I'm a huge film buff and love going to film festivals. Tonight, I went to the opening of Women With Vision, a film festival of films directed by women run at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis during the month of March.
Tonight's film, Older Than America, was introduced by the writer/director Georgina Lightning, writer/producer Christine Walker and actor Tantoo Cardinal, all Native American. The story centers around a woman named Rain, her long-time boyfriend Johnny, her aunt Apple and her mother Irene, as well as several people from a northern Minnesota town located in a Native American Reservation. Rain spends the movie discovering that she shares the gift of "sight" with her mother, and comes to reveal atrocities done to Native American children at a local Catholic boarding school (cultural genocide, rape, torture, murder, physical and emotional abuse). While this movie is fictional, it is inspired by true events experienced by the director's family and accounts by other Native Americans of boarding schools.
So what does this have to do with the Friends of Color Blog?
I collect facts in my brain and one that popped up for me during the film was that Quakers are at least partly responsible for the cultural genocide that happened at some Native American boarding schools. So I and my partner Liz did some research.
An FCNL page lays out a time line of Friends' involvement in Native American affairs that dates back to when George Fox first came to the United States. But what was most surprising for me was that Quakers started the first boarding schools for Native Americans in 1816, decades before the "official" founding of boarding schools to "civilize" Native Americans by Richard H. Pratt (who was said to coin the phrase, "Kill the Indian, save the man.")
And according to this paper by a Swedish author, Quakers led the way to what's now considered cultural genocide.
But my brand spanking new bachelor's degree taught me not to believe everything I read on the internet, so I did an academic paper search and found an article published in 2007 in the journal Wicazo Sa Review, Fall 2007, called No place to go: the Thomas Indian School and the 'forgotten' Indian Children of New York by Keith R. Burich about Thomas Indian School in New York, founded by Quaker Philip Thomas in 1855, more than two decades before the most famous and historically criticized federal government sponsored boarding schools. The government institution were, in fact, based on Quaker efforts to "civilize" Native Americans.
So what does this history have to do with modern Friends?
Quakers so often hold up our history with, for instance, the Underground Rail Road and the early suffragist movement, as proof of our enlightenment.
When are we going to own up to the things in our history for which we shouldn't be so proud?
Saturday, March 8, 2008
History: Quakers & Native Americans
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8 comments:
Hi Jeanne--Useful point. Don't forget Daisy Douglas Barr, 1920's Imperial Empress of the Indiana Women's Ku Klux Klan, and a prominent Quaker minister.
Many Friends were apparently Klan members in Indiana during the 1920s. You don't hear much about that these days, either.
In Christ,
Kevin
This is a history with many tensions. Friends relationships with Native Americans run between racism and cultural genocide to profound respect and mutually beneficial cultural exchange. At times, these extremes exist within the same communities and individuals.
One interesting question to ask is how do we remain ignorant of how Native Americans have affected Friends? For instance, Haudenosaunee women profoundly affected women, like Lucretia Mott, involved in the early women's rights movement.
Cultural exchange is never one-way but European Americans infrequently acknowledge (or credit) others' contributions to their own culture(s) leading to passively held assumptions of white cultural superiority.
Friends, slow down please. Let us not take thing to far out of the context of the period. Many communities of faith do things that are seen as "wrong" now, for the cultures they are trying to help. And some do it right. My mother's family all went to Goodland Indian Boarding School in the 1930's. All of them speak with fondness for the institution. The harshest punishments administered were yard chores for the males, and quilting for the girls. They all recieved an excellent elementary and high school education. As for tribal identity, the Oklahoma choctaw chose assimilation with most of them becoming Methodist shortly after the civil war.
MaryM
Remember too that solitary confinement was a Quaker solution for imprisonment, with a prisoner confined with only a bible.
Hi all,
Thanks for stopping by and adding your voices to this.
Kevin, I didn't know about Daisy. Wow. I'm now hoping that Vanessa and Donna's new book, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship, will highlight this.
Hystery, You're right. Quakers started out their relationship with Native Americans with "good intentions" but a lot of good intentions can go awry. I'm not discounting good intentions; I'm asking us to hold up all of our history, and not just those things that people think make us "better" than others.
