My friend Paula Palmer shared this resource, Partnering with Native Nations in a Good Way Guide. It is often difficult to ascertain authentic, trusted sources, so I appreciate what she shares. https://nativegov.org/resources/partnering-with-native-nations-guide/
Category: colonialism
Spirit led handwriting
There are several reasons why I have begun handwriting and why the Spirit led me to this. My intention is to try another way to get people’s attention, another approach to express the urgency of the need to prepare for the chaos that is already happening and rapidly accelerating. Handwriting is a symbolic way to show that we won’t have the Internet, for example, very shortly. I don’t know how many months or years some of these systems can continue to struggle to maintain themselves. What I do know is we are already seeing collapse occur. We can either be proactive or not change and be at the mercy of what is coming.
Two decolonizing efforts
Emerging decolonial efforts are a welcome acknowledgement of the growing realization on the part of more settler-colonists of the incredible harms and injustices Indigenous peoples have experienced that have passed from generation to generation. That every Indigenous person suffers today.
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is an arts/research collective that uses this website as a workplace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures.
https://decolonialfutures.net/
Decolonial Repair Network launch
Yesterday, I wrote an introduction to the Decolonial Repair Network. And how this relates to the Honor Native Land Fund to support the Great Plains Action Society’s work to raise money to buy land. Last night, I attended the first meeting (Zoom) of the Decolonial Repair Network.
Decolonial Repair Network
Decolonial Repair Network
Working Towards Healing the Harms of Colonialism
Monthly Calls: First Wednesday of the month, 7-8 CT
Our first online informational call is Wednesday, April 3rd, 7-8 pm. Sign up here.
We are a network of non-Native individuals, communities and organizations in Iowa and across the Midwest who strive to be good allies to Indigenous people through actively working to repair the harms of colonization in the Midwest.
Honor Native Land Fund
We are calling on non-native white settlers across the Midwest from Chicago to Omaha, Minneapolis to St. Louis to consider the ways they have benefitted from colonization and to voluntarily offer a kind of rent or tax to Indigenous peoples.
We feel like, in the face of the climate crisis, one of the most important things we can do is support Indigenous people reclaiming Indigenous lifeways-that is a key part of what is going to heal the land and the climate.
Eric Anglada, Honor Native Land Fund
We’re grateful for your interest in and support of the work of Honor Native Land Fund. Hopefully you were able to join us for our opening launch webinar. We urge you to become a regular contributor to this fund, 100% of which goes to support amazing Indigenous women in the crucial work of land rematriation.
Are you interested in getting your organization on board with this work of financial support but are unsure of how to do that? Email us and we can explore a presentation for your group.
If you missed Beth Hoffman’s recent essay, “A New Way to Honor Native Land,” you can check it out here.
And lastly, one of our HNLF members is helping launch a broader Decolonial Repair Network that includes ongoing support for HNLF while also looking to continue the journey of learning and supporting decolonization, community, healing, and repair. Sign up here for that introductory zoom call this Wednesday, April 3rd, 7pm CT!
In Solidarity,
the Honor Native Land Fund team
Homeland Return
Homeland Return Newsletter
Today we officially launch our “Homeland Return” campaign, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reestablish a landbase for the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. The Tribe has a time-limited opportunity to purchase 232 acres located on a historic Nisenan Village site called Yulića near Nevada City.
We urgently need you – our allies, our community – to help us take the next BIG step and purchase Yulića, our original and next “new” homeland.
It is an extraordinary dream to reclaim one of our historic villages, revive our Tribal kinship and ceremony, provide much needed Elder housing, and renew our relationship with the land. This is the FIRST TIME the Nisenan will have a home in our own homelands since the illegal sale of the Rancheria in 1964.
Our wellbeing is inextricably tied to the land. Like fish and water, our people cannot successfully live — and cannot recover from the impacts of historical and generational trauma, poverty, and near erasure of identity and culture — without land for us to call home.
Our fundraising goal is $2.4 million and includes the purchase price, government mandated improvements, and an operating endowment. Phase 1 fundraising: $1.5 million must be raised by April 4, 2024.
This is the Tribe’s best opportunity to reestablish a homeland in *more than half a century*, and we need your help to make it happen
★ HOW TO HELP ★
- Share this news far and wide and tune-in over the next 66 days to keep learning and sharing about the progress of our campaign. *We ask you to share our posts at least 5 times over the course of the campaign.*
- Donate!
- Visit the GoFundMe
- Mail a check payable to CHIRP (memo line: “Homeland Return”) to CHIRP, P.O. Box 2624, Nevada City, CA 9595
- Contact CHIRP: info@chirpca.org, 530-237-0707
Returning to this land is a dream we barely dare dream. It is a big ask and there is little time but we have hope because of the ever-growing understanding and allyship about Native Land Back and because of the healing promise of this vision for All of us.
