This is a bit a gru­some sto­ry, though not as shock­ing at it should be. Louellen White, a researcher look­ing for bur­ial records of Native Amer­i­can chil­dren stum­bled on a Native Amer­i­can skull just sit­ting in a dis­play case of a old Philadel­phia meeting.

As White searched for grave­yard ledgers in the library — crammed with stuffed birds, cloth­ing, shells and books — she came upon the skull. Her legs wob­bled. And her stom­ach dropped. Arsenault-Cote offered advice and reas­sur­ance. “You’re out there look­ing for them, and now they’re show­ing them­selves to you,” she told White. “He’s been wait­ing a long time.” His­tor­i­cal­ly, Philadel­phia Quak­ers were “incon­sis­tent friends” to Indi­ans, engaged in the same col­o­niz­ing projects as oth­er faiths while see­ing them­selves as unique­ly able to edu­cate natives.

Incon­sis­tent is an apt word. Paula Palmer has been trac­ing the his­to­ry of Quak­er Indi­an Board­ing Schools: high-minded enter­pris­es that often for­ca­bly stripped her­itage from their pupils in ways that were as cul­tur­al­ly impe­r­i­al as they were unaware.

Byber­ry Meet­ing dates to the 1690s and the meet­ing­house grounds are full of abo­li­tion­ist his­to­ry. The skull was appar­ent­ly dug up in the mid-nineteenth cen­tu­ry as part of a near­by canal project and is thought to have come to the meet­ing­house as part of a col­lec­tion from a shut­tered his­tor­i­cal soci­ety. Its pres­ence on the shelf rep­re­sents the atti­tudes of Friends many decades ago who thought noth­ing of plac­ing a Lenape skull in a case. There’s also the sad sub­text that the meet­ing library is said to be so unused that most of the meet­ing’s con­tem­po­rary mem­bers had no idea it was there. It’s a shame that it took an out­side researcher to notice the skele­tons in our dis­play case.

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