From New Eng­land Friends, a very impres­sive research find­ings of the NEYM Quak­er Indi­an Board­ing School Research Group (PDF). The main doc­u­ment is 17 pages but with foot­notes and maps and sources it stretch­es out to 62 pages. It’s going to take me awhile to go through this since it’s quite packed but this pas­sage real­ly stands out:

Friends of that era, the vocal ones at least, were unapolo­getic assim­i­la­tion­ists even as they wrote to Con­gress to protest the bru­tal and unjust removals of Native Peo­ple, the vio­la­tion of treaties, and the greed and duplic­i­ty of White set­tlers and politicians.

One of the things we looked for and have not yet found are the voic­es of Friends who advo­cat­ed that Indi­an Peo­ples should be allowed to live accord­ing to their val­ues and tra­di­tions. What dis­agree­ments we came across were over how best to pur­sue assim­i­la­tion (and the implic­it cul­tur­al era­sure). In Samuel Tay­lor’s con­clu­sion to the 1856 report for the NEYM Com­mit­tee on the West­ern Indi­an (CWI), assim­i­la­tion “may be the only alter­na­tive left and the one most like­ly to save them from utter extin­guish­ment,” we hear a fore­shad­ow­ing of Richard Hen­ry Prat­t’s infa­mous descrip­tion of his task at the Carlisle School, to “kill the Indi­an in him, to save the man.”

Nineteenth-century Quak­er atti­tudes toward Natives Peo­ples is trag­ic, yes, but also just so per­plex­ing. There are moments of great sym­pa­thy and kind­ness in the records — help with need­ed food and sup­plies, assis­tance when nego­ti­at­ing treaties — but also what I can only describe as a clue­less­ness about the need to main­tain Native tra­di­tions and autonomy. 

Also I hope we’re learn­ing more about the “no about us with­out us” les­son in this. There are some Native-majority Quak­er meet­ings and even a Native-majority year­ly meet­ing and I’ve not seen them includ­ed in these re-evaluations of the rela­tion­ship between Quak­ers and Native Peo­ples. These reli­gious bod­ies are the result of mis­sion­ary work and are often appre­cia­tive of at least some of the teach­ings of nineteenth-century Friends. These Friends are solid­ly Chris­t­ian, as are the major­i­ty of Native Amer­i­cans today. This should­n’t sur­prise any­one: Jesus’s mes­sage has often been tak­en up by the oppressed, who have embraced and lived into its rad­i­cal mes­sage of lib­er­a­tion. I’ve heard some anti-Christian mes­sages in dis­cus­sions around Quaker/Native his­to­ry and while I under­stand the impulse to ques­tion all aspects of the colo­nial lega­cy, I don’t think majority-White reli­gious bod­ies should be going about denounc­ing the spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of most mod­ern Native Peo­ples. This indeed is a big part of what got us here in the first place. (Eden Grace wrote a sto­ry that touch­es on sim­i­lar com­plex­i­ties among African Friends).

We need to be able to hold the com­plex­i­ties, ironies, and nuances and find a way to con­tin­ue to lis­ten to those who inter­pret cul­tur­al his­to­ries dif­fer­ent­ly. I’m glad we have the work of the New Eng­land Year­ly Meet­ing group to give us spe­cif­ic his­to­ries so that we might under­stand ongo­ing cul­tur­al ele­ments of all this.