As I wrote about my time at Scattergood while working on the demolition at the Great Plains Action Society’s Urban and Resilience Hub, “I haven’t been sleeping well at all, my mind on fire with memories of the years I spent at Scattergood (class of 1970). Reflecting on how every one of the main themes of my life found their beginnings there.”
Thursday, December 4th, was my last day of helping with the deconstruction of what will be the Healing Justice House. I was sad to be leaving the friends I’d made when we worked really hard to get the house ready for the remodeling. We had to look out for each other as we broke through the walls and ceiling, to avoid falling debris and make sure we changed our masks often as they blocked the dust. Sikowis made sure we had lodging, good food to eat and safety equipment.
I’d planned to head home the next (Friday) morning, but I received an email asking if I would like to talk about the work at the Hub at the all community meeting of the school on Friday afternoon. I had mentioned to Sam that I would be glad for any opportunity to talk about this project, but I hadn’t heard anything until that message. I was grateful for the opportunity, and spent Friday morning preparing, which involved thinking through the story I would tell as I selected photos to accompany the narrative. I was glad for the few times I’d had to be around the students. Most of their faces were familiar as I stood to speak with them.
This was yet another time to reflect on where I am on my journey through life. And in particular, my leading to work on Quakers and decolonial repair.
I am unsettled by many things that have arisen during this time at Scattergood and the GPAS Hub. I’ve worked on many of these concerns for years and all kinds of thoughts have been stirred up now.
Seeing the photo of my younger self from the Scattergood time capsule, and what I had written, “students of the future: ban nuclear weapons”, has triggered extensive reflection.
The fact that I’m still dealing with some of these concerns after so many years makes me wonder, again, what I might have done differently to resolve some of these issues. What informs my spiritual and justice work is my Quaker upbringing and practices. I’ve had spiritual experiences. Part of what I’m wondering is what spiritual guidance I might have missed. Of course, some of these concerns are vast: war, violence, social inequities, environmental devastation.
I believe most Quakers in this country were as unaware as I was about what really happened at the Indian Boarding Schools, as they were called, until recently. In my own Quaker meeting I heard one of the members had worked at one of those schools many years ago. We were told they were helping the Native Americans.
What triggered my focus on Quakers’ role in the Indian Boarding School policy was when I read Paula Palmer’s article about this in Friends Journal in 2016.
Last year I responded to a call that came from two sources: from Spirit, in the manner of Friends experiencing leadings, and from a coalition of Native American organizations that is working to bring about healing for Native people who still carry wounds from the Indian boarding schools.
My leading started with a nudge four years ago and grew into a ministry called Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples. This ministry has grown in depth and breadth under the loving care of the Boulder (Colo.) Meeting. Working in partnership with Native American educators, I learned about their efforts to bring healing to the Native people, families, and communities that continue to suffer illness, despair, suicide, violence, and many forms of dysfunction that they trace to the Indian boarding school experience.
More than 100,000 Native children suffered the direct consequences of the federal government’s policy of forced assimilation by means of Indian boarding schools during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their bereft parents, grandparents, siblings, and entire communities also suffered. As adults, when the former boarding school students had children, their children suffered, too. Now, through painful testimony and scientific research, we know how trauma can be passed from generation to generation. The multigenerational trauma of the boarding school experience is an open wound in Native communities today.
Quaker Indian Boarding Schools. Facing Our History and Ourselves by Paula Palmer, Friends Journal, October 1, 2016
I’ve gotten to know Paula as I was led to take on this concern myself. I was among the Midwest Quakers who helped bring her to Iowa to put on the workshops and presentations she uses to bring an awareness of this tragedy to Quakers and others.
So, I was beginning to learn about forced assimilation when I joined the First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March, September 1-8, 2018. I didn’t know if it would be appropriate or not for me to bring that up with the Indigenous people on the March. I had heard that ceremony should accompany such apologies.
