JWN reader Scott H., who is part Lenni Lenape, sent along a reference to this AP story out of Oregon yesterday, which tells of yet another attempt to fence in a group of indigenous people…. In this case, the native-American students at a boarding school in Salem, Oregon:
- Barbed wire turned out to be the wrong way to mark the 125th anniversary of the Chemawa Indian School, which serves tribes across the nation.
Construction crews began setting up an 8-foot-high fence, topped with barbed wire, around the 200-acre campus in Salem as the boarding school was preparing to celebrate its anniversary this weekend. The barbed wire was being removed Friday following protests.
The construction … [resulted] in a student demonstration and letters from parents to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ordered the $63,000 project.
“Chemawa means `happy home,’ ” student Jeremy Cummings told the Statesman Journal newspaper in Salem. “It doesn’t make a happy home with a fence around it.”
Indeed not. Neither there, nor in the fenced-in cities in occupied Palestine.
By the way, I explored that Lenni Lenape website a little bit, and found this page about the people’s history which should be of special interest to US Quakers.
One of the first big groups of Quakers on this continent was the group brought over in the late 17th century by William Penn, who has a “land grant” from whichever British King it was and came over here to launch what was called the “Holy Experiment” in Quaker governance.
Quakers have prided themselves on having tried to treat the native peoles of north America fairly– in particular, by “buying” their land from Indians for a “fair” price, etc etc. (In later centuries, Quakers also participated along with other churches in undertaking the cultural genocide of many Indians by putting their children and youths into boarding-schools where they were forbidden from speaking their people’s languages. But I suppose they thought they were “doing them a favor”? Anyway, that phase came a lot later… )
So the Lenni Lenape were some of the first native peoples that Penn’s colonists encountered. I guess he and the Quakers who came with him tried to treat them decently. But much or most of the land they had in “Penn”-sylvania and New Jersey was actually held in Penn’s personal name, and after he died his descendants weren’t nearly so attentive to trying to treat the Indians fairly.
According to the Lenape story told on that page I linked to, after William Penn’s death his descendants,
- falsely represented an old, incomplete, unsigned draft of a deed as a legal contract. They told the Lenape that their ancestors some fifty years before had signed this document which stated that the land to be deeded to the Penns was as much as could be covered in a day-and-a-half’s walk.
Believing that their forefathers had made such an agreement the Lenape leaders agreed to let the Penns have this area walked off. They thought the whites would take a leisurely walk down an Indian path along the Delaware River. Instead, the Penns hired three of the fastest runners, and had a straight path cleared. Only one of the “walkers” was able to complete the “walk,” but he went fifty-five miles.
And so the colonists claimed from the Lenape an extra 1,200 square miles of land inside “Penn”-sylvania… The Lenape were put off that land and sent off on what became a 130-year “trail of tears” that pushed them ever further west and south till they ended up in Oklahoma…
In June 1762, the New Jersey Quaker John Woolman determined to travel from his home-farm westwards to visit some of the native Americans in the center of what is today Pennsylvania. In his journal he wrote,
- [start quote] as I rode over the barren hills my meditations were on the alterations of the circumstances of the natives of this land since the coming in of the English. The lands near the sea are conveniently situated for fishing. The lands bear the rivers, where the tides flow, and some above, are in many places fertile and not mountainous, while the running of the tides makes passing up and down easy with any kind of traffic. Those natives have in some places, for triflking considerations, sold their inheritance so favorably situated, and in other places been driven back by superior force, so that in many places… [they] have to pass over mountains, swamps, and barren deserts, where traveling is very troublesome, in bringing their skins and furs to trade with us.
By the extending of English settlements and partly by English hunters, those wild beasts they chiefly depend on for a subsistence are not so plenty as they were, and people too often, for the sake of gain, open a door for them to waste their skins and furs in purchasing a liquor which tends to the ruin of them and their families.
… I had a prospect of the English along the coast for upward of nine hundred miles where I had traveled. And the favorable situation of the English and the difficulties attending the natives in many places, and the Negroes, were open before me. And a weighty and heavenly care came over my mind, and love filled my heart toward all mankind. (p.128)
Woolman was a powerful systems thinker, centuries before the term had even been invented. He clearly saw and described the relationships among different social and economic phenomena, and how the choices that men (mainly) and women had made in the past had led to the kinds of social inequality that he saw in front of him as he traveled.
Reading John Woolman was what started drawing me to Quakerism, around 11 years ago. (You can also read what I wrote about him two years ago, here.)