Showing Up

In September of 2018, a small group of Native and non-Native people walked 94 miles across Iowa in eight days, following the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline from Des Moines to Fort Dodge. I was one of the non-Native walkers. The purpose was not to demonstrate anything — the pipeline was already built and operating. The purpose was to spend eight days walking together, sharing each other's stories, so that when we got home we could actually work together on things that mattered.

That worked. The materials gathered here — the Quaker Social Change Ministry program of the American Friends Service Committee, the documents and history of the Great Plains Action Society, the work of the Decolonial Repair Network, my own epistle on Mutual Aid and LANDBACK — all circle back to the same problem. What does it actually take for a small Quaker meeting in rural Iowa to be genuinely useful to Indigenous-led work? Not performatively useful. Not useful in ways that serve the meeting's self-image. Actually useful.

This document is organized around seven questions. They are not abstract. Each one is grounded in specific events, specific places, and specific relationships that have developed over nearly a decade of actual work between my Quaker community and the Great Plains Action Society.

In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant handed administration of dozens of Indian agencies and schools to religious groups, including Quakers. He called it the Peace Policy. The actual goal, documented in the records of the period, was to pacify Native peoples and eliminate barriers to the settlement and exploitation of their land. Quakers ran some of those agencies and some of those schools.

This was not done by bad Quakers. It was done by Quakers who believed they were acting out of love — The theology of assimilation, the belief that Indigenous cultures were a barrier to salvation and civilization, ran directly through the Religious Society of Friends.

Most Iowa Quakers today do not know this history in detail. Some who know it treat it as something in the past. It is not in the past. I have sat across from Native friends and apologized for what Quakers did. That apology was not enough, but it was necessary — the starting point of a reckoning that is still underway.

Sikowis Nobiss, who founded the Great Plains Action Society and leads the work at the Urban Resilience Hub in Iowa City, is Plains Cree and Saulteaux (Nêhiyaw/Saulteaux). Her family is from George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan. George Gordon First Nation had a residential school. In 2022, unmarked graves of children were found there.

Quaker testimonies — peace, equality, simplicity, integrity — are not aspirations. They are descriptions of how Friends commit to actually live. A testimony of equality that does not reckon with stolen land is not a testimony of equality.

What the following sections describe is not a program that can be adopted by committee vote. It is an account of what has already been built through relationship, over time, and what Iowa Quaker meetings can do to become genuinely part of that work.

Iowa is the most biologically colonized state in the country. It is the number one contributor to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and has the second highest growing cancer rate in the nation. The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers — two of the mightiest rivers on the continent — define Iowa's borders, and both are badly degraded. The conversion of nearly all of Iowa's diverse tallgrass prairie into monoculture corn and soybean production — a conversion that happened within the lifetimes of people now living — is one of the most thorough acts of ecological destruction in North American history.

Colonial-capitalist farming practices caused this. The collapse is not only ecological. The same system that has poisoned Iowa's rivers is now damaging the communities of white Iowans who were supposed to benefit from it. Across rural Iowa and the broader Midwest, white working-class communities have experienced surging rates of deaths from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related illness.

White Christian Nationalism is one response to this situation. It misdirects the resulting anger and grief toward immigrants, people of color, and secularists — away from the structural source of the problem. The militarization of policing is another symptom of the same collapse. The Department of Defense's 1033 Program has transferred more than $7.4 billion in surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies since 1997.

It is worth saying plainly: Native Americans die from deaths of despair at higher rates than anyone else. The harm that white communities are now experiencing from colonial capitalism deserves attention, but it does not override or replace the ongoing violence that the original targets of this system have lived with since contact.

"The Architecture of Repair," a document produced by the Decolonial Repair Network, names the system we are dealing with as Christian Colonial Capitalist Violence. This is not three separate problems. It is one integrated system in which Christian ideology provides the moral license for conquest, capitalism provides the economic engine, and the colonial state provides the enforcement apparatus.

The Doctrine of Discovery — a series of 15th-century papal bulls that granted Christian monarchs divine authority to seize non-Christian lands — is not a historical artifact. It was incorporated into U.S. law in 1823 in Johnson v. M'Intosh and has never been fully repudiated. The response to a single fused system must be equally integrated.

Mutual Aid: Solidarity, Not Charity

I spent three years working with Des Moines Mutual Aid alongside Ronnie James. What I learned is what the Epistle says directly: Mutual Aid is a radical departure from "us helping them." It is everyone working together to solve problems we all face. Mutual Aid requires physical presence. It cannot be done by committee or donations. The transformation that Mutual Aid produces — in both those giving and receiving help — depends on people actually being in the same place, doing work together, learning to trust each other over time.