The first Indigenous person I began to get to know was Matthew Lone Bear. He was taking videos, while I was taking photos to document the March, so we were often in the same positions as we framed our shots. To document something as complex as a group of people moving together frequently requires running ahead of, to the side of, or behind the group.
It was about the third day of the March, Matthew and I were walking together, not saying much. I was trying to discern if this might be a moment to raise the issue. I didn’t know how he might react. I didn’t want to make him upset.
The moment arrived, and I felt led to tell Matthew I knew about the Indian Boarding Schools, and about the role Quakers played. I said I was sorry they had done that. He just nodded and kept smiling and we walked on.
But later that day he told me he had a story to share with me. That story was about something related to the videos from Standing Rock, where Matthew was at the time, that really upset his mother. It brought back a specific memory of her own experience, a generation or two after the schools were closed. And he later shared the story of how he spent months looking for missing and murdered relatives, using the drone technology that he knew,
I’ve eventually apologized to each of my Indigenous friends.
Then we learned about the bodies buried on the grounds of some of these schools. The current wave of investigations began in May 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) had detected anomalies indicating the remains of 215 children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
The Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) Peace and Social Concerns Committee provided support in 2022 for the documentary They Found Us. The documentary concerned the George Gordon First Nation residential school,.
This action aligns with the New Conscientious Objector (NewCO) call for material repair, specifically addressing the legacy of the Indian Boarding School system, which represented a “catastrophic moral failure” for Quakers. By supporting work related to the trauma inflicted by assimilation policies, the IYM(C) advances the Abolition pillar of the NewCO, which requires Investment in alternatives and healing to dismantle the structural violence of the colonial state.
Peace and Social Concerns Committee Report 2022
Quakers today are struggling with what we are learning about Friends’ history of the harms done at Quaker Indian Boarding Schools and the policies of forced assimilation. We don’t judge the Friends who worked in those schools. We love them because we are members of one another in the Spirit. From today’s vantage point, we can see more clearly that forced assimilation is always a tragic mistake. We realize in retrospect that as Friends, we must not impose our values, beliefs, and ways onto those who grew up in a different culture.
We feel we have been on a continuing journey, begun earlier in our lives and intensifying in the present because so much is opening up.
Native peoples are lifting up their voices in greater numbers and are beginning to be heard by those of us who are settlers. Settler people are beginning to be open to awareness of the harm we have inflicted on all that is indigenous to the land we now live on.
In 2019, Friend Paula Palmer held a series of workshops and presentations in Iowa and Nebraska related to her ministry, Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples. One of those presentations was “The Quaker Indian Boarding Schools. Facing our History and Ourselves.”
In the summer of 2021, ground penetrating radar located the remains of 215 children near the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Native peoples knew many of the children who attended those schools never returned home. But the location of these remains reopened deep wounds. And as feared, thousands of remains have been found at other schools since. The searches continue.
Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland created the Federal Native American School Initiative in June 2021. The initial report was released recently. The next phase will focus on the role of churches who operated these schools. About 30 of these schools were operated by Quakers.
Today, we support the establishment of a federal Truth and Healing Commission. We encourage Friends and Quaker meetings to research the involvement of their ancestors and meetings in the Indian residential schools. And share what they find.
Friends are urged to learn more about injustices indigenous peoples continue to face, including forced assimilation, missing and murdered relatives, racist mascots, Indigenous Peoples Day, expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, and pollution of Mother Earth.
Decorah Friends Meeting is working to support an effort to realize a Meskwaki language workbook.
This past year our committee decided to reserve our budget for an opportunity that might present itself. Because of years of Friends’ relationships with Sikowis (Christine) Nobiss, she asked if we could help support the screenings of the video “They Found Us”, about finding remains of children at the residential school of her nation, George Gordon First Nation. Our committee was glad we could give our budget of $1,100. We would like to reserve this year’s budget for a similar Spirit led opportunity.
Jeff Kisling, clerk
Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative)
Peace and Social Concerns Committee
https://www.iymc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2022-MB-WEBSITE-pdf-searchable-FINAL.pdf
