Quaker Indian Boarding Schools

Facing Our History and Ourselves

Quaker teachers, families, and students at the Ottawa School, Indian Territory, 1872. Courtesy of the Quaker Collection at Haverford College.
Quaker teachers, families, and students at the Ottawa School, Indian Territory, 1872. Courtesy of the Quaker Collection at Haverford College.

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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.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says that for healing to occur, the full truth about the boarding schools and the policy of forced assimilation must come to light in our country, as it has in Canada. The first step in a truth, reconciliation, and healing process, they say, is truth telling. A significant piece of the truth about the boarding schools is held by the Christian churches that collaborated with the federal government’s policy of forced assimilation. Quakers were among the strongest promoters of this policy and managed over 30 schools for Indian children, most of them boarding schools, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The coalition is urging the churches to research our roles during the boarding school era, contribute this research to the truth and reconciliation process, and ask ourselves what this history means to us today.

Hearing this call, I began researching the Quaker Indian boarding schools, with support from Pendle Hill (the Cadbury scholarship), Swarthmore College (the Moore Fellowship), three yearly meetings, the Native American Rights Fund, the Louisville Institute, and my own meeting. In August 2015, I visited the sites of 11 of the Quaker Indian boarding schools in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, and then spent 16 weeks reading primary source materials in the Quaker history collections at Swarthmore and Haverford colleges.

I’d like Friends to learn about the Quaker Indian boarding schools as much as possible through the words of the Quaker teachers themselves and the Native students and other Native people who wrote about their experiences. These quotations are, of course, selective, but I believe they are fairly representative of views held by Friends and Native people during the boarding school era.

Friends’ purpose in providing schools for Native children

In 1791, the Seneca chief Cornplanter wrote to Philadelphia Quakers:

Brothers…we cannot teach our children what we perceive their situation requires them to know, and we therefore ask you to instruct some of them. We wish them to be instructed to read and to write and such other things as you teach your own children, and especially teach them to love peace.

In a July 1869 letter to the Quaker Indian agent on the Otoe Reservation in Nebraska, Friend Edward Shaw from Richmond, Indiana, wrote:

to protect, to Civilize, and to Christianize our Red Brethren—it is a duty we owe them that we may help in a degree to make up to them for the cruelty and wrongs they have received at the hands of the white man, if that can ever be done. If we want them to become Christians, we must act as Christians towards them.

Why Friends promoted the “manual labor boarding schools,” or “industrial schools,” as opposed to day schools for Native children

In 1870, a delegation from Ohio and Genesee Yearly Meetings met with the Quaker men who were serving as Indian agents under President Ulysses S. Grant. They reported:

It is the opinion of all the agents that the Industrial School is the best adapted to the wants of the Indians. They will then be removed from the contaminating influences of the home circle, where they lose at night the good impressions they have received during the day.

In a letter dated May 26, 1853, teacher Susan Wood at the Quaker Tunesassa Indian Boarding School in New York, wrote:

We are satisfied it is best to take the children when small, and then if kept several years, they would scarcely, I think, return to the indolent and untidy ways of their people.

Why Quakers in the late 1800s felt it was so urgent for Indian children to be in school

In 1894, Quaker teacher Elizabeth Test wrote impassioned letters imploring the means to compel Kickapoo parents to send their children to school, even against their will:

I know it will sadly grieve [Kickapoo parents] to part with their children, but…every day’s delay is of great loss to them….There is not one of their whole number who can speak English….. In this condition they are already surrounded by whites, are being defrauded of the little money they have, are tempted continually with strong drink [and are] not disciplined to resist temptation. [They] often yield, and many who are not guilty are arrested and carried off to jail. Their ignorance renders them helpless.

Why Quakers, unlike some of the other denominations, did not proselytize among the Native peoples

In his 1875 book, Life and Adventures of a Quaker Among the Indians, Thomas Battey, a teacher to the Caddoes and Kiowas in Indian Territory, wrote:

It has long been my opinion, that to present the sublime doctrines of the gospel to these untutored people, without a preliminary work of preparation having been first accomplished, might be comparable to casting “pearls before swine,” or sowing good seed on the “stony ground”: it would not be likely to be productive of the best results.

In its October 12, 1867 issue, the Friends Intelligencer opined:

What is the white man’s duty when he comes into contact with these sons of the forest? . . . We must come as superiors and as Teachers. Our superiority must be shown by our conduct . . . namely absolute justice, intelligent consideration and disinterested benevolence. . . . The doctrines of Religion and the teachings of Education will then have a basis to act upon.