LANDBACK: Material, Not Metaphor

LANDBACK is frequently misunderstood as a symbolic demand. Nickita Longman of George Gordon First Nation named the scope of it plainly: "Any time an Indigenous person or nation has pushed back against the oppressive state, they are exercising some form of landback." The movement goes beyond the transfer of property deeds. It includes the full restoration of Indigenous sovereignty — the preservation of languages and traditions, the revitalization of traditional food systems, the guarantee of housing and a clean environment.

Sikowis Nobiss's concept of ReMatriation names the philosophical foundation underneath LANDBACK. It is not simply the return of land titles. ReMatriation is the restoration of a matriarchal governing philosophy — a way of organizing collective life in which the well-being of all members of the community is the foundational principle of governance.

Abolition: Decolonization Requires It

Abolition is frequently misread as simply opposition to prisons. It is that, but it is also an analysis: the prison-industrial complex is the enforcement arm of the settler-colonial state. It exists to protect property claims on stolen land and to manage the populations that colonial capitalism has dispossessed. You cannot achieve decolonization while leaving intact the carceral apparatus that would violently prevent it.

On 1.2 acres in downtown Iowa City, the Great Plains Action Society is building an Urban Resilience and Innovation Hub. It is Indigenous-led. The land has existing buildings that are being renovated. The Hub is, as the GPAS documents describe it, "a true testament to Indigenous Futurism" — a place where Indigenous worldviews and lifeways can help reimagine the world and establish a just economy where technology can help and not harm the earth.

I have been involved in work projects at this land. What is being built there is not abstract.

The Buildings and What They Do

The Hub Center at 800 Maiden Lane is the main community space: multi-purpose rooms, offices, storage, an industrial kitchen, a teaching kitchen, and an art space. Programming will include education and training, community engagement and outreach, and the building of a Mutual Aid network.

The Urban Farm at 815 Gilbert Court is organized around traditional ecological knowledge. It is a working farm designed to produce food, create jobs, provide farming and cooking education, and carry out Mutual Aid practices in Iowa City. GPAS intends to develop it into a worker cooperative over time.

The Healing Justice House at 418 E Benton Street is where GPAS works with a BIPOC Healing Collective — therapists and social workers who understand that individual health cannot be separated from the conditions that affect that health.

The Mutual Aid Café at 410 E Benton Street will operate on a pay-what-you-can model, with a community fund that collects donations for local social justice work. A coffee shop that operates on Mutual Aid principles is a daily demonstration that a different economy is possible.

Why Iowa Specifically

Iowa is the most biologically colonized state in the country. The colonial-capitalist farming practices that produced that condition are also producing the climate instability that everyone in Iowa is now living with. What GPAS is building is not a service program for marginalized populations. It is a set of systems — food production, healing, economic development, community gathering — built on the knowledge systems that maintained the health of this land for thousands of years before colonial agriculture arrived.

The Hub is also LANDBACK made physical. Acquiring 1.2 acres of downtown Iowa City for Indigenous-led use, in a state that is the most biologically colonized in the country, is a material act. It is exactly what the LANDBACK framework calls for — not symbolic, not a land acknowledgment, but actual land, held and used by Indigenous people, for Indigenous-led purposes that serve the whole community.

On September 1, 2018, a group of Native and non-Native people set out from Des Moines on foot. They walked for eight days along the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline — 94 miles — arriving in Fort Dodge on September 8. This was the First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March, organized by Sikowis Nobiss and a group of Native and non-Native Iowans who had been working together for the previous two years.

The purpose of the march was not to stop the pipeline. It was already built and operating. The purpose was to spend eight days walking together — Native and non-Native — sharing stories, learning each other's lives, and building the trust that makes working together possible afterward. That is what happened.

We are a tribe.
— Donnielle Wanatee, First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March, 2018

This is what active objection actually looks like. Not a statement. Not a donation check. Not a resolution passed at yearly meeting. Eight days of walking together in hard conditions, talking about real things, being physically present with each other. Durable solidarity requires shared struggle, not shared sentiment.

The relationship built through the march and the years around it produced a specific institutional act in 2022. Unmarked graves of children had been found at the residential school at George Gordon First Nation — Sikowis's First Nation. Sikowis came to the Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) Peace and Social Concerns Committee and asked Friends for money to help promote the film produced about the boarding school at her George Gordon First Nation. That happened because the groundwork had been laid — years of showing up, walking, working together, being present.

