Abolition is ceremony: Christianity, carcerality, and the Cherokee Mission School

The Indian mission school, with its haunting institutional merge of Christianity and education, marks how carcerality and its categories structure not only the Native boarding school, educational, and child welfare systems that follow in what is now the United States, but the carceral state itself. Indeed, this material and ideological punishment infrastructure is a prerequisite for the politics of genocide, fascism and authoritarianism. These ongoing colonial projects that we live with today make historic sites of settler care, learning, and religious fervor, penal harbingers for the carceral moment we live in. This article examines this settler project through the evangelizing “mission” of Valley Towns Baptist Mission school, the largest and most popular settler mission among the ᏣᎳᎩ/AniKituwah/Cherokee people. As a key point of first contact with forms of settler colonialism and Christian supremacy, the school emerges as a contested site where evangelical practices, logics, and ideologies systematically sought to eradicate Cherokee knowledge, life ways, and spiritual cosmologies. Amid ongoing counter-archival efforts to unravel the fate of family ancestors who attended this school, I draw from official and legal documents, Native elder stories, land walks, and Indigenous scholarship that unveil a field of carceral christianizing cruelty and enduring strands of life flourishing cosmologies. These tensions continue to shape how Cherokee and Indigenous peoples address harm and harm-doing without prisons and jails, laying out some of the world's most abiding and foundational ways into struggles for communal healing, safety, accountability, and abolitionist plotting for power.