Sonja Thomas’s presentation on “Indians on the Reservation: Missionary Priests from India and Catholic Settler Colonialism” was very interesting and brought about topics that I realized I really don’t know much about. First and foremost, I feel guilty that I don’t know much about Native American issues and struggles, but I also question the American education system for not teaching me more about this important subject.
To start off, I appreciated that Sonja Thomas began with an expert from current events related to the topic. The first slide was about Nick Sandmann, the student at Convington Catholic High School who was recently in the news for laughing at a Native American man. This opened up the presentation in a intriguing way, for probably everyone in the room has seen that video/heard about Nick Sandmann/are interested to know more.
One piece of information that I thought was extremely interesting was that when American priests set out to other places they are called missionaries but if priests from other countries, such as Asian countries, come to America they are called “imported goods”. This difference in language has created a great misunderstanding and extreme racism. As Isabella said in her post, there are definitely some parallels with how America looks at immigration these days, also being racist to those who come to America/acting like they are “imported goods”.
Thomas explained her background, coming from a very Catholic family in a predominately white town in Montana. The town was located near Native People’s Reservations and she was constantly surrounded by Indians Priests who were friends of her family. When listening to her ethnographic research it made me think a lot about my current class, Sociology Research Methods, and how we are learning that it is so difficult to do research from both an insider and an outsider perspective. Sonja is both an insider and an outsider in this research, since she is going home and researching her family friends/neighbors/teachers/etc. She is an insider because they trust her and she knows them but she is an outsider because she is doing research. As she was saying, one person she interviewed was very racist and she didn’t know if they were telling her those things because she was an insider to them, or because she was an outsider. That is a common dilemma, and I wonder if she would have had the same powerful interviews if she was a complete stranger coming in trying to get information (probably not).
The way Sonja Thomas wrapped up was enlightening. She first talked about how the Montana archives are very frustrating and it is extremely difficult to find information which brought her to the topic of the presence of the past. She said there is an effort to erase the presence of the past but instead we need to focus on the presence of the past. She ended by saying that history promotes world understanding and fosters peace, which I think she is doing a great job by studying this topic and continuing her research.