Quakers, Moral Injury, and Decolonization

This past week, I participated in the annual conference for the Friends Association for Higher Education (FAHE). It had three things going for it that appealed to me, since I had never participated in FAHE before:

1. It was held in hybrid format.

2. The host site this year was Haverford College, my father's and my alma mater.

3. The theme was Quakers, Colonization, and Decolonization--topics that my monthly and yearly meeting have been coming under the weight of.

After more than 30 years of paying little attention to the college because of their lip service to being a Quaker institution and to addressing racial justice issues, the administration now is actually engaged in meaningful work around equity and racial disparities. And the college's website and brochures seem to refer to its Quaker history rather than wrongly asserting that it's a Quaker college.

A few years ago, I learned about the John P. Chesick Scholars Program, which provides a tremendous amount of support through a variety of measures to first generation college students and to low income students--a population that has heavy overlap with the BIPOC community.

In the past year, my mother and I had an opportunity to learn a great deal about the program. That's a longer story for another time, involving some wealth redistribution and laboring with my mother about how to memorialize my father and what could make a meaningful difference to the students there.

But as a result of our conversations, I also noticed the change in racial makeup of the student body and the faculty, so I knew something at the structural level was going on. The FAHE conference gave me a reason to dip another toe into Haverford's waters, even though I've become wary of highly academic conferences: such conferences unintentionally exclude so many among us who have been undereducated because of racism and classism, if not also because of other oppressions. (One notable exception is the White Privilege Conference.)

Takeaways

A few of my takeaways include:

1. The use of certain words and phrases in everyday discourse about indigenous issues continue to center white colonizer-settlers, which derails harm reduction and perpetuates an unjust narrative. Indigenous presenter tom kunesh explained how saying "America" instead of "the United States" or even "Turtle Island" points to settler-colonizer Americo Vespucci; using the word "Indian" rather than "indigenous people" reinforces colonizer Christopher Columbus' error and alludes to the violence carried out by European colonizer-settlers against the original inhabitants of the land; calling the institutions that forced indgienous children and youth "Native American/Indian boarding schools" erases the horrific reality that these were, in fact and in effect, forced assimilation camps, not schools. These are not my words, though they are now my concern: These are part of the perspective, counsel, and wisdom provided by indigenous peoples who were presenters and ministers during the FAHE conference.

2. Those of us who are descendants of European settler-colonizers--white peole--aren't able to do the deepest work of decolonizing our hearts and minds on our own, even if in a study group or praxis group. We who are white must humble ourselves to accept the guidance and corrections of our indigenous kin, including descendants of BIPOC people who were forced here and who immigrated here. In many cases, these kin and elders embody ways of life that are much closer to the original ways of being. In mixed groups, we who are white must be willing to observe and not take over or assert. It requires a deep practice and discipline of humility.

3. Concepts like "repair and restore" must be broader than #landback. They must include language back, culture back, religion back, way of life back. There are a few communities in the U.S.--across Turtle Island--that have an honor tax or a land tax that white residents can pay voluntarily that go toward restoring or returning land back to indigenous stewards as a way to repair the theft of land by the federal government, whether through broken treaty, massacre, forced removal, or other unjust means, even if deemed "legal" back then. After all, even slavery was a legalized institution at some point. Perhaps these sorts of funds are also being used--or will be, soon--to restore other parts of indigenous ways of being. There are also indigenous-led organizations that focus on language and culture preservation; healing from the multigenerational trauma of forced assimilation camps, etc. 

All of this reminds me that my signing emails with a simple land acknowledgment doesn't change or decolonize any of the larger systems that still oppress or even erase indigenous people. Land acknowledgments might make me feel good briefly, knowing that I at least can name the original inhabitants of where I currently live. But I now have added another statement to my electronic signature at the bottom of my email:

I am living on traditional homelands of the Dakota, and our household makes annual donations to indigenous-led organizations that are engaged in returning land to Native peoples and in preserving/renewing Native language and culture.

An afterthought: Moral injury

In the two weeks leading up to the FAHE conference, the indigenous author-botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book Braiding Sweetgrass appeared in my life a number of times. A fellow worshiper shared a recent essay of Kimmerer's, on harvesting serviceberries; someone in a group I'm in about money and justice mentioned the book shortly after that, as did one or two presenters during the FAHE conference.

Something else was stirring in me, more deeply than I expected. It got agitated during Paula Palmer's remarks, much of which I have heard or seen before. But something was different this time. Maybe it was the intimacy of the group--about 20 people in person and 15 online, with about a third of them being indigenous or of African descent.

Or maybe it was that by being intellectually familiar with some of the facts of these tragic and horrific histories, I could receive the information through emotional, energetic, and spiritual pathways, not solely intellectual ones.

A collective sorrow was welling up within my spirit.

What had we done?! ...What had we white colonizer-settler Quakers done?!

Subconsciously, I was starting to live into that question more fully as the final day of the conference was about to get underway.

That morning, I was reading a news story about doctors in this country who are working within the for-profit healthcare system. They are beginning to come to terms with what some are calling a moral injury: by taking the Hippocratic Oath, they had agreed to work in a profession that commits them to providing beneficial treatments and ethical care while refraining from causing hurt or harm. Yet, at these for-profit medical facilities, they are pressured by "the demands of administrators, hospital executives and insurers [who force] them to stray from the ethical principles that were supposed to govern their profession," ultimately prioritizing profits over patient care when the patients are at their sickest.

At its core, a moral injury has to do with engaging in or being witness to an act that goes against our deepest held beliefs and personal or communal ethics. It seems that if trauma can be secondary--by indirectly experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event--so too moral injury can be secondary: As more white Quakers learn of how our Quaker predecessors promoted and worked in the indigenous boarding school system [forced assimilation camps], brutally stripping indigenous children of their language, culture, hair, clothes, religious, and family, more of us experience deep sorrow, grief, anguish, or even shame. We carry the grief together, learning how just a few generations ago, Quakers participated in activities that would appear to be reprehensible and that would go against our Quaker identity and values of mutual respect. Truthtelling helps begin some healing and offers some accountability but more is needed, as the FAHE conference and its indigenous participants and presenters alluded to.

Tenderly,
Liz