To learn more about CHIRP and the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan, please visit us:
- Website: www.nisenan.org
- On instagram: Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan
- On Facebook: California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project
- On Twitter: @CHIRPCA
- On YouTube: CHIRP CA
Decolonizing Quakers Steering Committee
If you use Facebook or Instagram, please like, comment, and share there.
- California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP) on Facebook (also on Instagram)
- Woolman at Sierra Friends Center on Facebook
- DecolonizingQuakers on Facebook
With hope and gratitude for your consideration, Alyssa Nelson & the Decolonizing Quakers Steering Committee
Previous articles about the LANDBACK to the Nisenan Tribe |
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Conscious act of land return to Indigenous peoples |
LANDBACK by Friends |
LANDBACK by Friends
[What follows is more information related to my latest post, Conscious act of land return to Indigenous peoples.]
Yulića –the land also currently known as Woolman at Sierra Friends Center— is in the north-central Sierra Nevada of California, epicenter of the California Gold Rush and California Genocide.
It has most recently been home of the former John Woolman School, Woolman Semester, and Camp Woolman through the work of the College Park Friends Educational Association which purchased the land in 1962. The land is being sold to the Nisenan tribe through the Tribe’s non-profit organization, California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP).
From the Tribe’s nonprofit, CHIRP, on January 29, 2024:
“Today we officially launch our “Homeland Return” campaign, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reestablish a landbase for the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. The Tribe has a time-limited opportunity to purchase 232 acres located on a historic Nisenan Village site called Yulića near Nevada City [in California]…. Returning to this land is a dream we barely dare dream. It is a big ask and there is little time but we have hope because of the ever growing understanding and allyship about Native Land Back and because of the healing promise of this vision for All of us.”
The Decolonizing Quakers Steering Committee enthusiastically encourages all Friends, our meetings and Churches, our Friends organizations, and friends of Friends to participate in this historic opportunity to return Yulića: 232 acres of Nisenan homeland in what is now called California that has been stewarded by Friends as “Woolman” since 1962.
More info at the GoFundMe page that was set up and run by CHIRP
https://www.gofundme.com/f/homeland-fund-initiative
The immediate goal is to raise $1.5 million by April 4th, and a total of $2.4 million.
This total includes purchase price, government-mandated improvements, and an operating endowment.
Background: Members of the Decolonizing Quakers Steering Committee have been lending support to the process for the last 3 1/2 years and waiting for the moment to make good on our assertion that Quakers across the continent and beyond would be willing to step up and help raise the needed funds when the time came, this being one concrete act of reparations and rematriation. And that time is now!
Over the years, we heard again and again that people had profound experiences on the land, the land seemed to be sacred. Woolman programs were experienced as healing and transformational and part of creating that healing was the land itself. So, when it became apparent that we couldn’t keep going, the question became, “What is this moment asking of us? Is it possible to create healing from this moment of loss?”
We remembered that CHIRP had approached us in 2020 before the Jones fire about buying the land. (You may remember that in the summer of 2020 we had started having conversations about selling the land with Quakers and other potential “friendly buyers.”). As we sat with this idea and learned more about CHIRP and the Nisenan story we became convinced that CHIRP stewardship of the land we call Woolman would continue educational programming but more importantly it was a step toward the deep transformational healing that needs to be done for all of humanity. While Quakers may not have specifically harmed the Nisenan people, we are beneficiaries of a brutal history that nearly eliminated the First Peoples of this state. Seeking to ethically transition this land back to CHIRP is a small step on a long path needed for being in right relationship with each other. We believe that the land we call Woolman will continue to be sacred, healing and transformational under the stewardship of the descendants of the first people who lived and worked here.
The organizations involved received help from The Center for Ethical Land Transitions through the process to arrive at a purchase agreement.
This land transfer is supported by the Indigenous Concerns Subcommittee of Pacific Yearly Meeting and many f/Friends, alums, staff, volunteers, and board members.
While many would have liked to have seen the land freely returned instead of sold back, the Quaker organization holding title to the land is not in an immediate financial state to be able to do so and also make good on its responsibilities. The next best thing is that Friends Everywhere now have a chance to support this land transfer directly through contributions both to the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe’s nonprofit (CHIRP) and to Woolman at Sierra Friends Center.
LandBack by Friends: an opportunity to participate in the historic transferring of Yulića/”Woolman” land back to the Nisenan Tribe
Conscious act of land return to Indigenous peoples
Quaker Paula Palmer has been working on her ministry related to Friends and Indigenous Peoples for many years. You can find out about her work on the Friends Peace Teams site, Toward Right Relationship with Indigenous Peoples. https://friendspeaceteams.org/trr/
Indian Boarding Schools
You can read her foundational article published by Friends Journal in 2016 here: Quaker Indian Boarding Schools, Facing our History and Ourselves. This discusses another area of concern related to Quaker relationships with Indigenous peoples.
