“To Obtain the Gold…for the Needy and Poor”

Abstract

This article tracks the nuns who in 1864 established a boarding school and convent at St. Ignatius, Montana Territory, on the Flathead Indian Reservation. It excavates how the nuns’ notion of spiritual sacrifice and suffering fortified them to keep going in the face of the challenges of begging. Yet, their begging from gold miners was more than simply an act of self-sacrifice. Begging was also environmental labor and environmentally shaped labor. Begging was gendered. Begging was deeply interconnected with the U.S. settler empire, which included displacing Indigenous people, creating reservations, running boarding schools, fostering white settlement, establishing territories, building infrastructure, and following mineral rushes. Nuns narrated their labor as spiritual sacrifice, yet this framing decontextualized and obscured the violence and dispossession that their labor entailed. This article is part of a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West.”