What a child’s first day at a Quaker Indian boarding school was like

In 1903, looking back on his stint as a teacher at the Quaker Shawnee Mission Boarding School in Kansas, Wilson Hobbs wrote:

The service to a new pupil was to trim his hair closely; then, with soap and water, to give him or her the first lesson in godliness, which was a good scrubbing, and a little red precipitate on the scalp, to supplement the use of a fine-toothed comb; then he was furnished with a suit of new clothes, and taught how to put them on and off. They all emerged from this ordeal as shy as peacocks just plucked.

For a child’s view, we have The School Days of an Indian Girl, written in 1900 by Zitkala-Sa, a Lakota woman who entered White’s Institute, a Quaker Indian boarding school in Indiana, at age eight:

I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit. . . . Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards! . . . I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me . . . for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.

How Quaker teachers viewed education in the Quaker Indian schools

In a letter to “Esteemed Friend,” dated Eighth Month 28, 1871, teacher Mary B. Lightfoot wrote from the Great Nemaha Reservation in Nebraska:

According to instructions I submit the following report of the Iowa Indian school under my care. The number of pupils on list is 68, 32 boys & 36 girls, the highest number in attendance at any one time, 52. The progress of the children the past year has been satisfactory and encouraging. . . . These children now understand nearly all we say to them, many of them talk some & could talk well if they would, but the peculiar trait of Indian character of being averse to talking English obtains largely among the children as with the older [people] and retards their progress in acquiring the language. In spelling and writing and map and slate work they show much aptness and do well. . . . These children are tractable pleasant and affectionate, after we once get hold of them, and the possibility of their civilization education and culture is only a question of time and proper opportunities.

Joseph Webster, the Quaker agent among the Santee Sioux, put the goal of education succinctly:

The whole character of the Indian must be changed.

In a record book that now resides in the Quaker Collection at Haverford College, teachers at the Quaker Tunesassa Indian Boarding School noted these (selected) observations about students who left the school:

  • ran away
  • ran away (fourth time)
  • married a white man
  • sent home for persistent disobedience
  • went home when father died
  • went to Carlisle
  • taken to Buffalo hospital for TB treatment
  • graduated with honors
  • killed on the railroad when drunk
  • expelled for immorality
  • unable to adapt herself

How Native people viewed education in the Quaker Indian schools

In his book From the Deep Woods to Civilization, the Lakota physician Charles Eastman remembers the humiliation he felt at the Santee School in Nebraska:

We youthful warriors were held up and harassed with . . . those little words—rat, cat, and so forth—until not a semblance of our native dignity and self-respect was left.

In his book Native American Testimony, anthropologist Peter Nabokov quotes a Kickapoo father telling a Quaker school recruiter:

Take that axe and knock him on the head. I will gladly bury him. I would rather you do that than take him to school.

Reviewing the early nineteenth-century Quaker schools among the Senecas in New York, Rayner Kelsey, general secretary of the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs, wrote:

These schools were not greatly appreciated by the Indians and often had very few scholars, the boys’ school even being entirely without attenders at some periods.

In 1875, Barclay White, who served as superintendent of all the Indian agencies in Nebraska during the Ulysses S. Grant presidency, quoted a Sac man named Ketch-e-mo:

I am willing you may instruct our children, and teach them the white man’s ways, they cannot now live upon the wild game, it is gone, destroyed by the white man’s guns. As for myself, I am too old to learn new ways. I shall live the remainder of the time in the way of my fathers.

The Quaker policy of giving Native children English names

In 1869, when Friend Thomas Lightfoot was appointed agent at the Great Nemaha Reservation in Nebraska, his wife, Mary B. Lightfoot, assumed the position of teacher. In a letter to Friends in the East, Mary wrote:

Tell H. and C. I have named two little boys for them. I am giving them English names, as I cannot think of learning theirs. I have named several [children] after Friends in the East. When I get through I will send a list.

Friend Albert Green, who had served as agent at the Otoe and Missouria reservation in Nebraska, wrote about this practice in a 1935 letter to J. Russell Hayes at Friends Historical Library:

As part of the civilizing program, [Mary B. Lightfoot] gave to her pupils English names which they ever afterward retained. . . . The names she dealt out to them were of the most devout and highly esteemed Friends, such as Hallowell, Foulke, Lightfoot, Darlington, Kent, Lincoln, and other names highly esteemed among Friends. One letter [to Lightfoot from her former Native assistant teacher, after Lightfoot had left Nebraska] informs her that Maggie Kent had married Abraham Lincoln, and that Emma Darlington…had married Joe Rubideaux . . . and that Millie Diament, named from my wife’s first cousin had married a white man. . . . And that Phebe Foulke had married Benjamin Hallowell—a very good match so far as names are concerned.

What names and naming mean to Native people

N. Scott Momaday wrote several plays about the Riverside Indian Boarding School in Anadarko, Oklahoma, which was founded by Quakers. In his memoir, called The Names, he writes about the origin and meaning of his Kiowa name:

My name is Tsoai-talee. I am, therefore, Tsoai-talee; therefore I am. The storyteller Pohd-lohk gave me the name Tsoai-talee. He believed that a man’s life proceeds from his name, in the way that a river proceeds from its source. I am.