In October 2023, I published the Epistle — "An Epistle to Friends Regarding Community, Mutual Aid and LANDBACK." It states plainly:

"It has become clear to some of us who are called Friends that the colonial capitalist economic system and white supremacy are contrary to the Spirit and we must find a better way. We conscientiously object to and resist capitalism and white supremacy."

That is the model. Not a program you can adopt by committee vote. A set of relationships built through sustained physical presence in Indigenous-led spaces, over time, until institutional change becomes the natural next step.

The Quaker Social Change Ministry program, developed by the American Friends Service Committee beginning in 2015 and 2016, works in small groups of five to twelve people who commit to work together for at least one year. The groups are covenant-based. They commit to accompaniment rather than leadership, to following rather than directing, to showing up in Indigenous-led and community-led spaces rather than running programs of their own design.

That is the right frame for what Iowa Quakers need to do in relation to GPAS. The question is not what Friends think GPAS needs. The question is what GPAS is asking for and whether Friends are willing to commit to showing up and doing it.

Physical Presence at the Hub

GPAS needs labor — skilled and unskilled — for the renovation of its buildings and the development of its land. Showing up to work days is the most direct thing a Quaker meeting can do. Bring your hands. Learn what is actually needed on the ground rather than deciding from a distance what would be useful.

A Quaker meeting that decides to be present at the Hub on a regular basis, and then actually shows up consistently for a year or more, will learn things about what is needed that cannot be learned any other way. The trust required for deeper collaboration develops through the accumulation of those ordinary days of work.

Presence at GPAS Events

GPAS holds events that need non-Native attendees who understand why they are there — not as observers of someone else's culture, but as people who have committed to taking direction from Indigenous leadership. Truthsgiving, which reframes the Thanksgiving holiday in its actual historical context, is one such event. Document and amplify. Friends who attend GPAS events can write about them in their meeting newsletters and help GPAS reach audiences that GPAS's own channels do not reach.

Financial Contribution, In Context

Financial contributions matter and are asked for. The Hub is fundraising to pay off its mortgage while maintaining current programming. But money sent by check from a distance does not build the relationship that makes other things possible. Give when GPAS asks for it. Give without strings attached and without conditions that reflect your meeting's priorities rather than GPAS's needs. And do not let financial contribution substitute for physical presence. That is the trap the Epistle names directly: Mutual Aid cannot be done by committee or donations.

A small rural meeting — ten, fifteen, twenty active members — cannot do everything. But it can make a covenant among three to five of those members to commit one year to regular, physical presence in GPAS's work: monthly work days at the Hub, attendance at GPAS events, regular communication with GPAS about what is actually needed.

The GPAS documents describe the Urban Resilience Hub as "a true testament to Indigenous Futurism" — a place where Indigenous worldviews and lifeways "can help reimagine the world and establish a just economy where technology can help and not harm the earth." This is not a vision of the past being restored. It is a vision of the future being built.

What colonial capitalism is producing in Iowa — poisoned rivers, rising cancer rates, cascading climate disasters, communities torn apart by economic despair — will not be solved by more of the same systems that caused it. The knowledge systems that maintained the health of this land for thousands of years before colonial agriculture arrived did not disappear. They were suppressed. They are still here, and the people who carry them are building with them.

ReMatriation, as Sikowis Nobiss articulates it, is the philosophical framework underneath all of this. It is not about replacing one hierarchy with another. It is about organizing collective life around the principle that the well-being of all members of the community — and the land itself — is the foundational purpose of governance and economy.

What this asks of settler Quakers is not agreement. Agreement is easy and costs nothing. What it asks is a recognition that the world being built at 800 Maiden Lane and 815 Gilbert Court and 418 E Benton Street in Iowa City is the world that Quaker testimony has always pointed toward — and that Quakers are not building it. They can be part of building it, if they show up.

The Quaker concept of continuing revelation holds that the Spirit is still speaking. What is being revealed now, in Iowa, is that the path toward a world that works for people and for land runs through Indigenous-led spaces and Indigenous-led knowledge. The Hub asks the same thing the 2018 march asked: be here, for the long work, in the difficulty and the conversations that do not resolve cleanly.

Indigenous futurity is not a destination that settlers arrive at by making good decisions. It is a set of relationships and practices that are already underway, led by people who did not wait for settler institutions to grant permission.