I’m grateful I had the opportunity to get to know Paula when she came to the Midwest to talk about and lead workshops related to the forced assimilation of native children.
Land Return
Yesterday I received this email from her.
Friends, I spoke about this at today’s QIBS meeting but want to pass the information on to all of you. The Sierra Friends Center property in the northern California mountains (home of the former Woolman School) is being sold to the Nisenan tribe, through their non-profit organization California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP). The sale is supported by the Indigenous Concerns subcommittee of Pacific Yearly Meeting and by many California Friends. However a letter by a Berkeley Friend criticizing this sale was published in Western Friend online. Please read the letter and the information on the Sierra Friends Center site and the announcement below. Please consider whether you would like to write a letter to Western Friend supporting the sale as a conscious act of land return to Indigenous peoples.
Paula Palmer
Letter of Dismay
Dear Friends,
I am a graduate of the first class of John Woolman School in Nevada City, CA, and have held the campus and its environment close to my heart and soul for sixty-odd years.
I have just sent the following letter of dismay to all of the nonprofits that I mention in it, plus to many parts of many yearly meetings, plus to Western Friend.
This letter was written in response to the sale of the property that was once John Woolman School – currently 188 acres with 9 buildings – which is being sold to a nonprofit representing the Nisenan people, who are indigenous to the land in question. The Quaker board that represents Woolman in this sale has not been up front with the larger Quaker community about the extent of the property’s debts, nor about the fair market value of the property, which I speculate could be $4 million or more. The board has suggested that the property might be sold to the Nisenan for $1.3 million.
Here is my letter of dismay, which I have distributed widely:
This is the link to that letter: https://westernfriend.org/news/letter-of-dismay/
I find this detailed letter to be helpful in itemizing the objections some Quakers have about returning land to Indigenous peoples. I say “some” Quakers because I don’t know how many Friends object to this idea of land return.
I realize using the phrase “land return” implies the land was taken from Indigenous people. This is complicated by the concept of “property” and land ownership as viewed by most non-native people. It doesn’t mean taking back private property. It is about returning public lands to the stewardship of native peoples.
It is also about broken treaties, treaties that acknowledged native people’s rights to land.
Broken Treaties With Native American Tribes: Timeline. From 1778 to 1871, the United States signed some 368 treaties with various Indigenous people across the North American continent by Sarah Pruitt, History.com, July 12, 2023
LANDBACK and Quakers
As I was writing yesterday’s post, Palestine and LANDBACK, I realized it has been some time since I wrote about LANDBACK. And I’m reminded many Quakers are not well versed in this concept.
The LANDBACK focus on the plight of Palestinians shows how this concept is increasingly being used globally by Indigenous peoples to regain their land.
Going far beyond economics, LandBack sees land as tied to culture – regaining land is central to efforts by the colonized to assert their existence. It advocates decolonization, dismantling white supremacy, and reclaiming stewardship to save their land. Palestinian efforts to regain their land can become a spark to mobilize LandBack across the globe.
What does the Green Party of St. Louis think about the war against Palestine? And why do we call for LandBack?
Following are three examples of connections of Quakers to LANDBACK. At the end of this is an electronic book that goes into much more detail.
To this day we have not come to grips with fundamental injustices our country was built on, the cultural genocide and theft of land from Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans and the legal justifications of bestowing rights and privileges on white land-owning men. The consequences of these injustices continue to plague our society today. And will continue to impact us until we do what is necessary to bring these injustices to light and find ways to heal these wounds.
Several Friends recently assisted Boulder Meeting Friend, Paula Palmer, to lead workshops and discussions as part of her ministry “toward right relationships with Native people.” Part of the tragedy of the theft of Native land is that some Native people don’t have the concept of land as property, belonging to a landowner. Rather they have a spiritual connection to Mother Earth, that the land is sacred and not something that can be claimed as property by anyone. Being forced to leave their land broke their spiritual bonds with the land.
Native people have asked us to begin work toward reconciliation and healing. The first step needed is truth telling, recognizing that injury or harm has taken place. One of the important parts of holding “right relationship” workshops is to determine which Native nations were on the land before white settlers arrived.
–Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) 2019
(Iowa Quaker) Marshall Massey on LANDBACK
As far as archæology can tell, no one actually lived on any of the land within fifty miles of where I, personally, live, until the 1870s, when whites came to use it for transshipment. It was too dry and barren and empty to support people who just lived *here*. There’s a part of the Bighorn River Canyon about 90 miles southeast of me, where very small numbers of people like the Anasazi lived in Anasazi-style cliff dwellings, at about the time of the Anasazi, perhaps 800 or 1200 years ago. They fished the streams, hunted the nearby hills, and probably cultivated small patches of ground. But that was long before horses arrived, and they had no real reason to come the long distance (it would have been a week or more on foot) from where they dwelt to where I live, except perhaps in curiosity about what the land looked like.
