I have been shocked not just at what I continue to learn about Friends’ involvement in the forced assimilation of Native children, but it has also been heart wrenching to realize how much of this history Friends chose not to write down — and then chose not to read.
Harder still is seeing the intergenerational trauma that history produced, and its effects on my Native friends. I could not see any of that until I had a couple of channels into their lives. The trauma was there the whole time. The channels were not.
There are three different things going on in our records, and they are worth keeping separate.
Intent
Lying means knowing. We don’t know what the clerk of Quaker meeting knew or intended in 1883, when Grace Yellowhair died at the West Branch Industrial School, for example.
The records that mislead
Quaker school records of that period documented attendance, crop yields, and student behavior. They left out disease, abuse, the children’s objections, and the grief of their families and their nations. They left out that two of the children died.
(See below: 1883 — two Native children died and were buried in the West Branch cemetery, in unmarked graves.)
The later official history does the same thing in a gentler tone: a paragraph about Friends going to the schools to help Native children.
(See below: 1971–2023 — Left out. The official history is written.)
The records nobody read
Thousands of pages sat in Friends’ archives for a century, unopened. Nobody lied there. There is no false impression, because there is no statement at all.
(See below: 1884–1950 — Never opened.)
Opened at last
One instance: Peter Hoehnle, a ranger at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site in West Branch, wrote a paper about the West Branch Industrial School — from sources that had been available the whole time.
(See below: 2024, the paper — Opened at last.)
Below is an adaptation of a graphic I shared recently. It follows the Grace Yellowhair story and labels each part of the record as left out, never opened, or opened at last.
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