FCNL shares this Indigenous Land Acknowledgement as an important step towards truth telling and places it in the present. Colonialism is a currently ongoing process and mindset, and FCNL continues to work to build our awareness and acknowledgment of our present participation in settler colonialism. FCNL strives to root out these truths in action as a step towards right relationship with the Indigenous peoples of this land.
Foundationally, we recognize the ongoing harm of the Western colonial-enforced concept of “land ownership” in contrast to our true collective responsibility of interconnected stewardship.
FCNL recognizes the harms of colonization on this “stolen land.” It is known by many different names to Indigenous tribes and sovereign nations, including Scheyischbi or Lenapehoking (Lenni-Lenape), Turtle Island or Mikinaak Minis (Ojibway/Anishinaabe), Tsenacommacah (Powhatan Confederacy), and Mílahaŋska-Tȟamákȟočhe (Lakota).
FCNL honors, celebrates, and recognizes the resilience of the Native American peoples who still live across this land, despite settler colonialism’s attempt to displace many from their traditional homelands and all from their traditional lifeways.
As a Quaker organization, FCNL acknowledges and claims responsibility to reckon with our specific legacy in the colonization of Turtle Island. Quakers, along with other European colonizers, started their harm against Native American people by colonizing within what is now called the United States often through deception, false promises, broken treaties, violence, and forcing their cultural ideas of land ownership and privatization.
Out of the hundreds of Indian Boarding Schools for Native American children from 1796-1960s, Quakers founded and operated at least 30 day and boarding schools on Indigenous nations’ lands in collaboration with the US government.
Indian Boarding Schools, often run in partnership with religious organizations, attempted to culturally erase Native American peoples and assimilate them into white supremacist, Christian, capitalist, and patriarchal ideals.
In large part due to false notions of Christian superiority, the Religious Society of Friends devastatingly persuaded President Ulysses S. Grant to further enforce assimilation of Native peoples by replacing Native American leadership in reservations with Christian missionaries in the 1869 Peace Policy.
Quakers have reparations to make for our part in this genocide. As a Quaker organization, FCNL has a unique part to play in reconciling the damage the Religious Society of Friends committed to Native American peoples — damage that lives on today.
FCNL acknowledges that the material profits and resources we have today as an organization stem from the founding of our nation through broken treaties, stolen land, and genocidal acts against Native Americans. As such, FCNL pledges to continue to put our organization’s resources to pushing for equity and right relationship with Native Americans.
FCNL will continue its collaboration with Native American organizations to lobby Congress and the administration for investments in Indian country, policy changes to benefit Native American communities, and respect for tribal sovereignty.
FCNL believes in a future where Native peoples and the U.S. are in right relationship with one another. We have much to learn and mutually gain through partnering with Native American-led organizations and actions.
As we seek to move into right relationship with Native peoples, we call on those who have benefitted from the colonization, genocide, and displacement of Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Alaska Natives to join the movement in demanding radical truth-telling, reconnection, accountability, and action.