The Choctaw poet, H. Lee Karalis, writes in the voice of a student who returns from boarding school:

You’re an Indian,
My father said to me.
Go dance with ‘em.
He pushed my small body
Into the smiling rhythms,
But I did not know them.
Or my name.
I remember his disappointment
As I walked away from the crowd,
Embarrassed by his words. . . .
My father knew his name,
But he never gave me mine.

How successful were the Quaker schools in assimilating Native children?

In 1950, Myra Frye, a Kickapoo child named after a New England Friend by her teacher Elizabeth Test, wrote a tender memorial to “Teacher,” including:

When I am faced with decisions to make, I find I try to decide through how [Teacher] would have done.

Most Quaker teachers despaired of having any lasting impact on their students. Wilson Hobbs, who taught at Shawnee Mission School in Kansas, sent some of his most promising students to Ohio and Indiana to extend their education in hopes of grooming them to become teachers, but, he complained:

The Indian traits were never sufficiently stamped out of any of them to make suitable examples for the children.

Mary B. Lightfoot’s star student, Mary Dorian, seemed proud of her achievements in the Iowa school. In November 1876, she wrote to her retired former teacher:

I wish you would come see us. You don’t know how glad we would be to see you. I can wash clothes, wash dishes, and scrub floors, tables and benches, and I can sew on the machine. I made a dress for myself, a whole dress last summer. In school I can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, long division and compound numbers and I am studying Geography & mental arithmetic.

A year later, however, the Quaker superintendent Barclay White wrote that Mary had “left the Iowa Home, cast off citizen’s dress, and clad herself in Indian costume.” Teacher Anne Kent, who succeeded Lightfoot in the Iowa school, reported regretfully that all the educated Iowa women had similarly gone back to “the Indian life.”

What does this history mean to us, as Friends, today?

This question is not for me to answer, but to pose to Friends for individual and collective discernment. It is clear that Quakers were instrumental in promoting and implementing the forced assimilation of Native children. Through a lens of European Christian superiority, Quakers tried to remake Native children in their own image. In their writings, I found no appreciation for what the children would lose in this process. “For their own good,” the children would be raised by Quaker teachers (removed from their own families and kinship relationships), receive English names (lose their family lineage), speak English (lose their Native languages), wear “citizens’ dress” (lose the beautiful and skillful art and handiwork of their tribes), become farmers and homemakers (lose the hunting and gathering knowledge of the land and ecology), and aspire to European lifestyles (lose competence in their own cultures and pride in their Native identities).

From our twenty-first-century vantage point, we know (or can learn) how Native people suffered and continue to suffer the consequences of actions that Friends committed 150 ago with the best of intentions. Can we hold those good intentions tenderly in one hand, and in the other hold the anguish, fear, loss, alienation, and despair borne by generations of Native Americans?

Native organizations are not asking us to judge our Quaker ancestors. They are asking, “Who are Friends today? Knowing what we know now, will Quakers join us in honest dialogue? Will they acknowledge the harm that was done? Will they seek ways to contribute toward healing processes that are desperately needed in Native communities?” These are my questions, too.

 

Seeking Right Relationship with Native Americans

What can be done to heal the damage done to native communities by colonists, including Quakers? As Paula Palmer shares, it begins with telling the truth.

Paula Palmer

Paula Palmer's Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples ministry is under the care of Boulder (Colo.) Meeting. She offers Toward Right Relationship workshops in churches, schools, and colleges. Her 60-minute slide presentation on the Quaker Indian boarding schools and additional resources are posted at boulderfriendsmeeting.org/ipc-right-relationship.

38 thoughts on “Quaker Indian Boarding Schools

  1. Paula,
    Thank you for your discussion of Quaker Indian boarding schools.
    I first learned about Indian boarding schools in 1980 when I took a job at an urban Indian-run health clinic in Minneapolis.

    I had no idea that Quakers were once involved; but I am not too surprised.
    We have experienced some evolution in educational thinking multicultural awareness since then, and I hope for “continued evolution.”

    At the end of your article, you pose some questions:

    “Who are Friends today?
    Knowing what we know now, will Quakers join us in honest dialogue?
    Will they acknowledge the harm that was done?
    Will they seek ways to contribute toward healing processes that are desperately needed in Native communities?”

    These are all important questions, especially your final question:
    “Who are Friends today?
    Knowing what we know now, will Quakers join us in honest dialogue?
    Will they acknowledge the harm that was done?
    Will they seek ways to contribute toward healing processes that are desperately needed in Native communities?”

    I am a recently retired speech-language pathologist, and for me, a big contribution toward those healing processes has been to adapt my conversational interaction style with Indian people.

