Friends and Natives: Part III

This year at FGC the opening evening was a water ceremony lead by a Native woman, Pocana.  The second night the plenary speaker was Robin Wall Kimmerer.  And the third night a panel of three started out with a white woman Paula Parker speaking about Quaker involvement in the creation and running and promotion of Quaker boarding schools.  I do not know if the order of these speakers was intentional or somewhat an accident of total speakers available to the Gathering, but for me they built powerfully on each other.

Pocana brought our attention powerfully to the role of water in life.  Robin who is also a professor of botany, very use to speaking to white audiences reached for the symbols already familiar to this mostly white audience to translate her message.   She first touched into the idea of We the People from the US constitution and talked about the idea of inalienable rights.   She went on to point out that western culture makes living things; plants, animals, water, minerals, etc into "its" - that we make them into objects rather than into living beings - and that in so doing we disconnect from them and we turn a blind eye to the web of life.  She went to a native speaker of her language and asked him if they had pronouns that did not make other living things into it.  He said no, but helped her figure out that the word ki from their language could serve in this way as a pronoun for a living thing.  She wanted to pluralize too which in their language means adding an N which of course meant the plural is kin!  While she did not say this I am well aware that this how native people really think about all living things - that they are their brothers and their sisters and deserving of respect.  In fact respect is a key concept in Native culture.

She talked about how weird it was for her when she went to graduate school in botany to have to write about plants as things in order to pass her classes.  How foreign and awful a way of looking at them this felt to her after growing up feeling completely connected with them.  She then went on to introduce folks to the idea of the rights of nature.   She gave examples from other countries where River's were given legal rights and how that changes the equation of decisions that can be made about the river and the protections it has against things like pollution.  How it sort of raises it back up into visibility as something valid.  I could feel in my body a sort of relaxing when she spoke about this - a sort of feeling into how much more rational and peaceful the world would be if we treated all of life as connected to us and precious.

The next night was the panel which started with Paula Parker describing the role Quakers had played in the creation of boarding schools for Native people and then the promotion of them.   She explained that as pacifists horrified by the continual US military slaughter of Native tribes and also aware of how poor and marginalized the tribes were, Quakers saw  assimilation as the only solution.  The schools were created to "help" the children assimilate and were at first local schools.  At one point some Quakers met with President Grant and proposed that churches be put in charge of all of them everywhere and the Bureau of Indian Affairs because it was so corrupt.  Grant eventually decided to do this and divided the country into regions to be governed by different Churches.  Quakers were, I believe, in charge of Iowa, Kansas and the Dekotas.  At this time they moved to making the schools boarding schools and forcibly removing children from their parents and sending them far away where they often did not see their parents all year.   They were deliberately not allowed to speak their language, had their hair cut off, and where not allowed to perform any cultural or religious ceremonies. The pictures she showed of children in the boarding schools were the saddest, most depressed school class photos I have ever seen.  In the absolutely saddest thing I ever heard, the Quakers encouraged this separation because they felt they had "failed" in the local schools to assimilate the children, and it would take "stronger measures".  (My God where is the reflection on why this was "failing"?)

It is absolutely horrifying to me to learn the leading role Quakers played in this nightmare.  Because of course the boarding schools did play key roles in the loss of language of tribes, and of generational trauma which has lead to more alcoholism, domestic violence, suicides and parental alienation in Native populations.   It has been the cause of so much suffering.  Paula shared in an interest group I went to later in the week that sometimes still when she gives talks among Quakers about this some Friends still try to justify or minimize the effects.  I also wonder at what point in our history we realized what a big mistake this was - because we certainly don't talk about it!  I have been a Quaker all my life and have only learned this shameful history in the last year.

Next on the same panel was a Puerto Rician man, Oskar Pierre Castro, who then shared the role that Quakers played (at much the same time in history) of causing Puerto Rico to become a colony!  Puerto Rico had been invaded and conquered by the Spanish, then the French, Dutch and British.  The US had acquired it at the end of the Spanish American war, but it had no formal status.  He explained that Quakers hosted a meeting to discuss what should happen with Puerto Rico and there was a hurricane so most of the Puerto Rican delegate could not come.  Undaunted the US Quakers met and decided that Puerto Rico should become a colony of the US.  This was proposed and passed through US Congress without the actual input of the people of Puerto Rico (who are now in the present time quite divided about whether they would prefer to be a state or to be independent. ) 

The reason I include this panelist who was not talking about Native rights (but about indigenous rights of the people of Puerto Rico) is that I was very struck by the similar white supremacist thinking that Quaker engaged in during both situations.  In both cases they correctly perceived a social injustice that the US was engaging in, but then concluded that they as "good hearted" white people could decide what was best for the poor people of color group.  I wonder in what ways we are doing the very same right this minute in our history?  Having in the last year heard Quakers say things that i considered blatantly paternalistic towards people of color I do not think we have gotten over this mindset yet.

