A Quaker Promise Kept: Philadelphia Friends' Work with the Allegany Senecas, 1795-1960 (review)

Book Reviews Edited by Thomas D. Hamm A Quaker Promise Kept: Philadelphia Friends' Work with the Allegany Sénecas, 1795-1960. By Lois Barton. Eugene, Ore.: Spencer Butte Press, 1990. Map, illustrations , bibliography, and index. Paper, $14.95. In 1938, at the age of nineteen, Lois Barton spent several months as a substitute teacher at Tunesassa, a Quaker-run boarding school on the Allegany reservation in southwestern New York. In ,4 Quaker Promise Kept, Barton has now provided us with a detailed history of this school, which was built and managed by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Indian Committee. Drawing on letters, diaries, and other records housed in the Quaker Collection at Haverford College and Swarthmore College's Friends Historical Library—as well as on the memories and photographs of several Tunesassa staff members, students, and supporters—Barton tells her story within the context of Philadelphia Friends' much broader attention to the education and assistance of Sénecas. This effort began about the time the United States restricted Iroquois nations to reservations in the post-Revolutionary period and continued into the 1960s. Thus this book is also a contribution to the still larger story of Friends' commitment to peace, justice, and benevolence. The boarding school, which opened in 1852 and closed in 1938, was apparently among the most successful strategies employed by the Indian Committee to attain its goal of "the Gradual Civilization and Christianization ofthe Indian Natives" (p. 3). The early chapters discuss less effective efforts prior to that—among them the establishment of model farms on the Oneida and Allegany reservations to teach men white farming methods and women white housewifery methods, the undertaking of a similar venture on Quaker lands just beyond reservation boundaries, and the setting up of a series of day schools to teach Seneca children vocational skills or reading and writing. The rest of the book focuses on the more enduring boarding school with its sophisticated vocational programs and institutional organization; its struggle to survive amid fluctuating enrollments, financial strains, epidemics, and a disastrous fire; and the comraderie and complaints of the mostly young Quaker staff who gave months if not years of their lives to the cause of Indian education. Interspersed among descriptions of their educational methods and goals are numerous references to Friends' vital support of Sénecas' ongoing struggles to preserve what little land they had left in the face of unscrupulous land speculators and insensitive if not duplicitous representatives of federal and state agencies. The "promise kept" of the title refers to the repeated assurances Friends gave that they would never demand land as payment for the considerable time and money they expended on Sénecas' behalf. However important recognition of Friends' many good works among Indians is, as a scholar, a teacher, and a student of Indian history, I find this a disappointing book. Although it makes accessible rare and remarkable photographs of Tunesassa's students and staff, as well as lengthy passages from some of the richest sources on Quaker-Indian relations, this is primarily a narrative of what Friends did among Sénecas and what Friends said their missionary efforts meant to them. It offers little analysis of why they did what they did in the way they did it, what the Seneca side of these social relations looked like, or what effect this interaction had on both Sénecas and their Quaker allies. In her discussion of the early and mid-nineteenth century, about which several interpretations of Quaker-Indian history are available, Barton's story is enriched by her incorporation of some of their insights and conclusions. But for the most part, she avoids the hard questions about the mixed motives and enormously complicated effects of the Quaker "civilizing" process on Seneca children and adults. I can comfortably recommend Book Reviews53 this book only if it is read alongside Zitkala-Sâ's American Indian Stories, Basil H. Johnston's Indian School Days, or some of the other published accounts of what it meant to students, then and later, to be regularly and often severely punished for speaking their language or otherwise expressing their culture in white-run Indian schools. Friends come off better than most...