated in those abuses, although I’m aware that a lawsuit by several former students who alleged they were abused at the school in the 1970s is pending in South Dakota courts.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/137073748.html

Rather, my focus is the CNN story about the school’s dishonest fundraising practices, and the red flags popping up about its finances. Is this really a bona fide charity run by a religious order with altruistic motives for the benefit of poor children from Indian Country? Or is it a lucrative business venture that’s making a few white people rich by posing as a charity and using poor Indian kids as pawns? It wouldn’t be the first time someone did that while wrapping themselves in a religious cloak to make shady financial dealings look like do-gooding.