The Truth about Friends and Native Americans....

If I were to ask you: “have Quakers been good to Native people?” What is your answer?  I think most Friends would conjure up the Benjamin West painting of William Penn sitting under a tree with members of the Lenape tribe and the often repeated story of PA making a treaty with the tribe rather than killing them as was done in most other states.   Or perhaps you would think of the famous Doyle Penrose painting of some Indians quietly sneaking into an old time Friends Meeting as they worshipped.   Or maybe you would simply be aware of FCNL’s dedicated work for decades to prod the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to treat natives well and especially to honor the treaties.  

As a birth right Friend this is what I was raised with a sense that I was from one of the “good churches” who had treated natives well and until recently had felt that if I told a Native person that I was Quaker that it would have immediately identified me as an allie.  I like most other Friends with progressive consciousness, signed for years petitions for Leonard Peltier’s release and even wrote to President Obama with the hope that Leonard would finally be pardoned and not have to die in prison.  I have mourned the trail of tears, the intentional small pox infestations and the cruel stories of children ripped from their families and forced to go to boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their language, were often beaten or sexually abused and where the cultural extinction began in earnest.   I have thought “what ignoramus’ thought it a good idea to strip a culture of its language” the very means it tells its story, and mourned the restrictions against Native spiritual practices.

You may share my shock and horror then at the discovery that these “ignoramus” were indeed Quakers. Paula Palmer has written about this in Friends Journal and if you have not read her article please do: https://www.friendsjournal.org/quaker-indian-boarding-schools/.   She tells us that Quakers were among the largest promoters of boarding schools for Native people and ran 30 such schools primarily in the Midwest.   How do you grow up Quaker and in the Midwest and not know this shameful history?   Apparently, we have become embarrassed enough of it that we do not speak of it – even while still speaking of our other “good deeds” towards Natives.

 Having perceived Native tribes to be people (a slight improvement over the commonly held belief at the time that Natives were “animals” or “savages”), and having out of a general conviction towards non-violence had for the most part managed not to engage in killing them, Quakers still held the culturally biases view point that they lived “primitively” and that white culture with its language, and it technology was culturally superior.   Once one buys into the myth of superiority one is quickly down the path of unconscious white supremacy.  It is on this logic path that Quakers concluded that the best thing for the Native people was for them to go to school and learn what we considered the most important lessons of our culture.  This is a path that believe assimilation is best for some other group of people. 

Seeing Native resistance to this, the idea was arrived at that if children were separated from their parents and not allowed to speak their native language then they would be receptive to the offerings of the schools.    From this flawed logic Friends not only encouraged the idea of Indian boarding schools, but Friends being big proponents of education we actually set up and ran many of these Indian boarding school.  (This flawed notion of helping those “less fortunate” is the same logic that lead us to our other biggest mistake – the setting up of the penitentiary system – in the naively idealistic notion that if prisoners had quiet time alone for meditation and reflection that they would arrive at pence and eventually redemption.)

I have wondered before why some Native people I have met have last names that I think of as “Quaker” names.   I was aware that at the boarding schools they were forced to give up their Native names and go by English names.  I thought only first names.  It was only recently that I learned that there were scholarships to help pay for Native children to go to school and that  they were then given the last name of their Quaker “patrons”.   I cannot tell you the pain I feel at meeting native people carrying this colonial marker of Quaker fallacious thinking.

In my next Post I will talk more about the process of “decolonizing our own minds” and beginning to look at how we live on this land – this land that is someone else’s.   However, a good starting place as Friends is to learn our true history in relationship to Native People and to begin to tell truthfully that story.   So for example that Doyle Penrose painting I mentioned at the beginning.   That story, as it is told, is that a local tribe who were angry and had been aggressive in the area arrived at the Meeting house on a Sunday while the members were worshiping, they entered but felt the “Presence of the Great Presence” and so remained quiet, share a meal with them and leave behind a white feather as a sign of friendship.   (The implication being that if we were not so Holy then the Friends there might have all been killed.)  Thus we feel proud of ourselves from being different from other white people of the time.   What is unsaid in the normal telling of that story is that the land the  NY Meeting house was on was undoubtedly land that Tribe had occupied.   We still have that picture in many Meeting Houses today.  What sort of message does that send any Native who might happen in our doors?  Just like it is time for the South to take down statues of Confederate “war heroes”,  it is time for us to take down such paintings and tell more accurate stories about our relationships to the original inhabitants of this land.