Personally when I moved from the Midwest, some 30 years ago, I was very surprised to meet Native people who were living on reservations that had fairly intact cultural practices.  I had come from where the tribes were so genocided and so pushed off their lands that it was hard to ever meet a Native person.   Here in the NW there are 27 enrolled tribes with over 61,000 members - as well as quite a few more unrecognized tribes.  Therefore the influence of Native Art and culture is felt throughout the region.  It is important to me; it is one of the reasons it would be hard for me to ever leave the NW.  Because of the myth of the Black Snake, shared by many tribes, many native people across the country have been coming off the reservations to fight climate change and to deliberate teach white people because their prophesies tell them there is a time when the Black Snake threatens all of civilization, and they must teach the white people if the earth is to survive.  I feel extremely fortunate to have been learning from local native activists. 

What is becoming increasingly clear to me is the US's unresolved, unapologized for genocide of Native people is inherently bound up in climate change.   That same colonizing mindset: the one that says it is ok to come and take that which is not yours, to take the resources of the land, to act as if we are "over' the land and the other living creatures on it, to live in a way that is disconnected from the history of the land or its rhythms or needs is the mindset that creates climate change.   It is a way of sleep walking on the land.  I'm coming to understand that we must both heal our relationship to Native People and to this land.   We will never solve climate change until we become connected to the land and to the entire web of life.  The reason why climate change is so "big" touching everything: how we use energy, how we manufacture and consume goods, how we produce food, how we build buildings, how we do transportation,etc etc.  is because we developed all of things in a paradigm of estrangement from the earth.  The very things we need to do to heal climate change are the things that will take up back into relationship with the earth.

Those of you who live in this area of the Salish Sea (Puget Sound to some) are aware that an Orca pod that lives here gave birth to the first baby in 3 years, and it died.  The grief stricken mother has been carrying the dead calf on her nose for 9 days now!  While this has been observed before for 3 days - this length of grieving is unknown of.  At this point the scientists are concerned for the life of the mother who is not really eating in her grief.  Some have postulated that the Orca mother, aware of human observation is carrying out a protest: screaming "look what you have done".  She should scream at us: the ways we have degraded the water, and the damns and the heating up of the water by climate change has severally reduced the Chinook Salmon population which is the main food source of the Orca who belong to a food chain with the Chinook Salmon.  The Orca population is shrinking because they do not have enough Salmon.  The local Lumi Tribe has often said at protests "We are the Salmon People.  Who will we be when there are no Salmon?"  This is a question we should all be asking - who will we be when there is no Salmon- because we are part of a web of life also with them.  They bring nutrients from the oceans back into our rivers and our forests - how will our whole ecosystem change without them?

This week after hearing a story on the local radio about this situation, it was followed by a story reporting that Congress is trying to pass a bill allowing the killing of 900 Sea Lion on the west coast because they are hanging out at the entrance from the ocean to the rivers where Salmon run and gorging on the Salmon, but the Salmon are so endangered that this is a disaster for the Salmon.  The Marine biologist interviewed were divided on this plan.  One stated that this is the 11th hour for the Salmon - that we are in such danger of them going extinct that we just have to kill the Sea Lions.  The other Marine Biologist interviewed stated that it is a big mistake because other attempts to kill off a species to protect another have badly backfired.   She pointed out that the Sea Lion also feed upon some of the main predators of juvenile Salmon -so when they won't be around to do that it will simply create another threat to the Salmon.   As I listened to this I could only think "stupid white person solution".   In other words, once again we are trying to manage and control nature while being so detached from it as to only create a certain disaster.  We are mad at the Sea Lion for eating the Salmon, but have we stopped for even one moment to examine our own bellying up to the trough?  Or the multiple way we are involved in both the dead baby orca and the dying Salmon?

If we stopped seeing ourselves as separate from the web of life perhaps we could hear the feedback from the system we are a part of? 

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.