Forward Movement on the Quaker Indian Boarding School Initiative
Friends Peace Teams, Beacon Hill Friends House, and the Yearly Meeting Right Relationship Resource Group coordinated to present a unique 2-hour program on the Quaker Indigenous Boarding Schools (QIBS) on November 15, 2022, with 145 people from all over New England participating.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) has asked religious communities to research and take action for the role they played. The QIBS topic is not for the faint of heart. It is heartbreaking how zealous and racist Quakers acted as they actively advanced the QIBS for 150 years. Zitkála-Šá, a Lakota Sioux girl at Carlisle IBS, summed up her experience: “Then I lost my spirit … for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”[1]
The last schools managed by Friends closed in 1930 in Oklahoma, yet many Friends (including our Yearly Meeting) stayed engaged in the system, including forced child assimilation, until recently. Quakers participated in cultural erasure. Joseph Webster, the Quaker agent among the Santee Sioux in the 1800s, wrote, “The whole character of the Indian must be changed.”[2]
How will we make amends today? The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition proposes truth-telling as the first step. New England Friends have agreed to be accountable for their part in QIBS. To fulfill the spirit of that decision, a model of reparations was imbedded in the registration for this program; registrants were asked for donation to the Wôpanaâk Language Reclamation Project. In addition to the registration donations, several monthly meetings contributed from their budget as a way to share current resources with Indigenous People. Reclaiming a language is a key step in recovering a culture, just as forbidding the speaking of their languages separated Indigenous children from their culture. At the conclusion of this program, Quakers gave about $1,800 to the Wôpanaâk Language Reclamation Project—a small but firm step forward.
If you missed the event, you can find the video here.