Learning Our True History

Cathy Walling and Organized Village of Kake President Joel Jackson at a podium draped with orange shirts commemorating the harms of boarding schools, Jan. 19, 2024. Photo by Ati Nasiah.

People in the United States and Canada recently have become more aware of evils carried out within Indigenous boarding schools run by federal governments and religious institutions. Friends worked closely with the federal government to design the Indigenous boarding school system and operated at least 30 of these schools nationwide. Alaska Friends Conference, an unprogrammed yearly meeting of Friends in Alaska, has taken some important steps in the past several years toward healing and repair. While we are still at the beginning of a lifelong journey, we have some stories and suggestions for Friends to consider.

Friends mission in Kake, Alaska. Established by Oregon Friends in 1894. Photo courtesy of Alaska State Library Historical Collections.

“It’s critical for Friends to learn your true history of missionizing in Alaska and the consequences it has had for Alaska Native people and communities,” said Ayyu Qassataq, vice-president of First Alaskans Institute, during a 2019 meeting in Anchorage organized at the request of visiting Friend Diane Randall, then general secretary of Friends Committee on National Legislation. Ayyu spoke about what had been taken away from her people by Quaker missionaries. She hoped we Friends would be brave in our research to more deeply understand the particulars from Indigenous perspectives. She also encouraged us to share what we learned with others. “Help us pull back the veil of this carefully hidden history,” she said, “so that Native people aren’t the only ones who talk about our forced assimilation as a source of trauma which still affects us today.”  Ayyu went on:

And, if you come to it, we believe an apology is in order. We also hope you Quakers can find ways to help repair what has been broken. For example, because Friends missionaries banned dancing and your schools punished our children when they spoke our languages, you might want to help fund dance or language programs, if our communities so wish.

Friends met in annual sessions a few days later. There was a sense of excitement and resolve to follow Ayyu’s guidance. Friends formed a committee that has met monthly since then. At first, we mostly read and discussed historical documents and books written by and about Friends missionaries in Alaska. After a year of this, we were asked a head-scratching question by Ayyu: “As you do this research, who are you accountable to?”

A month later, First Alaskans Institute, a respected Indigenous organization, invited Alaska Friends Conference into an accountability partner relationship. A big part of our role as accountability partners was participating in tribunals sponsored by the Institute to listen to Alaska Native people’s truths, and put our hands alongside theirs for healing and for transformation of the institutions that still do harm.

During the tribunals, individuals told of their own and of their communities’ experiences. Over the span of many months, we listened to people speak on four topics: “Protecting our ways of life,” “Our lands and laws,” “Indigenous boarding schools,” and “Murdered and missing Indigenous relatives.” People told stories of strength, courage, and fierce love but also of exhaustion, pain, and rage. The Alaska Native truth providers spoke of assaults big and small, including the inability to access ancestral land, the depletion of food, unjust laws, racism, pandemics, alcohol, and the depredations of mining camps. But strikingly, the thing that they named again and again as particularly crushing were the boarding schools. Too often children came back strangers who didn’t necessarily know how to parent when they had their own children. The boarding schools were intentionally designed that way by the federal government to destroy Native American culture and assimilate children into White society, using whatever means deemed necessary. Christian denominations, including Friends, were contracted by the government to run these schools. Some also took advantage of the children’s free labor during the summer months, further separating the children from the teachings of their own relatives and putting the children at further risk of illness and predation.

We Friends felt grief as we listened, knowing of Friends’ active participation in the boarding school system. However, during the months when we were hearing these hard truths, Alaska Native people continued to invite us to take steps with them toward the healing and well-being of their communities. For example, Alaska Friends provided logistical and financial support to Alaska Native healers so they could participate in an elders and youth conference. We helped with the funding and construction of a memorial bench for missing and murdered in Alaska, with acknowledgment of the particular impact on the Native community. In order for the family members of three missing and murdered Alaska Native relatives to give testimony of their loved ones, we assisted with their travel and lodging. We also sent requested supplies to a remote coastal Native village inundated by a storm. These actions were not big in themselves, but maybe that is the point. They were small things asked specifically of Alaska Friends by Alaska Natives. We said yes, and more steps followed. It felt similar to the old Quaker counsel to live up to the Light that you have, and then more Light comes.