MaryM, I'm glad your family had a good experience. Assimilation can go both ways for different people. Many Native Americans writing and making movies today are revealing the abuses that happened at boarding schools. This doesn't mean that everyone had those experiences (as, of course, you point out). But the abuses have had a profound impact on culture today: lost languages, lost spiritual practices, sexual abuse, alcohol abuse.
I'm not writing from my own experience, but from things I've seen and read, so I'm glad you're here to add your experiences.
I hope everyone gets a chance to see the movie I mentioned in the post. Their website has a lot of links to helpful websites including the Boarding School Healing Process.
That boarding schools which came later in time used the structure for "cultural genocide" is not necessarily an indictment of the idea of such schools originally. A point to consider is that the free roaming gatherer hunter lifestyle option was clearly coming to an end for the Indian culture, and it was also becoming clear that they would need to find ways to adapt to a new lifestyle. I think we need to look into how the schools run by Quakers approached the idea of what needed to be done to help Indians adapt, and whether there were, in fact, elements of such "cultural genocide" unrelated to equipping for a new mode of life that was so clearly a part of the later schools such as requiring "western" clothing, names and language. As a cultural anthropologist noted, the requirement for adaptation was undeniable, how it was done was unconscionable. Just how much did Quaker schools actually contribute to "how it was done?"
In His Love,
Nate Swift
I'd just like to note that it's usually non-white groups that are "helped to adapt" to a dominant majority's culture, and not the other way around. This is assuming that the majority's culture is best for everyone, and even in good intentions, is dominating.
Two quick thoughts:
1. "I'm asking us to hold up all of our history..." I unite with this request: If we speak of Friends being among the first to denounce slavery, let us also speak of Friends who held other humans in bondage, whether treated fairly or not.
2. I have heard from a couple of representatives from different minority groups that members of the dominant or majority culture will speak about examples of individual work against racism (or classism or fill-in-the-blank ism); while members of the oppressed or minority culture will lift up examples of systemic racism (or other isms). This may explain, in part, the varying comments about the practices at boarding schools for Native children and the experiences there.
Blessings,
Liz Opp, The Good Raised Up
Adaptation has been necessary. None of us live the kind of lifestyles of our ancestors, all of us are assimilated in one way or another. If I could have a family reunion of my g-g-g-g grandparents I wouldn't be able to speak to most of them; it's the same with most of us.
The thing too is that when you talk about "cultural genocide" you disempower some of very people you're supposedly standing up for. The most important Native American institution in these parts is the Methodist church. For a bunch of liberals to go into one of them and tell them they're all misguided because they don't look like what we think Indians should look like is itself cultural arrogance.
The reality is that people make choices. And yes, they have choices made for them. If you're well-off or socially connected you have more choices and a better ability to surf through the changes unscathed but everyone's had to adapt whether they wanted to or not.
Like all of us I'm a product of assimilation. I could get angry at all of those ancestors who decided to adapt rather than fight. But I've personally lived through enough hard times that I know that sometimes you do what you need to do to survive.
There was a great piece a few years ago on the leading mercantile Philadelphia Quaker families. Fifty years ago there was a network that owned banks, department stores, factories, etc. and they used some of their wealth and influence to fund philanthropic efforts. None of these businesses have been able to survive the globalized economy. The banks and department stores have all been sold to national holding companies and the factories have been closed. Members of theses leading families have left the industries or been reduced to middle management. Don't cry too much for them: plenty live a life of extended adolescence courtesy of the trust funds, and their last names still get them admitted to schools that would never even look over my transcript. But this too is a kind of involuntary adaptation. If anything the world is changing even faster now and white skin only offers minimal protection.
Martin @ Quaker Ranter
ps: yes the Klan started as something of a Quaker institution, especially in Indiana. Jeanne: Thomas Hamm has written some well-researched pieces on this. Of course they weren't exactly the Klan we know.
pps: you want chills, remember it was a Quaker who founded eugenics.
ppps: another Friend started night-shifts, the precursor to the always-on economy that has workers from Bangalore help desks to your local supermarket's pet food aisle working at 3:30 in the morning (past tense).
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