    When I began to work in Indian people, I learned to change the way I “talked.”
    I learned that when Native people say they want to see you, the literal meaning, “seeing” you, is important.

    I learned that listening – and silent reflection – needed to become my primary conversational strategies.
    I had recently become a Quaker, so I was getting that message from several directions.

    In that setting, I learned a new link between communication and emotional healing.
    Adapting my communication style to Native patterns of conversation helped us to know that we were being listened to, and the nonverbal messages became more positive.

    Subsequently, I worked a s a speech-language pathologist in the Minneapolis and the St. Paul school districts, and as a faculty member at Nova Southeastern University.

    In all of those positions, I found myself educating colleagues and students about Native American experiences with non-Indians, and with our education and healthcare systems.
    I was touched when one day a Seminole elder wrote to thank my clinic for the way that my students and I interacted during a day of speech-language screenings.

    I have continued occasional contact with the Seminole Tribe, and it is my turn to reach out.
    Not long ago, our local Quaker Meetings had a great discussion with the tribe’s environmental resources specialist.
    I want to learn more about how the tribe has been approaching climate change in the Everglades.

    Here are my basic principles for honest dialogue:

    1. I continue to approach each interaction the way I approach a Meeting for Worship.

    2. I keep in mind that listening and being present are more important than how much I talk.
    I remember what a chief once told John Woolman: “I love to hear where words come from.”

    I love to hear where words come from as well, so I listen.

  2. I am grateful for this thoughtful and challenging article. I am 9th generation Quaker in America and although I became an ordained Presbyterian minister, I cherish and am profoundly grateful for my Quaker heritage. I am troubled (and need to BE troubled!) by the historic ethnic relationships that challenged our ancestors. My father served a year at the Tunnasasa Indian School (1922) and my Great grand Uncle served many years in Kansas among Native Americans teaching agriculture. There is no doubt that they understood the world in their timely “lens” just as we also do today. I do not feel we need or must “apologize” for their being who they were. I DO agree that we today must LEARN from their experiences as best we can, and struggle to implement Christ’s teachings and values within our own lives as disciples. That certainly means seeking forgiveness for intentional and unintentional hurts and prejudices that we and ancestors have caused, and seek EACH day to create and live within the New Covenant of Love and Fellowship.

  3. Unintended consequences – with the best of intentions….Indian Schools….solitary confinement…and all the racial harm we have done with our “good intentions”

    God forgive us for our arrogance – then and now….open our eyes, ears and hearts so that we can see the harm we do, the hurt we inflict and work to stop it now!

    I am grateful for this article bringing this very disturbing piece of history into the Light and I for one am deeply sorry for the harm these Friends did.

    1. Thank you/sgi/wado for saying exactly what needs to be said. Jesus lived over two thousand years ago and He NEVER in his all too brief life would have subscribed to this evil. ARROGANCE is exactly what this is and also a COLLOSAL IGONORANCE of Christ’s teachings that all these religious denominations claim to base their churches on. Small wonder that ignorance was also the lens they used to view not SEE the glorious beautiful children they claimed to be ministering to.

  4. Paula — Thank you so much.

    My father’s family was Danish Lutheran; my mother was Church of the Brethren, and my step-mother was Catholic. I attended a Catholic boarding school in Boulder with the loneliness and isolation any boarding school entails.

    I could not understand why my father was so upset when I began attending Boulder Meeting in the mid-1960s.
    I understand his objections better now.

    His stories, letters and a great-aunt’s journal indicate he attended what had been Ignacio School (Ft. Lewis), a mile or two from the family homestead. Although Ignacio was not an “Indian school” after 1911, my father (b. 1914) and his friends lived on homesteads adjacent to that school and attended in 1920. The nearest neighbors (other than my great-aunt and her family) were Ute.

    My father told of cutting school to go hunting, since learning from books is not the same as learning from the landscape. An aunt’s formal picture of him was of a fair-skinned 15-year-old in formal attire, but with Ute-style hair — long, bound with skins, decorated with feathers. He told of being sent on a vision quest by one of the neighbors who was a shaman. It’s possible. His father had recently died, and he later lived with that aunt and her family.

    My mother taught near Bayfield until the schools consolidated in the mid-late 1930s. Her teaching focused on Chinese communities of several cities; after she returned to Colorado, her work included immigrant and indigenous peoples. My father returned to the area as well.

    My parents honored the views of their friends — in my mother’s case, former students. I recall discussions about the difficulties with boarding schools, the disruption of families and communities. Some older people recited treaties and told their histories without a printed text.

    After trying many Christian practices, my father resumed the spiritual practices he learned from his parents’ Ute neighbors. They cared for people. They cared for him.

    Can I, as a Friend for several decades, do less?