By the time the natives of my area had horses, my area, along with most of the broad stretch of land from the Bighorn to the Rocky Mountain Front — 400 miles and more miles across — was an area that the nearest tribes (Crow and Blackfeet) hunted buffalo and other prey on horseback in, but did not settle in, and did not regard as a possession. They rode across it, from their own edge to the other tribe’s edge, to raid the other tribe’s dwellings on the far side, to steal horses and count coup and work revenge. They spoke of this to the European-Americans: “This all belongs to the Great Spirit,” they said, “and the Great Spirit meant us to have the use of it, but not to own it.” If you want an exact quotation, here is Crowfoot, a chief among the Blackfeet, speaking some time around 1885: “We cannot sell the lives of men and animals; therefore we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us.”
We have a similar testimony in the Bible — would you believe it? Funny coincidence. “The earth is YHWH’s,” it says, “and the fullness thereof.” (YHWH is a Hebrew word which some modern scholars believe began as a representation of the great wind that fills all the sky, or the great breath that animates all beings: the great spirit.) You may know this passage: it appears in Deuteronomy 10:14 and Psalm 24:1, and is repeated in I Corinthians 10:26. Not that the Bible matters much to liberal activists any more, though; most of them would much, much rather get the same teaching from some other source, anywhere else but their own tradition. Nonetheless, this teaching in the biblical tradition is why the believers in the early Church held all things in common and committed all their resources to look after one another. How can anyone really own what God has put in place for all, especially in cases where someone else has an unmet need? Deuteronomy and Psalms represent wisdom teachings that date back three thousand years, and were I a betting man, I would bet the wisdom of non-possession goes back to the dawn of thought about such things — millions of years back, to when our ancestors and the ancestors of chimpanzees were one people.
I have begun to think that many modern Americans — including, unfortunately, many modern, Westernized native Americans, and at least equally unfortunately, also many modern Quakers — will never, never let themselves comprehend the idea of non-ownership. Their souls are too far shriveled. Surely the land must have been someone’s property, whenever there was anyone even remotely able to make a claim. But this was the testimony of the natives of that time, and of Friends as well. And I believe it is the truth. You might as well claim that somebody owns the sun.
–Marshall Massey
Bear Creek Friends Meeting
Bear Creek Friends (Quaker) meetinghouse is in the Iowa countryside. Many members have been involved in agriculture and care about protecting Mother Earth. A number of Friends have various relationships with Indigenous peoples. Some Friends have worked to protect water and to stop the construction of fossil fuel pipelines in the United States, such as the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
This is a letter Bear Creek Meeting sent to the British Columbia Premier.
We are concerned about the tensions involving the Wet’suwet’en Peoples, who are working to protect their water and lands in British Columbia. Most recently they are working to prevent the construction of several pipelines through their territory. Such construction would do severe damage to the land, water, and living beings. Bear Creek Friends Meeting, of Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) approved sending the following letter to British Columbia Premier, John Horgan.
John Horgan.
PO BOX 9041 STN PROV GOVT VICTORIA, BC V8W 9E1.
Email premier@gov.bc.ca
John Horgan,
We’re concerned that you are not honoring the tribal rights and unceded Wet’suwet’en territories and are threatening a raid instead.
We ask you to de-escalate the militarized police presence, meet with the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, and hear their demands:
That the province cease construction of the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline project and suspend permits..
That the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and tribal rights to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) are respected by the state and RCMP.
That the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and associated security and policing services be withdrawn from Wet’suwet’en lands, in agreement with the most recent letter provided by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimiation’s (CERD) request.
That the provincial and federal government, RCMP and private industry employed by Coastal GasLink (CGL) respect Wet’suwet’en laws and governance system, and refrain from using any force to access tribal lands or remove people.
Bear Creek Monthly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
19186 Bear Creek Road, Earlham, Iowa, 50072
Following is a case study to illustrate some of the work that Quakers have done related to LANDBACK. When you click on the image, an electronic book appears that you can page through.
WARNING: This video (on page 16) contains graphic images of an armed threat on the lives of land defenders Denzel Sutherland-Wilson (Gitxsan) and Anne Spice (Tlingit). It may be traumatic for many to see. But we feel strongly that it should be available to witness. Denzel, Anne, and all the land defenders are now safe. These events took place during the RCMP raid on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory on February 7, 2020. The video was filmed by Gitxsan land defender Denzel Sutherland-Wilson from atop this tower.