Friends and Natives, part II: Decolonizing our Minds

This is part two of a post I did last month about Quakers and Native Americans.   It has become even more timely with the extreme actions of white supremacy that the Trump administration has engaged in during the last month, separating Hispanic immigrant parents from their children.  It is becoming more and more clear the ugly and hateful attitudes of the Trump administration to all brown colored people and that Trump's real agenda here as he faces a country that was crossing over from white majority to people of color majority is trying to turn back the hands of time by actually deporting people of color.  The violent suppression of Native people is the first systemic racism in the Americas, followed of course by slavery.   So colonization is a foundation in US white supremacy and it is therefore important to understand it.

A first step in de-colonizing ones own mind would be learning your own family history and faith history of oppression of Native People’s. (Which some people’s families came here well after the removals had happened, but that does not mean you are not benefiting from the outcomes of colonization.) For example, on whose tribal land do you now live?  https://native-land.ca/# What were the indigenous names for the significant geography of your area (the rivers, lakes, and mountains.)  Even some of the names we are told are Native names for local landmarks are in fact badly mispronounced English imitations of the real Native name for it.  Please notice the white privilege that we thought of these lands as “undiscovered” and unoccupied and therefore ours to name.  If I came to the city or town you live in and suddenly announced that hence forth it would be called “Hippopotamus” you would be indignant and wonder who I thought I was that I can just waltz in and name something that is already named in the awareness of all its residents.   And yet that is exactly what people of European descent did.  

So for example I grew up in Winnetka, Illinois – both names I were told were Native names – Winnetka does appear to mean "Beautiful Place" but it is unclear in what native language.  Illinois had a French ending because the French changed it from Illiniwek.  The tribe there, recorded by the US government as the Illinois called themselves the Inoka.  I then went to school in Indiana in territory that had belonged to the Miami (resulting in a nearby city being named that ) by 1846 most had been “removed”,  and the Osage tribe (official Bureau of Indian Management name – they referred to themselves at Wazhazhe).  The Miami and the Wazhazhe were both forced west to Oklahoma as were the Inoka.  So I grew up in lands with Native names but no Natives.  I knew there existed tribes in a few places in the US, but thought of them as mostly having been genocided long before my birth.  
It took moving to Seattle (a city named after a Native chief whose real name was Chief Sealth.)  before I met any real native Americans.   And then again I lived in a city that had forced the Duwamish tribe off its land and then denied them to this day official recognition as a Tribe – resulting in their having no reservation and no services.  Despite them popularly being referred to through the city as the Duwamish, this is turns out is also a mispronunciation of their name.

During the end of President Obama’s term he renamed Mt. McKinley as Mt. Denali its original name – in recognition of the indigenous people and that President McKinley had in fact never even been there.   However, Trump is now planning to rename it Mt. McKinley because he says Obama disrespected the former President McKinley  (There is of course blindness to the disrespect of a whole culture.)  My thought was ‘hmm well what if we all just kept calling it Mt. Denali?"   And then my mind went further and realized what if I just went to calling everything by its original name?  Would it help me to live with the humbling reality that all white Americans are standing on stolen land?

There are many other useful questions to begin looking at what it means to be the descendants of Settlers.  Unlike some people who were taught very rationalizing history about “Indian’s on the warpath” as a justification for US killing of Native tribes – I was fairly early on taught the ugly truth about the Trail of Tears, the slaughter of tribes etc.   But somehow this was still taught to me as “look what the US government did, look at what the army did”.   Somehow I was shielded till a native person called me the descendent of Settlers from the truth that indeed both sides of my family came to this country as “settlers”  - both took land awarded to them as if it were “empty”, “vacant”, and “unoccupied” and called it their own.  Suddenly I am seeing clearly that it was just such taking up of land that was why the army “cleared” the land, and why the treaties pushed the Natives further West and off their historic lands.  Suddenly I have to understand that indeed I have benefited from the complicity of my ancestors.

This is a good start to recognize how we are part of colonization.  And then we must look clearly look at how the media, Hollywood, tv and book portrayed the people indigenous to the United States.   I don’t know about you but when I was growing up they were still called “Indians” and tv shows and movies still showed them as “sneaky” and attacking white people (generally for no reason).  Books like the Little House on the Praire series, which was then turned into a tv show, portrayed the white people as nothing but kind, hard working and noble with a few references to Indians as threats.  Children still played in their imaginative play, as well as with little plastic figures “Cowboys and Indians” – a game in which the cowboys were the good guys and it was appropriate to kill all the Indians before they killed you.  (As a Quaker I was not allowed to play these games but that does not mean that my mind did not take in the programing.)  Phrases like “Indian giver”, and “circle the wagons” without any awareness of their racist origins.  For me decolonizing my mind means squarely confronting all these cobwebs, as well as confronting the implications of the term wilderness the gives lie to what was true about all US lands before they were “settled”.

Native People have been some of the most powerful fighters of climate change, using their treaty rights to stop massive oil pipeline and excavation projects.  And for that reason the tribes are under great threat under the Trump administration, which wishes to change their status to a race rather than to one of a sovereign nation.   This would be a clear opening move to strip all remaining power and self governance from them..  One example already happening is the desire of the Trump administration to strip an already financially strapped population because of the lack of jobs on reservations with health benefits by putting “work requirements” on them.  Health care was provide for under most treaties.  So the taking, and the violation of Native Tribes is not a historic footnote.  It has not stopped. 

So the big question remains what will you do now to not passively support the ongoing colonialization of this country?  And how might you benefit if you stepped out of a way of thinking that sees nothing wrong in taking, that says possession is 9/10^th of the law, that does not see killing, maiming or destroying as an inappropriate way to get ones way.   Sure you don’t personally believe that, but what practices in your life come out of that same way of doing things?  (An example which comes strongly to mind is how easily an without thought we feel it is ok to cut down groves of trees and to kill animals.)  I strongly encourage people to read the whole Spring issue of Yes Magazine on decolonization,  and particularly the article by Native author Kyle Powys Whyte of the Potawatomi Tribe, “White Allies, Let’s be honest about Decolonization”.   Will we stand with Native people this time to stop the taking?

                                          public art on the Lower Elwha Klallam tribal lands

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.