  5. I do feel a need to apologize. I do not think its alright because I wasn’t there. For the life of me, I don’t see this campaign as being in keeping with Quaker values at all, and certainly was not William Penn’s viewpoint. My own ancestor, Vice President Charles Curtis worked to assimilate his own native people further into Anglo culture, feeling that it was the only way to survive, to lose one’s own culture and adopt one that is foreign. He spent his life denying his own native roots and lobbying for expanding the Indian boarding school program for the goal of becoming good “Americans”. Many Anglo Saxon protestants feel its simply the luck of the draw and that someone would have dominated all the other native cultures of the world and it just so happened to be them. Its a way of deflecting responsibility and continues to this day as we see with the dirty energy corporations feeling they have the authority to destroy the water supply, burial grounds, and the existing Native lands left in this country for the sake of “civilization”. Thank you for listening and being part of the healing.

  6. It’s strange, reading this article and knowing my ancestors were on both sides of this particular coin. My great grandma was inducted into one of these Quaker schools for Indians. She eventually married a white Quaker man and nothing was preserved in our family of the Native Heritage, except our black eyes and hair.

    It was spoken of in quiet tones through the 70’s, my grandma called her step mother “the Indian woman” in a rather derisive tone, not acknowledging her own husband, my grandpa, was half Native American.

    Oddly none of this was really brought to light until I started studying my ancestry several years ago. All I knew was my great grandma was “Indian” and married a Quaker.

    Thanks for the article, it brings helps shed more light on an obscure part of my family history.

  7. Thank for this article. I was stunned when Emmy Gay at a recent meeting about Standing Rock flashed a photo about Quaker boarding schools for Native American children. I apologize for the cruelty and spiritual deprivation spent on the Native children. In my ignorance and prejudice I assumed all boarding schools for Native children were run by Catholics.
    I apologize to the parents and grandparents for the forceful removal and “kidnapping” of the native children. I apologize for cutting their hair, for forcing them to speak only in English, and for giving them new names.
    I went to Standing Rock, ND to Sacred Stone Camp, full of self-righteous Quaker empathy, never realizing how generous and hospitable they were in spite of the family traumas in their families we had been complicit with.
    I dream of a truth and reconciliation process here, and am feeling led to work on it, as I already do in healing from the legacy of slavery, at http://www.ComingToTheTable.org Enjoyed hearing of your work from Cheryl Angel yesterday after the Native Nations Rise march, as we lobbied the Senate together with other Friends.

  8. What alternative was there to these policies? Grant’s Peace Policy was called that for a reason. In that day and time Quakers pursued and advocated policies that, painful as they often were in terms of unforeseen consequances, represented an opportunity for survival for Native peoples. When the alternative was war and genocide and since Friends often were responding to requests from Native American elders and leaders, it is unfair and inaccurate to label them as tools of the US government and its policy of cultural eradication. Quakers keenly felt the injustices that were perpetrated upon Native Americans by unscrupulous whites. My question, “What would Paula and others have had Friends do differently in such dire circumstances?” I was also struck by the discussion of the practice of re-naming children. Many tribes gave children names and eventually re-named them using adult names, usually reflecting strengths or positive characteristics. To read that Quakers used English names of people they respected and admired could be viewed as continuing that cultural perspective. We have indeed been given much to consider.

  9. Thank you for this. Whilst there can be no excuse by the way of things today, it was a sign of the times and being white and in a seemingly superior position, even Quakers might get caught up in a misconceived view of God and the work that had to be done.

    Slightly moving away from why the specifics of the question , ‘Who are Friends today?’….it is a very good question and is a question I ask myself frequently as someone who was actively involved as a Member ( by convincement), still retaining that Membership but distanced from the ‘hubble and bubble’…and particularly hurt by a thoughtless comment from a Friend who said to someone close ‘…Well, he never was a proper Quaker, was he?’….apologies if that interpretation of the question is irrelevant to the post.

  10. As a white European descendant and US Grant historian, this article and discussion that followed was extremely valuable and educational. It is critical that we study the history of all Americans so that we can understand their culture and celebrate their history. The American Indians have an extremely rich history.
    Relating to Grant, his policy came from the heart and he did what felt was right to save them from extinction. He understood their plight from his time serving in two forts out west. No question he could have tried other routes but he knew that Manifest Destiny and the slaughter of the Bison was on a collision course with the way of life for the American Indians. This speaks to his humanity but it also brings into the play, as discussed, the mentality that Europeans were more “civilized” than their native counterparts and had a right to make decisions for them that concerned their future. The Quakers also did what they thought was best at the time. I believe that lives were saved but it came at the cost of losing their culture. Hopefully the healing process can begin to rebuild trust and celebrate what has been lost for too many generations.

    1. I believe it is in The Banality of Evil where a recorded account of a Nazi soldier who took part in mass executions in occupied territory during WWII. In that account the soldier explains that during these executions he would take particular care to shoot the children in a family first because, as he saw it, that would minimize the child’s suffering and by extension, the family’s.

