[Anon_451]

Story has two sides to it. On one, you have a faith-based private school built on a native reservation with the explicit purpose of being as bigoted as possible toward the people living there, which is horrible, but on par for the behavior of such organizations. On the other, you have natives who continue to send their children to that school despite generations of this pattern because of better educational outcomes than the U.S. federal public school.

There are a few possible calls to action here. You're not going to convince the ministry to change their outlook -- you might as well ask an alligator to stop eating meat. As a religious organization they are exempt from many laws that would get government or corporate groups in trouble, particularly if the families signed a paper to enroll their kids. It comes down to biting the bullet and playing along with the school's BS, or biting the other bullet and seeking alternative educational providers. It would be great if as a community they could find their own path to creating better public schools (having the freedom to build casinos provides a readily-available revenue stream, if you can solve the leadership corruption issue), but failing that, I guess the U.S. federal government could throw more money at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

I can emphasize with the kids because I grew up atheist in an overwhelmingly Mormon backwoods town, where I was the "devil worshiper" and treated like garbage for it. On the other hand, the families have alternatives available to them. If the alternatives suck, they should look into how to make them better.