My Quaker meeting and channels

This concept of channels into knowledge is causing tensions in my Quaker meeting. Which is ironic, because a few members of my meeting have spent about thirty years building relationships with Native people in the vicinity. They have deep relationships of trust with those working on the annual Prairie Awakening/Prairie Awoke celebration, held just a few miles from our meetinghouse.

The meeting has supported those Friends in their work. But the meeting has not built on the channel they developed — and it could not have. Channels are relationships between individuals. That is their nature, and it is the whole difficulty. Friends who have not been involved in building those relationships do not have that channel themselves. It cannot be inherited, and it cannot be held on the meeting’s behalf.

What the existing channel offers is an opportunity — a door other Friends could walk through to begin building their own. The meeting has donated money when that was requested, and many members have attended the annual celebration. The goal would be more channels, as more Friends become directly involved with this Native community. But each Friend would have to build their own, however parallel it runs to someone else’s.

I had hoped thirty years of that work with Prairie Awakening would make it easier for Friends to begin building similar channels with the Great Plains Action Society. But, Friends will not have a channel to GPAS until they do their own work with the people of GPAS — not with GPAS as an organization, but with the people.

What a decade looks like

My relationship with Sikowis Nobiss, founder and Executive Director of GPAS, began nearly a decade ago. We walked together on the First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March in 2018, which was designed to create the conditions to begin building channels among us. Since then we have worked together many times — at pipeline protests, at actions about racist mascots and monuments.

I’ve been excited about how the GPAS Indigenous-led Urban Resilience and Innovation Hub has come into being. A concrete example of so many ideas put into practice.

When Sikowis asked for volunteers to come to the Hub to help remodel the buildings, and to cut down trees so we could fence the urban farm, I encouraged members of my meeting to participate. A fundamental part of decolonial work is following Indigenous leadership, and that request was an opportunity to do it. I was clearly led to go, and I have been to every work-week held there.

My meeting has a very small number of active members. One of them, Jon, has come to a couple of the work-weeks with me, which is great. He has begun creating his own relationships — his own channels — with people at the Hub.

The problem

It must be confusing to members of my meeting that I am now asking them not to simply drop in at the Hub. I appreciate their interest, and I asked for it. I encouraged them to come when there were work-weeks. I have been writing and speaking about this at meeting a great deal.

Some of them want to see for themselves what I’ve been describing. That is how Friends have traditionally engaged with justice work — by visiting the organizations doing it. It is the only model most of us were ever given. It is also the wrong one here, for two reasons.

The first is Indigenous leadership. Jon and I went to work-weeks organized by the Hub. An invitation came from the Hub, asking for volunteers for specific projects. Those were the times I let Friends know about and encouraged to attend.

Those hours of shared, difficult manual labor quickly built bonds among those of us who did attend . Channels being built.

The second is that the situation has changed. The work we did has brought the Hub far enough along that its work in the community has begun — work driven by the Indigenous leadership of the Hub. GPAS has very few staff, and they are fully engaged in that work while still building the place. Interest in the Hub is appreciated. Unannounced arrivals interrupt the work.

Expecting to be welcomed to visit, unannounced, is a colonial practice. I don’t say that to accuse anyone in my meeting. I say it because it is the habit we inherited and will keep repeating until we notice it. The Hub is a sacred space, and we should act accordingly.

What I am proposing

I’ve spoken with Sikowis about Friends who are interested in visiting the Hub doing some preparation beforehand, and she supports the idea.

My hope is that my meeting will be willing to develop that preparation — and to build it as a model other people considering a visit to the Hub could use. That would turn our confusion into something useful to the Hub rather than something it has to manage. It would also be the clearest demonstration I know of how a channel is actually built.

In the meantime, Friends can be connected to the work of the Hub by means of the Decolonial Repair Network (DRN), that was formed specifically for the purpose of teaching non-Native people about the impacts of colonization on Indigenous communities, and to share about the work of the Hub. We meet the first Wednesday of every month at 7:00 pm Central time. You can sign up to attend these Zoom meetings here: https://www.honornativelandfund.org/decolonialrepairnetwork