      Sometimes the lesser evil is not good enough and the Quakers who throw their bodies on to the wheels of the machine and force it to stop when it presents us two unacceptable choices are the heroes from our stories. We must do our best to live up to their standard

  11. My great grandmother was a student at the Quaker Tunessa Boarding School in Red House, NY. It was there that my great-grandmother was taught the ways of “heightened civilization” and severely mistreated in the process. Knowing the pain of which she endured at the costs of assimilating the indigenous people of this land to limit the costs of the “Indian” Wars for the United States and fully “Kill the Indian and Save the Man” is heartbreaking.The schools were set up and executed with the goal of converting indigenous people to Christianity, and to erase all of our identity that made us different from the Europeans. This was abhorrent, calculated behavior from an ethnocentric, distorted perspective of race- a concept our people did not have until introduced by European anthropology in the 18th century.

    Hearing the stories of how my grandmother was locked in closets for days without food or water for expressing herself as an indigenous individual by using her language, the only language that she had known before attending the school, hurts me to this day. That was downright sinful behavior on behalf of the school administrators. I also find it appalling that such sinful behavior in the forms of physical, sexual, and mental abuse can be committed in the name of the “greater good”, “benefit of the Indians”, and all done in the name of Christianity, Manifest Destiny, and God’s good grace. This was behavior that children endured at the hands of their caretakers, the Quakers at the schools.

    I am a learner and teacher of a critically endangered language, the Seneca language. The critical state of our language is a direct result of these boarding schools. I am in the fight against time to acquire, document, learn and share millennia of acquire knowledge through a devastated oral history and extremely complex language. Our people have carried on ceremonies to express thankfulness to all people, all of Creation, and our Creator, who is likened to be the same powerful entity of whom you call God. We lived in a thankful, peaceful, and democratic manner, in harmony with the earth and all living beings. We possessed profound knowledge of science, mathematics, the arts, and spirituality, of which is now being confirmed by Western Science. This was all conduct and knowledge known before the coming of colonialism, yet we were deemed savage and uncivilized. I do not find that any belief of our divine maker, our Creator/ God, would find it suitable to find one’s self superior over another one of his children and treat them with such disdain and abuse.

    I find it extremely hurtful, ignorant, and offensive the comments and thinking that excuse, support, and minimize the wrongness and uncivilized manner in which my ancestors were treated. As CHILDREN. Our communities have been introduced rampant abuse cycles of physical, sexual and mental abuse through these schools with now substance abuse also as a direct result of the abuse endured. The communal way of living in harmony with each other and our environment was destroyed, as well as the family structure and parenting skills and styles were adversely affected since those schools. It is my generation, as a 31 year old, that is consciously delving into the dialogue of how these schools affected our ancestors, trying to understand what historical trauma is, how the parallels of these times affect our lives today, and how to dismantle the cycles of abuse to live healthy and with a good mind again as my ancestors did before our originally intended way of life was stolen from us.

    We do not expect you to apologize for your ancestors wrongdoings and sins against our indigenous ancestors. Instead, we expect you to learn the history of wrongdoings, its affects generationally on the whole scope of our communities from historical times up until today, and to use your (white) privilege to help dismantle the oppressive systems that still exist today.

    1. O siyo O ga na li,
      I can not see the responses to your post if there are any. But I wanted to reply.

      I am Tsa la gi, we are cousins to the Seneca and at times we shared our fires together.

      The damage done is more far reaching than we can even imagine.

      As I write this, 215 burials of children were just found at one of the schools in Canada.
      They would have remained hidden forever if they had not been discovered.
      There are many thousands of others buried in the US and in Canada. Little ones who never got to go back home to their families, village’s and Tribes.

      My heart tells me that until they are all returned to their people, there will be no rest for the lineages of the abductors.

      Only then can healing begin.
      I am now 68 years old and I do not expect to see such a thing. But it is my prayer that you will.

      1. Osiyo Unole Waya, Galieliga/I am grateful for your reply and prayer for our Seneca oganali who spoke out on behalf of all these abducted and abused children, many of whom lie in unknown mass graves. I am 73 ale also don’t expect to see their remains restored to their people but join you in praying that she at 31 may see this done and so see healing begin. If you would like to join our Learning The Cherokee language on fb, (our teacher tsa la gi elder Charles Poole began to keep his promise to his grandfather to save the language he learned at his knee), please email me snb.stevenson@gmail.com. We can’t let any of these complex, beautifully rich languages die!