Meanwhile, Alaska Friends Conference also drafted an apology for the harms done by Friends’ Indigenous boarding schools. We shared the draft for input from our Alaska Native partners. These included Aurora Sampson, then superintendent of Alaska Yearly Meeting, an evangelical yearly meeting of primarily Iñupiat people in northwest Arctic Alaska; and Aqpayuq Jim LaBelle, Iñupiaq elder, boarding school survivor, and then-president of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. We had come to know Jim through the tribunals. During Alaska Friends Conference’s annual sessions in 2022, he told us what it was like to attend boarding school in Wrangell, Alaska, starting at age eight, and the healing he had done since then. The power of Jim’s presentation was important in Alaska Friends’ approval of the apology, a momentous milestone for us in August 2022.

The last paragraph of the Alaska Friends Conference apology reads:

It is not the responsibility of Alaska Native people to help us to transform our behavior. At the same time, we see that our acting without first listening has led to great harms. We seek your guidance and input to ensure reparations are done on your terms that will help your communities heal. We ask for forgiveness and pledge to walk beside you as we work together for healing and transformation.

We Friends were open, curious, and maybe felt a bit of trepidation about what would come next, once the apology was approved by our yearly meeting. The “next” came quickly.

Left: Ayyu Qassatq, who served as vice president and later chief administrativeofficer of First Alaskans Institute until 2024. Photo by Ayyu Qassataq.
Right: Historical photo of totem poles in Kake, Alaska. Photo courtesy of George Fox University Archives.

Within the month, Jim LaBelle sent the apology to Jamiann S’eiltin Hasselquist, a Tlingit leader and member of the Deisheetaan, Raven Beaver Clan of Angoon, who at that time was vice president of Alaska Native Sisterhood Camp 2 in Juneau, Alaska. Jamiann was working with the coalition Haa Tóoch Lichéesh (Htlcoalition.org) to organize an Orange Shirt Day/Day of Remembrance for Indigenous boarding school survivors near the actual site of the Friends Mission School in Douglas, Alaska, near Juneau. Jamiann invited us Friends to read the boarding school apology during the remembrance event. Friends read Alaska Friends Conference’s apology to about 150 people, many of whom were Tlingit or of other Alaska Native ancestry.

The following year, Jamiann and Jim and Susan LaBelle were keynote speakers at Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends annual sessions in Oregon. They spoke of the horrors of Indigenous boarding school institutions, and they watered seeds for justice and healing within the listeners. Jim later talked about how moving it had been for him when actual descendants of Oregon Quaker missionaries came up to him and apologized in person.

Friends Way, Agaayyiaġvik, near Kotzebue Friends Church, Kotzebue, Alaska. Photo by Jan Bronson.

One hundred miles south of Juneau is the Organized Village of Kake (OVK), a village of 500 people on a remote island that is bursting with life. The president of the tribal council of OVK, tribal leader Joel Jackson, has a vision to establish a regional cultural healing center in a currently unused U.S. Forest Service building on the island. Jamiann could see the alignment between Joel’s vision for a cultural healing center and Friends’ wish to make reparations, so she introduced us Friends to Joel. We could feel the possibilities too, and we started fundraising for the healing center. After working together for six months or so, Joel Jackson invited members of Alaska Friends Conference to share our boarding school apology, as well as the money we had raised, in Kake during a community gathering.

Three members of the Alaska Friends Conference (Cathy Walling, Scott Bell, and myself) offered the boarding school apology. A Tlingit man spoke: “I have heard of apologies being offered, but this time I heard it myself. Your words landed on my ears, and I feel a weight being lifted.”  

In addition to the apology, we offered a check for $92,809 for the healing center. The healing center will help people heal from intergenerational trauma caused in part by Friends’ insistence on assimilation and its enforcement while Friends were missionaries in Kake from 1891–1912. The healing center will be based on connections to culture, land, and one another: the very bonds that assimilationists tried to break. As Jamiann Hasselquist has said, “The things they took from us are the very things that will heal us.”

The money we gave was part of reparations from Friends to Alaska Native people. It came primarily from Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends, who contributed $75,000, as well as from Friends in Alaska and beyond.

Kéex’ Kwáan Dancers, a Tlingit dance group, in Kake, Alaska, Jan. 19, 2024. Photo by Cathy Walling.

Help uncover the effects of Quaker mission/boarding schools on generations of Indigenous people by supporting S.B.1723/H.R.7227, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act and by joining Quaker-specific research efforts.

