The Gap

What Did Not Reach Us is one of my life’s throughlines.

That line is completely different from the other throughlines because it begins with absence. That absence was an awareness of how settler-colonists, which included Quakers, completely dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands and their culture with genocidal violence. Absence of awareness of the tragic history of forced assimilation of Native children.

You don’t know what it is that you don’t know.

The only way to begin to become aware of something you didn’t know is when that missing knowledge is revealed from relationships with those who do hold that knowledge.

I wasn’t aware of this throughline until I began to get to know Native people. And from them I slowly began to learn what I had not known, what did not reach us.

When I graduated from Scattergood Friends School in 1970, I felt I had received a good education about Quaker practice and personal integrity. I learned about community integrity at Scattergood, because community meetings and work crews taught us how to be in community by actually living that way. I learned about personal integrity from observing the lives of our teachers and Quakers of my meeting, and studying the lives of Quakers throughout history. I learned critical thinking skills and how to become a life-long learner.

It was that Scattergood education that helped me understand the profoundly adverse consequences of fossil fuels and the car culture. I was led to not have a car during my adult life.

It was that Quaker education that made me pay attention when I was in the presence of Native people who came to our public gatherings to stop building fossil fuel pipelines. But there wasn’t time to begin to build relationships with any of them.

It was that Scattergood education that made me pay attention when I began to hear about the Quaker involvement in the Indian boarding schools. And when I heard Sikowis Nobiss speak about building bridges with Native peoples at Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) in 2017.

I was discovering the gap in what did not reach us at Scattergood back then. The gap included teaching nothing about settler-colonialism or Quaker involvement in the Indian Boarding Schools. About who had lived on this land before Scattergood was built. About the lives of Native people in today’s world.

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

How I began to discover what did not reach us

As I previously wrote, knowledge can be thought of as water flowing through channels. Water doesn’t reach where there are no channels — not because the water isn’t there, but because the channel hasn’t been built.

In 2018 I was blessed to be able to begin to create a channel to the knowledge I had not known that I did not know, a channel to Indigenous peoples and their ways. That was when I participated in the First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March, that was organized by Sikowis Nobiss and Ed Fallon. The intention of that march was to create the conditions for a small group (about 30) of Native and non-Native people to be together for an extended period of time (8 days and nights) to share stories and begin to understand each other across our cultural gaps.

One of the things that usually happens when you begin to gain new knowledge is that it changes you. I was profoundly changed by what I began to know during those long walks down empty Iowa gravel roads, along the black snake of the Dakota Access Pipeline. I gained insights into the Native people and their lives. And they began to teach me that the land is our relative.

**Matthew and I on the First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March (2018)**

I received the first shock to my system early in the march from a story one of my new Native friends told me as we walked together. The reason we were on this subject was because I told him I knew of the Quaker involvement in forced assimilation, and that I was very sorry that had happened. He just nodded and we continued to walk together. But several hours later he came to me, and told me he had a story to tell. The story had just recently happened. One day his mother called him, very upset. She had seen a story from Standing Rock that immediately took her back to the childhood stories she had heard related to taking children to the residential schools.

[Note: my decision to bring up the subject of the boarding schools was not something I took lightly.]

That experience was the beginning of a channel to Indigenous knowledge. You cannot learn that from a class or book. That is what did not reach us at Scattergood. But this is how knowledge began to travel through that channel to me (and I hope some of my knowledge might flow in the other direction).

That channel has led me to the work being done at the Great Plains Action Society’s Indigenous-led Urban Resilience Hub in Iowa City. Knowledge continues to flow through the channel. Authentic relationships continue to evolve there.