    2. Degaweno’di:he’t, I apologize for not being able to put the proper punctuation on the latin letters that spell your beautiful name. I agree with you 100% that those whose ancestors participated in the wrongdoings of history must learn that history IN FULL (AND EXPOSE IT AND TEACH IT IN OUR SCHOOLS) and use their, which includes my, (white) privilege to help dismantle the oppressive systems that still exist today. It is my belief that full disclosure leading to dismantling must include declaring publicly and world-wide that these wrong-doings were crimes against humanity and are today wherever they are ongoing. I am also replying because you are trying to save the complex Seneca language and I in my small way (taking over Learning The Cherokee Language FB group when our teacher Cherokee Elder Charles Poole asked when he was stricken with cancer) am trying to help save Cherokee from extinction. I have knowledge of how people in Ireland managed to save and revive the Irish language which English invaders tried over 400 years to stamp out, I would be glad to share with you if you would like to email me at snb.stevenson@gmail.com. I believe that these rich complex process-oriented languages of Indigenous peoples are one of the keys that may lead humanity out of the darkness that has the most powerful among us bent on destroying the very climate that allowed that rarity in the universe, LIFE, to proliferate here on Earth. You/Indigenous peoples always knew this and your languages reflect that wisdom, knowledge and understanding of our place in the intricately balanced web of Creation. Indo-european languages over time have fostered the opposite, a static subject-object-verb grammar that gives a dominating subject/ “I” an inordinate place in the scheme of things. In Cherokee and Navaho everything is tacked onto the verb/what’s happening/what’s going on. Subjects and objects are relegated to prefixes and suffixes of the action. Language is perception. If we are to dismantle the colossal arrogance and ignorance of the (white) european language speakers as they set about colonizing the planet as if it was their just due, we must also work on changing our perceptions by changing our static Aristotelian languages. I am grateful/galieliga for all your work trying to save the Seneca language and for your insightful and intelligent comment.

    3. I am grateful for your truth-speaking. I grieve for the harm, for the pain of children and families, past and ongoing. I promise to seek humbly to share privilege and to humbly learn from the indigenous people in the lands they now share with me and my family. May humanity turn from its current path of arrogance, destruction and pain, back onto the paths of coherence, care, and attunement. Yours in gratitude, grief, and hope.

  12. My great grandfather attended a Quaker school in Kansas,I am researching his life ,I heard he was adopted by a family named Lawrence .Please email me with any helpful information,thanks !

  13. I offer deep gratitude for the preservation and attempts to rebuild NA cultures, following the genocidal brutality of “Indian” “schools.” I offer deep apologies for the actions of my Quaker and Anglican ancestors.

  14. I am searching for Eliza Craddock Coleman born 1835? Native American, tribe unknown who attended a school in Gibson County, Indiana when a teenager. I know she was Native American from the photo of her with her first child.There is no doubt however I do not know which tribe. Any ideas that I might try to find her. I know where she is buried.

  15. Hominy Friends Meeting is one of the few Native American Friends meetings in the US. Our meetinghouse is located in the NW corner of Indian Village, 160 acres set aside for Osage residences, adjacent to the town of Hominy, OK. At one point there was also a Friends school in the Village. Friends came to Hominy at the request of the Osage elders of the Hominy district, led by Black Dog. Since the clan system was devastated by deaths and repeated removals, by the time the Osage re-settled in what is now Osage County, OK, their traditional religion could not be followed. Thus they adopted the Native American Church (peyote religion) and became in their words “Christian.” They contacted former Agent Isaac Gibson requesting that Friends open a work in Hominy so that their children could learn of our Quaker perspective of Christianity and that they might become familiar with the “black book.” Quaker “missionaries” Arthur and Nettie Hadley served as cooks for the feasts which culminated overnight Native American Church meetings. Thus they supported Osage ways and did not denigrate or disrespect them.

    Our meetinghouse served many years as a community center prior to the construction of the metal community building on the Village square. It was in the Meetinghouse that the Village Committee met. It was also there that Osage Nation Organization meetings were held which eventually led to the current Osage constitutional government. It was also the venue for conversational Osage classes prior to the establishment of the tribal language program. We sing and pray in both Osage and English as we worship God on our land. We have a website: http://www.hominyfriends.org (still under construction).

    We have in the past pursued and continue to pursue efforts to counter the great wrongs done to Osages and others. To recognize this is not to claim that Quakers always acted perfectly nor to ignore the great sufferings of Osages and others. It is important for Quakers to learn about what earlier Friends did and why. It is essential for us to be humble and to ask for forgiveness when appropriate. To understand when forgiveness is appropriate requires some familiarity with history. Let us show the same love and dedication as earlier generations in seeking healing and in walking together with our Native American brothers and sisters to make this world a better place for us all.

  16. It is so easy to think we need not take into our hearts the wrongs done, to come to a place of accepting our ancestors’ roles – and the myths we grew up with, not understanding those realities. It is so easy to toss off our own assumptions of our personal injuries .. those assumptions created from the stories we have heard … and not think about the stories we have not heard.