Following Ayyu Qassataq’s request to share widely what we are learning, we have these suggestions: 

Learn your Quaker history as it relates to Indigenous people, but go beyond that and learn the priorities, projects, and protocols of Indigenous people in your area. If you are invited to an event or to do something, show up! Stay in the metaphorical back seat of the car, though. Friends are not driving, and we aren’t even in the passenger’s seat when it comes to the identified needs and strategies of Indigenous people.

Stopping White supremacy behavior. We have heard from Alaska Native leaders about the importance of Quakers learning about and stopping White supremacy behavior that many people with European ancestry have unwittingly picked up because of the society we live in. These behaviors include, for example, automatically taking charge, filling silence with talking, disregarding elders and children, expressing urgency rather than letting things unfold in the right time, acting as if Western norms and ways of doing things are superior to other ways, and talking about good intentions as a way of explaining bad behavior. Jamiann Hasselquist regularly asks Alaska Friends to become better at self-stopping White supremacy behavior “so that it isn’t so exhausting to be around you.” She also talks about the rarity and hopefulness of the work we are doing together, while also insisting we do our internal work.

Support cultural learning and sharing. Sugpiaq elder Susan LaBelle says, “It is within our cultural strengths, which are connected to our traditional values, that we will find the resiliency we need.” Uphold the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, based on their histories as self-governing, independent nations since before the United States was formed.

im LaBelle, Jamiann S’eiltin Hasselquist, and Susan LaBelle at Sierra-Cascades Yearly
Meeting of Friends annual sessions in Oregon, 2023. Photo by Jan Bronson.

We know many other Quakers are doing this work too, or are interested in starting. We would love to learn what others are doing and see where we might collaborate. Our Alaska Native partners keep telling us, “It’s all about the relationships,” and we are living into the wisdom of this. Together let’s grow relationships with Indigenous communities, other Friends around the country, and that Spirit who loves and nudges us.


Questions and Answers

Here are some questions we get and that we wrestle with ourselves.

“By saying you are committed to reparations and by raising so much money for one particular project, aren’t you opening yourselves up to a nonstop stream of requests until you’re overwhelmed?”

That has not been our experience so far. Facing this fear is a “growing edge” for us. But we are finding that we are being asked to participate with our presence, our efforts, and sometimes with money, and that among us we are pretty much able to meet the requests that have come our way. We are building up our generosity muscles in terms of both money and time. Far from being overwhelmed by requests, we are instead overwhelmed by generosity, including that of other Friends and certainly that of Alaska Native people. 

“But my branch of Friends or my yearly meeting was not involved with Indigenous boarding schools.” 

Distinctions between branches of Friends don’t mean much outside of Friends circles. In any case, during the extinguishment period, roughly 1870-1930, most Christian denominations and most Quaker groups of all “flavors” either actively supported the schools or were silent as they were happening. Alaska Friends Conference itself didn’t exist during the boarding school era. However, we of Alaska Friends Conference benefit from our Friends history when it is positive, so we are also willing to make right our denomination’s wrongdoings.

In any case, it is not a matter of figuring out exactly what “our yearly meeting did” and therefore how much “our yearly meeting owes.” We can’t pay enough for what children experienced at some of these schools. But we can be in relationship with Native people, put our hands beside theirs when asked, and share resources as we are able, so that their communities and children and ours thrive. 

“Weren’t there a variety of experiences at boarding schools?” 

Yes. Although in total, boarding schools did a great deal of harm, individual experiences varied. We are glad whenever we hear of a positive experience. Our apology doesn’t negate those; it apologizes for the harms when they did occur.

“Alaska Friends Conference is the smaller of two yearly meetings in Alaska. The much larger Alaska Yearly Meeting is made up of primarily Iñupiat people. How have you worked with them during this apology process?” 

We’ve done this by staying in touch with their superintendent for guidance, attending their annual sessions, and keeping them informed of our actions. In 2023 members of Alaska Friends Conference were asked to share our apology during Alaska Yearly Meeting’s summer conference, and the apology seemed well received. We are building this relationship like others: at the speed of trust. 

Jan Bronson

Jan Bronson is a member of Anchorage (Alaska) Meeting and co-clerk of Alaskan Quakers Seeking Right Relationships with Indigenous Peoples. She shared a draft of this article with everyone named in the article, inviting their input and edits, and most responded. The process of writing this article was itself a way to build relationships.

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