NOTE: This is an edited re-posting from the year 2021. The events below occurred then, not today. There were similar events in other years. See: Monuments to White Supremacy July 4, 2020.
I’ve come a long way from what I, a white person, was taught in school. About the heroes and battles that brought independence from the British. And just a sentence or so about taking over Indigenous lands, and the slave trade. All whitewashed and presented as acceptable. Even referred to as “Manifest Destiny”.
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
The crown and the colonists were both determined to seize lands from native peoples and to continue enslavement. But their interests were also hostile to one another and war was the inevitable result. White settlers wanted full independence for themselves and no control over their actions at all.
The indigenous populations were nearly eradicated in the decades long quest for conquest. Expanding slavery was an integral part of those efforts against native peoples. Genocide could not be carried out completely nor could any accommodation be made with European nations in the quest to control land from sea to shining sea. That is why the settlers declared their independence.
The process of decolonizing ourselves is a difficult one. We have been cut off from our history and we don’t know where or how our people played a part. As we try to educate ourselves we may find it difficult to give up traditions that we have claimed as our own. Regardless of personal choices made on July 4th, the causes of the Declaration of Independence must be known and acknowledged. That is the beginning of true independence for Black people.
THE TERRIBLE ORIGINS OF JULY 4TH By Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. July 3, 2021
NOTE: This event was in the year 2021, not today.
The Great Plains Action Society has organized gatherings at the Iowa State Capitol for several years on July 4th, referred to as the Fourth of He Lies. I attended these events and took the photos below. My Des Moines Mutual Aid community has been involved.
In 2021 the event was called Stop Whitewashing Genocide and Slavery. Bring Back Critical Race Theory & Remove Monuments to White Supremacy!
On July 4th, stand with Great Plains Action Society, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Ní Btháska Stand Collective, Des Moines Black Liberation Movement, Humanize My Hoodie, Revolutionary Action Party, Quad Cities Interfaith, Iowa Coalition for Collective Change, and Des Moines Mutual Aid!
Join us on “Fourth of He Lies” to demand that the Iowa legislators remove whitewashed monuments to white supremacy in Iowa. Organizers will present a petition demanding that all racist, misogynistic, homo/transphobic, whitewashed historical depictions be removed from all state grounds and facilities. These monuments fall into the realm of hate propaganda and make folks feel unwelcome in public spaces. So, we need legislation that removes all monuments, murals, and depictions of white supremacist persons, acts, and ideologies from all Iowa state grounds and state-funded institutions.
The first Washington Post article is an interactive presentation of their investigation into sexual abuse in Native American boarding schools. ‘In the Name of God’ by Sari Horwitz, Dana Hedgpeth, Emmanuel Martinez, Scott Higham and Salwan Georges, The Washington Post, May 29, 2024
This is a continuation of yesterday’s post about partnering with nations. Parts of that article don’t pertain to my experiences, which have been with the Great Plains Action Society rather than with a Tribal nation. So, I’ll continue with the parts of the article relevant to both of those types of organizations.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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/
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
LANDBACK Friends 