Reverend Augustus W. Loomis

Description

Reverend Augustus W. Loomis was a Presbyterian missionary who sought to convert Chinese migrants in San Francisco to Christianity throughout the 1860s and 1870s. Prior to his work in California, Loomis worked at an Indian boarding school for Creek children. Indian boarding schools were abusive institutions that abducted Indigenous children from their homes and imprisoned them in residential complexes where students were forcibly ‘civilized’ into white Christianity. Hundreds of Native children died in boarding schools, where they were subjected to attempted cultural genocide, unliveable conditions, and immense violence at the hands of their ‘caretakers.’