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Native Voices and Quaker Choices

So, where’s all the Indians?” asked Yaynicut Franco, one of the Wukchumni adults. The whiteness of the conference was a bit shocking to us, given the title: “Quakers, First Nations, and American Indians.”

On Insight (March 2017)

The Landscape of Sanctuary

Albuquerque Monthly Meeting is “positioned” in a cultural and political landscape, but I can no more see our position in that landscape than I can see the position of our planet in the Milky Way, or the back of my own head. I can see that our meetinghouse sits on a one-way street in a valley separating the Sandia Mountains on the east from the Mesa on the west. Ask me about the minutiae of operating a sanctuary in a Quaker meetinghouse, and I can hold forth. Ask me about our position in the political landscape, and I find myself in a vortex of questions: What is sanctuary? What is political? What is a landscape?

On Politics (July 2017)

On Garbage

Henry Ford, the father of mass production, is famously known for declaring, “History is bunk.” Thus, he relegated “History” to “the trash heap of history.” (The word “bunk” comes from the Dutch word for “rubbish,” bunkum.) Histories exist to make sense of people’s lives, to reveal the meanings of humanity. Assembly lines exist to maximize the output of people’s lives, to boost the means of production. Between history and industry, humanity and mass production, tensions are too often resolved by treating the sacred as garbage.

On Garbage (November 2017)

Loving Stolen Land

We travel East each year to see my husband’s family in Pennsylvania, where we spend two weeks in the verdant, fertile, sticky forests and fields of the eastern states – eating fresh blackberries on the trail by the stream, fresh corn from the roadside stands, peaches that drip juice down your chin. It is glorious. The water, the leaves, the grass, the flowers bursting forth from every crack – life in every crack and corner.

On Expansion (May 2018)

Uprooting Racism (abridged)

My son was raised as a Quaker, but he left the meeting and joined an African American mega-church. Both our daughters were raised as Quakers, and they also left. During a retreat I attended this summer, several African American Friends told me they no longer attend their Quaker meetings because they cannot tolerate the racism they experience there on a weekly basis.

On Children (September 2018)

On Mixture

Dear Friends: Our bodies cannot live outside of history, nor can we live outside of history’s cruelty, its “mixing memory and desire.” Rowing our boats with our backs towards the future, we despair at the carnage we watch flowing out from our wakes – oceans choked by our poisons, lives crushed by our bigotry, truth and kindness twisted by our greed. Some bits of beauty bob along, too. But it’s easy to view the whole scene as basically grim.

On Mixture (November 2018)

Bullet Points

On the “open wound” of border between Nogales, Arizona, U.S.A., and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico (actually one city, divided), a steel-tube fence stretches thirty feet high and miles to the east and west – beyond our seeing. Dozens of people entered a restricted zone beside that wall and enacted a die-in last November, to remember 123 migrants who died in the nearby desert during the previous twelve months, as a result of U.S. “preventive deterrence” border policies. The die-in also honored the lives of people killed or disappeared by U.S.-trained, U.S.-equipped, military and police forces in Latin America.

On Weapons (January 2019)

How We Came to Ben Lomond

On Sunday morning, August 4th, 2019, Susan Wilson and I left our home in Central Vermont.  We had filled a twenty-foot rental truck with our possessions, hitched our car to the back of the truck, and started driving toward California. We were leaving behind our beloved friends and family, our lovely home, and the magic of the Green Mountains.

On Separation (November 2019)

This Is the Work

I am a twenty-year veteran teacher. I’ve always taught the littlest ones – first grade, kindergarten, and preschool for four-year-olds, otherwise known as early childhood education or ECE. I teach ECE today in a predominantly black district – Denver Pubic Schools – at Hallett Academy, where 99% of the students are black.

On Rules (November 2020)

The Long-Term Project of Anti-Racism

This is a time when many Quaker meetings have approved statements denouncing racist violence and pledging their efforts to uproot and dismantle systemic racism. Many individual Friends are engaged in anti-racist work in their communities and are educating themselves about the history and impacts of racism in our country, the better to discern how they might act to promote racial equity and justice.

On Cliques (September 2021)

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