‘An important moment of justice’: Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington gifts land to Salish School of Spokane for new campus along the Spokane River

Each morning, students and staff at the Salish School of Spokane greet the sun with a booming drum circle, a nod to the traditional practices of Indigenous Salish culture the school seeks to revitalize.

There’s a key difference in the ceremony performed by 21st century children and their ancestors’ pre-European contact: the roaring morning commuter traffic that surrounds the school, sandwiched between Maple and Ash streets. It’s not the most welcome accompaniment to their ritual, students said.

In a few years’ time, the constant vehicle din will be replaced with chirps of talkative robins and the distant rush of the Spokane River as the school prepares to relocate to a much more fitting setting, in part thanks to a reparations gift of land from Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington.

“It’s emotional because it’s a return, and you can feel the energy and the hopefulness of the students and the families and everyone here for a path forward,” said LaRae Wiley, Colville tribal member, founder and executive director of the school.

Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington officially passed off the deed Wednesday to more than 2 acres of property near their housing facilities along the Spokane River.

The site at 2752 West Elliot Court will become “River Family Haven” as soon as 2028. A $32 million project, it’ll house a much larger space for the Salish immersion school, a cultural community center and eventually 72 units of family housing, all adjacent to 30 acres of untouched ponderosa woods of the Three Islands Conservation Area along a lazy section of the Spokane River.

Eventually, Wiley imagines the school’s space to be a full Salish village, with a traditional sweat lodge, space for stick games, drying racks for fish and tanning hides, and gardens of serviceberries and other edible flora.

The private immersion school enrolls around 50 kids from preschool to 8th grade, teaching all core subjects entirely in Colville-Okanagan Salish, an endangered language of which there are only a handful of fluent speakers still living. Salish is the indigenous language of many Northwestern tribes, and each speaks their own dialect that shares some similarities with other tongues in the Salish language family.

Students who performed in the ceremony Wednesday were quick to explore their new grounds. As adults mingled and chatted, they weaved through the towering Ponderosa to catch sight of the Spokane River, walking worn down trails lined with yellow balsamroot flowers and purple lupin beginning its blooms.

“I saw a lot of the plants that we used to eat and stuff,” said 4th-grader Irie Wiley-Camacho, Wiley’s grandchild.

Namely, balsamroot is a traditional edible plant, the kids explained. They learned in school how to harvest and peel the furry skin off the stem for a slightly bitter, celery-like food.

“We usually eat the stem because they have lots of water in them,” Irie explained.

For Wiley, the gift satisfies a years-long “pie in the sky” dream to settle her school along the banks of the Spokane River, which has fed and guided Indigenous people for generations.

“Our elders say that the River speaks Salish; that the land still speaks Salish,” she said last June when the plans were announced. “The land is lonely for our language.”

Wiley never thought she’d see the dream realized in her lifetime, she said.

She wasn’t alone in feeling the doubt.

“Well, we’re really happy to have this land, because I didn’t think that this would happen in my lifetime,” Irie said. “I never thought we’d have a school on the land.”

The students are excited for their daily drumming ritual in the new space, without the presence of cars.

“It’s such a beautiful day and so emotional because it’s a return of Salish-speaking people to the river. This is traditionally Spokane tribal land, and we’re so fortunate to be here, and be on this land and be next to the river,” Wiley said Wednesday.

The first part of the project, the school and community center, will cost around $10.7 million. The school has secured $7.7 million of that, including a $2.7 million federal grant, $2.5 million from the state and $100,000 from the city of Spokane.

The new school will double the amount of kids enrolled, said Salish School of Spokane Board President Randall Schleuffer, and increase its offerings to 12th grade. Their classes for adult learners will also increase, he said.

Eventually, Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington will pay to build 72 units of housing near the school. After 15 years, when the low-income tax incentive loans mature, the Salish school will own the entirety of the haven, from the land to the buildings.

Motivation for the gift stems in part from atrocities committed against bloodlines of Indigenous people at the hands of the Catholic church.

A large factor in the lack of Salish speakers today is the lingering effects of forced assimilation at Native American boarding schools, present in the United States and Canada from the 1800s to 1970s. At these schools, white staff abused Indigenous children, often taken unwillingly from their families and stripped of cultural identifiers like their hair, clothing and languages in the name of “killing the Indian, saving the man.”

Forced labor, beatings, solitary confinement, disease and sexual assault were commonplace. Thousands of Indigenous children died at these schools, staff sometimes burying their bodies in mass unmarked graves that went undiscovered for decades.

The federal government operated over 400 of these schools, as did religious groups. The Catholic Church operated the most of any religious group, according to a 2022 report from the United States Department of the Interior.

Both Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington and Salish school staff acknowledge these atrocities and their ever-present effects, including the lack of fluent Salish speakers that the school now seeks to address through educating the young.

The gift of land is an effort of “reparations” and “justice,” said Rob McCann, president and CEO of Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington.

“This is really a very special moment, not just for Catholic Charities, but for the Catholic Church,” McCann said. “It’s an important moment. It’s an important moment of justice. It’s an important moment of repair, and it’s just a very small drop in the bucket of the repair that’s needed in our country, and we are very keenly aware of that, and it’s super important to the mission of why we’re doing this.”

When the school and charity began talks of their partnership, across the border in Canada the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation announced the discovery of the bodies of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, a 7-hour drive from Spokane. Emotions were high for Wiley’s team, especially when hundreds and hundreds more bodies were found in other mass graves near old boarding schools.

Not all members of the Salish school’s board were eager to link arms with Catholic Charities, given their history with the church, Wiley said in June. It took grace to accept, but it’s a step towards healing, she said Wednesday.

“Personally, I feel like someone is willing to help and offers that help, that’s the way that we can heal,” Wiley said. “By saying ‘Yes, help us,’ and creating those relationships that are grounded in trust and honesty and openness.”