Finding Right Relations

Quakers, Native Americans, and Settler Colonialism

Marianne O. Nielsen, Barbara M. Heather

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780816550296, 9780816544097
• eBook ISBN: 9780816545292
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Quakers were one of the early settler colonist groups to invade northeastern North America. William Penn set out to develop a "Holy Experiment," or utopian colony, in what is now Pennsylvania. Here, he thought, his settler colonists would live in harmony with the Indigenous Lenape and other settler colonists.

Centering on the relationship between Quaker colonists and the Lenape people, Finding Right Relations explores the contradictory position of the Quakers as both egalitarian, pacifist people, and as settler colonists. This book explores major challenges to Quaker beliefs and resulting relations with American Indians from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. It shows how the Quakers not only failed to prevent settler colonial violence against American Indians but also perpetuated it. It provides historical examples such as the French and Indian War, the massacre of the Conestoga Indians, and the American Indian boarding schools to explore the power of colonialism to corrupt even those colonists with a belief system rooted in social justice.

While this truth rubs against Quaker identity as pacifists and socially conscious, justice-minded people, the authors address how facing these truths provide ways forward for achieving restitution for the harms of the past. This book offers a path to truth telling that is essential to the healing process.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Quaker Settler Colonialism: Its Disastrous Impacts on American Indians
• 1. Quaker and Lenape Peacemaking in the 1700s: What Quakers Didn’t Hear
• 2. Quaker Governance: Peace, Politeness, or Politics?
• 3. The Failure of the Pennsylvania Government: The Conestoga Massacres
• 4. The Subversive Effects of Colonial Ideology: Early Quaker Attitudes toward American Indians
• 5. Quaker Beliefs, Colonialism, and American Indian Education: Contributing to Cultural Genocide
• 6. The Universality of Peacemaking: Hope for Social Justice?
• 7. A Feeling of Rightness: Quaker/Indigenous Relations, Past, Present, and Future
• Glossary
• References
• Index