What does the Yearly Meeting Apology to Native Americans have to do with me? And what will this require me to do? These are two of the questions that can arise when the issues of the Apology and right relations with Indigenous people come up.
Regarding the first question, for me, recounting the generic history of settler-Native relations has not seemed sufficient. My family’s long presence as settlers on Indigenous land demanded a more specific accounting. Following Cherise Bock’s example during the 2020 NEYM Bible Half Hours, I began digging into the details of my ancestors’ participation in the settlement of New England and the displacement and destruction of Native people here and across the United States.
Edward Bugbee, my 8 times great-grandfather, arrived in Boston in the 1630s. Over the next 150 years, my ancestors settled on lands taken from the Massachusett, Nipmuck, Wampanoag, Penobscot, Sokoki, Abenaki, Onondaga, Seneca, and Winnebago people (among others) in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and Wisconsin. They were not trappers or explorers or soldiers, the vanguard of the European colonial project; they were devout religious people eager to find a place where they could worship as they were led and where their children and grandchildren could prosper. They were part of one of the early waves of European colonists and were indispensable to the permanent occupation and settlement of what the Abenaki and Wampanoag call “The Land of the Dawn.” They were sober, industrious, courageous people, who left almost everything behind to start anew, and who left no evidence of concern about the fate of the Natives who were killed or removed to make room for their good fortune.
They feel familiar—like me and many I know, good people, in many ways exemplary, but heedless of the costs and consequences of our relative ease and prosperity to those whose lives and futures have been shaped—or worse, twisted—by the rhythms and demands of our choices. I did not mean to occupy the land of the Massachusetts people when my wife and I bought our current home, any more than I mean to consign Bangladeshi or Vietnamese laborers to sweat shops when I shop for an inexpensive shirt.
When I was putting together my family history, I noticed an interesting, but not surprising dynamic. The sections about Edward and Joseph and Alvin were lengthly, detailed, richly textured; those about Indigenous people were noticeably shorter and incomplete. The stories about my ancestors captured my interest, were easier to find, and made me feel good. The stories about how settlers had treated the original inhabitants were not so easy to find, were mostly from the perspective of the settlers, and made me feel embarrassed and ashamed. It can be very disorienting: up has become down, good and evil not so easy or comfortable to discern.
It is natural to be drawn to the happier stories of my kin and less interested in the woeful stories of strangers. It required discipline to keep digging and filling in the painful context for my family’s success. I am sure the narrative is still out of balance, skewed to the story of my forebears. Even this language reflects a settler mindset. The lives and tribulations of Native people are not just the context of my ancestor’s story. Our arrival and settlement were (profoundly consequential) disruptions of the 10,000-year history of the Algonquin people in this region. I have much more work to do.
Answering the second question, What will this require of me? will be more difficult and will unfold over time and in conversation with Indigenous people. It starts with an honest and humble acknowledgment of our shared history.
It has been difficult to hold the two narratives at the same time. The one feels familiar—I know these people. The other is less distinct and feels alien and at times threatening. Sympathy or compassion for one group feels like indifference to the other. This is scary for me because it is so open-ended and requires me to be attentive to the needs and requests of people with deep, longstanding grievances against people who overwhelmingly look like me and share much of my history and experience. That I have been and can continue to be insulated and ignorant is one of the benefits of privilege.
I fear that if I come to know these people, I will begin to care about them and become vulnerable, open to their requests or demands. Imagining the worst, keeping my distance seems prudent. Prudent, but not faithful.
I have come to think of the problem as one of “aperture”—how wide is my field of view? My natural tendency has been to zoom in on my relatives and occasionally drop back for a wider, less detailed, view. A fairer and more honest picture, of both the past and the future, requires more nearly equal attention to all the players in the scene.
The two questions we started with have important and substantial practical implications, but they are also profoundly spiritual questions. How widely drawn is my circle of care and compassion? Whose well-being is worthy of my attention? And am I ready to accept the challenges of restorative justice, to trust our Indian neighbors to treat us with more respect and compassion than my ancestors treated generation upon generations their forebears? The conversations are likely to be long and, at times, painful.
There can be no putting things back the way they were. There are grievous injuries to be attended to, and wrongs to be righted. Perhaps, together with our Native neighbors, we can find a way forward.