    As I grew up in a Quaker setting, asking of Friends, “Why did Friends own slaves?’ the answers I got did not answer that deep question: “Quakers treated (enslaved people) well.” and “We helped (Native Americans) in schools. “… – except when I heard, ‘That is what all were doing.’ All these answers gave my young self a queasy feeling, as if we did not know the whole story, and – worse – that we were not living up to our best selves, even tho I often heard how exceptional we were.

    There is a huge lesson in all that, and I am grateful to see more intentional listening, confessing, owning our imperfect selves. Let us strive to put aside exceptionalism, and face up to a huge ministry we can undertake. Remember that when Friends began, they were still unnamed, shoulder to shoulder, with the holy work of acting to be the presence. This work will be the sort of work that the earliest Friends did: with others, on the ‘street’, in the prisons, in the schools, putting together the words to say what is true, even when it is painful, and declaring Truth as we can.

  17. Hominy Friends Meeting is one of the few Native American Friends meetings in the US. Our meetinghouse is located in the NW corner of Indian Village, 160 acres set aside for Osage residences, adjacent to the town of Hominy, OK. At one point there was also a Friends school in the Village. Friends came to Hominy at the request of the Osage elders of the Hominy district, led by Black Dog. Since the clan system was devastated by deaths and repeated removals, by the time the Osage re‐settled in what is now Osage County, OK, their traditional religion could not be followed. Thus they adopted the Native American Church (peyote religion) and became in their words “Christian.” They contacted former Agent Isaac Gibson requesting that Friends open a work in Hominy so that their children could learn of our Quaker perspective of Christianity and that they might become familiar with the “black book.” Quaker “missionaries” Arthur and Nettie Hadley served as cooks for the feasts which culminated overnight Native American Church meetings. Thus they supported Osage ways and did not denigrate or disrespect them.
Our meetinghouse served many years as a community center prior to the construction of the metal community building on the Village square. It was in the Meetinghouse that the Village Committee met. It was also there that Osage Nation Organization meetings were held which eventually led to the current Osage constitutional government. It was also the venue for conversational Osage classes prior to the establishment of the tribal language program. We sing and pray in both Osage and English as we worship God on our land. We have a website: http://www.hominyfriends.org (still under construction).
We have in the past pursued and continue to pursue efforts to counter the great wrongs done to Osages and others. To recognize this is not to claim that Quakers always acted perfectly nor to ignore the great sufferings of Osages and others. It is important for Quakers to learn about what earlier Friends did and why. It is essential for us to be humble and to ask for forgiveness when appropriate. To understand when forgiveness is appropriate requires some familiarity with history. Let us show the same love and dedication as earlier generations in seeking healing and in walking together with our Native American brothers and sisters to make this world a better place for us all.


  18. It should be noted that Cornplanter’s 1791 request for Quaker help in educating native children, quoted at the start of this article, did not turn out at all as he had asked. Although Philadelphia Friends did offer to provide an education for Cornplanter’s son Henry, the US government and Army soon intervened and enrolled his son in a harsher Christian school instead. So, however good the intentions, this first attempt at a Quaker education for native children missed the mark. And sadly, what followed was being part of a much larger, harsher, and more overt state-sponsored re-education system.

  19. While I agree that healing begins with truth telling and acceptance of historical responsibility, I think that redemption will only come through reparations and overt actions not to repair, for it’s too late to repair, but to make concrete restitutions. This does not mean Minutes, and words of apology but amends.

    In the language of truth, when the article says, “…with the best of intentions. Can we hold those good intentions tenderly…” I wonder. There is not much evidence to support that it was with the best of intentions, and surely that cannot be said about all those involved. There was a full throat-ed commitment to take the Indian out of the Indian by everyone involved.

    We can also make the case that we, the non-indigenous, alive today were not involved in the schools, we, non-indigenous, cannot honestly say that we have not benefited from land theft and therefore are connected in this way and more.

    We often feel we are making meaningful work when we state a land acknowledgment, and yet many indigenous feel that action is somewhat disingenuous. https://theconversation.com/land-acknowledgments-meant-to-honor-indigenous-people-too-often-do-the-opposite-erasing-american-indians-and-sanitizing-history-instead-163787
    What have we done to restore lands to those robbed of them? Action over words.
    I heard from a facilitator in an AFSC workshop that her family give an amount of money to a local indigenous group based on what their property taxes are in an action of restitution.

    Friends need to go beyond the words.

  20. fyi – July 2023:
    A historic land transfer has been signed between MĂŠtis Nation—Saskatchewan and Parks Canada today. 690 hectares of the west lands at Batoche now belongs to the MĂŠtis citizens of Saskatchewan. https://metisnationsk.com/…/historic-land-transfer…/ #backtobatoche #BatocheNHS

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