Presbyterian church leaders have determined that closing Juneau’s Memorial Presbyterian Church was an act of racism. IndianCountry reporter Joaqlin Estus talks with KTOOpubmedia about the closure and its impact. Take a listen:
Listen: Can you tell me the story of Memorial Presbyterian Church?So, Memorial Presbyterian Church was heir to an earlier church that actually started in 1887. In Juneau, the town had two churches. They were segregated. There was a white church, and then the Native church and Walter Soboleff took over the Native church in 1940, I think it was. And by 1962, it was just the heart of the Juneau Indian Village. People thought of it as part of their extended family.
So the Ḵunéix̱ Hídi Northern Light United Church — it’s been renamed. Ḵunéix̱ Hídi, it means “house of healing.” And that was kind of the first step in the reparations that the Presbyterian church made towards the Native ministries committee and the Native members of the Northern Light Church. And so right after the church was closed, there were two devastating events. One was developers in Douglas burned down the Douglas Indian village there. They condemned the land, saying it was needed for development, and then burned the village.
And then the church goes on to say, to acknowledge that, that the closure, the justification for the closure “merely substituted assimilationist racism for the previous practice of segregationist racism.” And I’m wondering if you have thoughts on that, or anything to say about the fact that the church came in, was a force of assimilation, but then was run by Walter Soboleff and became a community center and then was taken away, and how that impacted people? I think the difference between what Walter Soboleff was doing and what mainstream Presbyterian boarding schools and churches were doing is that he spoke in both Lingít and English.
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