My example of how it reached us

I’ve asked, “WHAT did not reach us?” And “WHY did this history not reach us?”

These questions refer to the Quaker involvement in the Indian residential schools in this country and Canada. Which were institutions of forced assimilation.

Those words do not reveal the horrible things that often happened there. That is a large part of what did not reach us.

What follows is a specific example. Two years ago I was blessed to be included in a ceremony related to the deaths of two Native children and their unmarked graves in West Branch, Iowa.

A remarkable series of events unfolded from a research paper by Park Ranger Peter Hoehnle, a National Park Service guide at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, who holds a doctorate in history. This is a link to that paper, The West Branch Industrial School.

West Branch, Iowa, is just two miles west of where I attended high school, at Scattergood Friends School. But I never learned (Arapaho) Grace Yellowhair’s story. That she was buried in an unmarked grave in West Branch.

Her story didn’t reach me until 2024, when my friend Judy Cottingham, of the West Branch Quaker meeting, came across Peter’s paper and thought of me, knowing of my interest and concerns related to the Indian boarding schools. From there it traveled the way these things travel when people decide not to look away — Judy to me, me to my friend Paula Palmer, whose ministry is about Quakers and the residential schools.

Paula sent it on to Frank MedicineWater, the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribal officer working to identify the children who attended these schools and to trace their descendants. Frank carried it to Fred Mosqueda, the Arapaho Language and Culture Program Outreach Coordinator for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. Fred wrote back that his wife had been raised by her grandfather, Gustave Yellowhair, and that he believed he could trace the line to Grace.

Judy kept up the correspondence with Fred, especially about his wish to come to the gravesite, and did the research to locate the two unmarked plots — Grace Yellowhair and Theodore Rogers, an Osage boy, buried near each other in the Friends’ section of the West Branch Municipal Cemetery. Before the gathering that Monday, city staff placed white flags to mark the spots.

The family did not want to disinter Grace’s remains. But they felt it necessary to come to the gravesite to perform the ceremonies that would allow Grace to pass over to the other side. Since that had not been done before, her spirit could not leave. With the ceremony, her spirit was finally set free.

Fred Mosqueda came from Oklahoma for the ceremony, with his wife, Mary Fletcher, and her brother, John Fletcher. It was not a public event. Those gathered at the grave that Monday, July 22, 2024, included Judy and Jim Cottingham, members of the West Branch Friends Meeting of Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative), Peter Hoehnle, members of the West Branch Friends Church, and the town’s mayor. I was there to witness, and to take the photographs the family had asked for.

As we waited, I watched Fred move slowly through the gathering, greeting each one of us. Then he began by telling us, from the inside, why children like Grace had been taken at all — how the Army had killed the buffalo so the people would be confined to the reservations, and how families had no choice but to give up their children or lose the food and supplies the government had promised them. It was a hard thing to hear this history spoken from an Indigenous perspective.

Cedar was burned, and feathers were used to fan the smoke. Fred sang three songs with the drum he had brought. These allowed Grace’s spirit, held in that ground for a hundred and forty-one years, to finally leave and cross to the other side. Theodore Rogers was remembered in the prayers, so that he too could go. We stood together in silence to witness it. I strongly felt the presence of the Spirit.

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

This is what I mean when I ask what did not reach us. It was not the phrase “forced assimilation” that failed to reach me; those words I had heard. What did not reach me was Grace — a fifteen-year-old Arapaho girl who died in a Quaker school and lay in an unmarked grave two miles from the school that formed me, for a hundred and forty-one years, and I never knew.

And I have come to see that it did not simply fail to reach me. It was kept and not looked at, not spoken of, for all those years. That is the harder truth inside “what did not reach us.” Not that the story lost its way to us, but that we did not go to it.

What other stories should we be looking for?