The church helped take the land, staff the boarding schools, and — at Sand Creek — even lead the massacre. Repentance means saying that plainly, listening to the peoples harmed, and giving things back. Here is what that has looked like in the United Methodist Church, and in our own corner of Oregon.

Reviewed by the Beaverton First UMC editorial team · Fact-checked July 2026

Every Methodist church in Oregon stands on land that Indigenous peoples tended for thousands of years before a missionary ever arrived. Ours begins there too: the Willamette Valley mission of the 1830s and 40s that helped found this state — and this congregation — arrived among the Kalapuya peoples even as introduced diseases and, later, forced removal to the Grand Ronde reservation devastated them.¹ We have told that story honestly in our own history and in our article on Jason Lee’s mission. This article widens the lens: what the broader church did to Indigenous peoples, when it finally admitted it, and what repair has begun to look like.

Sand Creek: the hardest truth first

On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington — an ordained Methodist minister turned soldier — led roughly 675 troops in an attack on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho village camped at Sand Creek, Colorado, under both an American flag and a white flag of truce. More than two hundred people were killed, most of them women, children, and elders.²³ The church of his day never disciplined him.⁴ It took until 1996 — 132 years — for a General Conference, meeting in Denver — the city from which Chivington’s troops had marched — to express its regret and apologize for Chivington’s actions.⁵ In 2016, delegates received a church-commissioned historical report on Sand Creek and stood in lament with Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants.⁶

The boarding schools

For generations, the United States ran a system of boarding schools designed to strip Native children of language, family, and culture — “kill the Indian, save the man,” in the era’s own chilling phrase — and churches helped run it. The United Methodist Church’s own Commission on Archives and History has published research detailing Methodist involvement, including a list of known schools with Methodist ties and how church bodies helped fund and staff them.⁷ The church now invites every congregation to observe September 30 as a Day of Remembrance for the children who suffered and died in those schools,⁸ supports the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition,⁹ and has advocated for a federal Truth and Healing Commission on the boarding-school era.¹⁰

Repentance is not a feeling. It is returned land, kept promises, and the patience to listen.

2012: the church asks forgiveness

On April 27, 2012, at its General Conference in Tampa, The United Methodist Church held a churchwide Act of Repentance Toward Healing Relationships with Indigenous People — a formal service asking God’s forgiveness for the church’s violence against and neglect of Native peoples, with Sand Creek named among its causes.⁴¹¹ Native United Methodists welcomed it honestly: as “a start,” to be measured by what the church actually did next.¹¹ Annual conferences were charged to continue the work locally — which brings the story home.

Close to home: what our own conference has done

Our regional body, the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference, has tried to make repentance concrete. In 2018 it returned a first parcel of its Wallowa Lake camp property — in the homeland the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) were driven from in 1877 — to the Nez Perce, whose fisheries department now manages it as habitat for native fish.¹² Then, in 2021, the conference went further: it handed the Nez Perce Tribe the keys and the deed to the Wallowa United Methodist Church itself, returning the building and its land outright after 144 years, in a ceremony of friendship, celebration, and repentance.¹³¹⁴

That work is carried by Indigenous leadership within the church. The Greater Northwest Area’s Circle of Indigenous Ministries supports Native churches and ministry partners across our region — including Great Spirit United Methodist Church in Portland, led by Rev. Dr. Allen Buck of the Cherokee Nation, who helped shape the Wallowa land-return ceremonies and continues to lead truth-telling work about the church’s history in Oregon, including the legacy of the Willamette mission.¹³¹⁵

Why this belongs on a church website

Because the gospel we preach does not need protecting from the truth. Our own church history names what the mission era cost the Kalapuya, whose descendants live today as members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.¹ Telling the story of Sand Creek, the boarding schools, and the long road to repentance is part of the same commitment — the one that runs through our whole tradition and through the church’s parallel reckoning with slavery and racism: do no harm, do good, and where harm has been done, repair it.

Questions people ask

What was the Act of Repentance?

A formal service at the 2012 General Conference in Tampa in which The United Methodist Church asked God’s forgiveness for its violence against and neglect of Indigenous peoples, and committed itself and its regional conferences to ongoing acts of healing.⁴¹¹

Did Methodists really run boarding schools?

Yes. The church’s own archives agency has documented Methodist-affiliated boarding schools and the ways church bodies funded and staffed them, and the church now marks September 30 as a Day of Remembrance for the children harmed.⁷⁸

What has happened here in Oregon?

The Oregon-Idaho Conference returned Wallowa Lake camp land to the Nez Perce in 2018 and the entire Wallowa United Methodist Church property in 2021, and Indigenous-led ministries like the Circle of Indigenous Ministries and Great Spirit UMC in Portland carry the truth-telling and healing work forward.¹²¹³

This is a story we will keep telling honestly — and a debt we will keep honoring. To read how it touches our own founding, start with our history and the story of the Methodist mission that helped found Oregon.