The Spine

I graduated from Scattergood Friends School in 1970. I was taught personal integrity, community integrity, Quaker practice, critical thinking. I was not taught that Quakers ran Indian boarding schools. I was not taught whose land the school stood on.

It is ironic that Scattergood was established in 1890, at the very time Quakers were also establishing schools for Native children. Both were residential institutions built to shape young people. Mine was built to help me resist assimilation into the surrounding culture. Theirs was built to force assimilation into it.

I did not learn this until about 2017. I was in my mid-sixties.

When I looked for a phrase, I considered “what was hidden from us.” I did not use it. I do not believe our teachers at Scattergood were instructed to withhold this history. I believe they did not know it themselves.

So I called the arc what did not reach us.

Hold onto that phrase. We are going to come back and take it apart at Station 12.

Think of knowledge as water moving through channels. Water does not reach where there are no channels — not because the water isn't there, but because the channel was never built.

The knowledge was never missing. Native people carried it the whole time. What was missing was any relationship by which it could reach me.

I now call such a relationship a channel: a connection strong enough to carry knowledge across a boundary.

This throughline is unlike the others in my life. The others begin with something I received. This one begins with an absence — and an absence gives you no signal that it is there.

The only way to become aware of something you did not know you did not know is for someone who holds it to reveal it to you. Which requires a relationship. Which requires time.

Paying attention is not the same as understanding. And understanding is not the same as knowing what you do not know.

How did people shaped by a testimony against violence come to run institutions that inflicted it — and then, for generations, not see that they had?

The answer is the story that made Friends proud: that we were the humane alternative to the Army's brutality and the corruption of the Indian agencies. That is why President Grant brought Quakers into federal Indian policy in what was called the Peace Policy, and sometimes the Quaker Policy. Under it, Friends administered Indian affairs across the Great Plains and operated more than thirty boarding schools.

A narrative of benevolence is an unusually effective concealing device precisely because it is sincere.

Soldiers who kill know themselves to be killing.

Teachers sincerely believed they were helping Native children adapt to the encroaching culture. And they could pass that belief on, undisturbed, to their descendants.

To me.

Abstractions did not reach me either. A person did.

The West Branch Industrial School opened January 16, 1883, run by Benjamin and Elizabeth Miles, Quakers, who were paid $167 a year “for the keep of each Indian boy or girl sent to the school.”

Theodore Rogers, Osage, about eight years old, died there on June 15, 1883, of malaria fever, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Friends' section of the West Branch Municipal Cemetery.

Grace Yellowhair, Arapaho, arrived in mid-March 1883. She was fifteen. She died on September 11, 1883, and was buried next to Theodore. Her grave, likewise, remained unmarked.

West Branch is two miles from Scattergood, where I went to school. Her story did not reach me until 2024 — a hundred and forty-one years — when Judy Cottingham of the West Branch meeting came across a research paper by Peter Hoehnle, a National Park Service ranger, and thought of me.

From there it moved the way these things move when people decide not to look away. Judy to me. Me to Paula Palmer. Paula to Frank MedicineWater, the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribal officer tracing these children and their descendants. Frank to Fred Mosqueda of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, who wrote back that his wife had been raised in part by her grandfather, Gustave Yellowhair.

On July 22, 2024, Fred came from Oklahoma with his wife Mary Fletcher and her brother John. The family did not want Grace disinterred. They came to perform what had never been done, so that her spirit could finally leave. Cedar was burned. Feathers fanned the smoke. Fred sang three songs with his drum. Theodore was remembered in the prayers so that he could go too. We stood in silence to witness. I strongly felt the presence of the Spirit.

Afterward we shared a meal at the meetinghouse. That was part of it too — the last meal Grace would share with her family on earth. They made up a plate for her and set it outside, in a sheltered spot.

It was not the phrase “forced assimilation” that failed to reach me. Those words I had heard. What did not reach me was Grace.

I had been using what did not reach us as a way for Friends to get past the words that make people shut down. And it worked.

Then I saw why it worked. It worked because nothing more was being asked.

My friend Sikowis Nobiss, founder of the Great Plains Action Society, has spoken to congregations — Mennonites, Quakers, Catholic Workers — and says that in nearly every one she meets “a cocktail of white guilt combined with a desire to be in proximity to Indigenous folks” that leads only to more inaction. Giving land back, she reminds us, is the single most powerful thing settlers with inherited wealth can do, and almost none of those conversations have ever led to it.

So the phrase needs a second half. It has to be bridged from “what did not reach us” to “and therefore, this.” After we are moved by these stories, what are we being asked to relinquish?

• Is it land?
• Is it money?
• Is it our comfort?
• Is it the cherished story of our own moral goodness?

Everything above resolves into three questions, each with its own way of going wrong.

The passive completed with the active, ending in what you are called to do.

This is the distinction the whole path turns on.

Knowledge that is missing is found by study. You didn't know human anatomy; you took the class; now you do.

Knowledge that is withheld cannot be taught in a class. You cannot study your way across a withholding. A withholding is not a gap in the information. It is a break in a relationship. And the only thing that repairs a broken relationship is another relationship — a channel.

Quaker involvement in the Underground Railroad is a story Friends like to tell. What happened in the schools of forced assimilation is not. That story stayed on the other side of a boundary I had never crossed. I had no relationship with the people who carried the memory, and no channel by which it could reach me.

Passive language is not an accident of style. It is the finished product of the silence.

Iowa was opened to settlement.

Convert it:

The United States forced the Sauk, Meskwaki, and Ioway from Iowa through coerced treaties, and sold their land to settlers — including the families whose farms I grew up among. The land is held under that taking today.

Notice what the conversion requires: an agent (the United States), a mechanism (coerced treaties), the present tense (the land is still held), and the speaker (me, inside the sentence).

A sentence with no agent asks nothing of anyone. A converted sentence ends with someone holding something — and what is held can be returned.

I kept using the word we without saying which one I meant. That is how people slip out of an obligation without noticing — they assume they are in a different “we” than the one being addressed.

Any record you find is one of four things, and the classification tells you what work is in front of you.

We do not know what the clerk of a Quaker meeting knew or intended in 1883. Lying means knowing, and we cannot establish knowing. That is precisely why intent is the less useful question.

At my own meeting, historical documents sat in a safe in the meetinghouse that no one could unlock for many years. Recently it was opened — a treasure trove. Those papers were never opened. They are now a chance to be opened at last.

Peter Hoehnle wrote the West Branch paper from sources that had been available the whole time.

Here is the end of the path. It is small on purpose. Arriving informed is a form of respect, and every question you can answer through your own records is a question you do not spend on a relationship. There is a saying in oppressed communities: it is not our job to educate you.

Send this.

Then build a channel. Not a visit, not a tour. The first impulse most of us have is to go and look, to treat the work and the people as something to be seen. That impulse is not a fault; it is the only model of learning most of us were ever given. But it is the wrong question.

Not “may I see it?”
but “what is being asked of me, now that I know?”