Cowboys & Indians

What is the Road to Reconciliation Paved with?

By John Choe

October 10, 2026

When I was five years old, my parents decided to move from Korea to Australia. I still remember the cowboy suit and toy guns I wore during my migration from Seoul to Sydney. My parents were fleeing a highly-militarized, impoverished society, still reeling from decades of war and occupation. Like many Korean migrants, they were hoping for a better life, outside the bounds established for the colonized in the new Pax Americana. For me, it was all part of a grand adventure.

I learned how to swim on Bondi Beach, where my father would throw me into the waves and expect me to come back alive. I learned English the same way: my mom dropped me off at a train station, where I travelled to a Catholic boarding school in the hinterlands of Australia. For 2-3 years, I was the only non-white student in a sea of blonde-haired, blue-eyed boys, trying to fit in and not get into trouble. I kept my head above water and survived the violence of Christian instruction, taught by nuns who had no hesitation whipping out a leather belt or wooden ruler. I came back, more or less, alive.

The cost of admission for many migrants to The West is the erasure of native identity and culture. My assimilation journey included my Catholic baptism, the adoption of my Christian name, and the growing hesitation of my Korean tongue. However, no amount of fitting in would ever allow me to truly belong. Throughout my youth, I was constantly in schoolyard fights with bullies who laughed at their own racist caricatures and never seemed to be held accountable. I quickly learned that safety is an illusion. It became very clear that no one was going to rescue me. Promises of protection were like sand castles at high tide. Justice and equality … empty words. As James Baldwin eloquently stated in his 1965 debate at Cambridge University’s Union Hall:

“It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you.”

This is what came to mind while sojourning at Powell House, New York’s Quaker conference and retreat center, where I volunteered to help welcome and host the organizers of the Homelands PowWow, the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans. In the early 1800s, Mohicans (or the People of the Waters That are Never Still) had been driven out of their land in the Hudson Valley and Berkshires by land speculators and government officials in a series of forced migrations. Many ended up in Wisconsin, on land provided by other indigenous people like the Menominee and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago). For the Stockbridge-Munsee organizers of the Homelands PowWow, the visit to Powell House and the surrounding area was the first time many of their people had seen their ancestral lands in more than two hundred years.

For a century, the official policy of the United States (and Canada) was to kidnap indigenous children, erase their native culture and language, and educate them in forced indoctrination camps called “Indian Boarding Schools.” The goal was expressed by one of its pioneers, U.S. Army General Richard Henry Pratt: “kill the Indian, and save the man.” The federal government funded 526 Indian Boarding Schools, mostly run by Christian missionaries, where hundreds of thousands of children were often beaten, starved, sexually abused and even killed. In 1891, Congress enacted a federal law making attendance compulsory and the government withheld food from communities who refused to send their children to the schools.

One student from the South Dakota Yankton Indian Reservation, Zitkála-Šá (renamed Gertrude by missionaries) wrote about the trauma of Indian Boarding School:

“I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit,” she wrote in her 1921 memoir American Indian Stories. “Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities … In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”

Quakers were intimately familiar with this violent assimilationist program, having helped develop the federal policy and then operating 30 of the schools throughout the United States. Zitkála-Šá was a student at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, where missionaries systematically stripped away her Native culture and forced her to pray as a Quaker. In New York, Quakers operated the Tunessasa Indian Boarding School in Quaker Bridge (in the Allegheny Territory of the Seneca) and donated to many others, including the Thomas Indian School on Cattaraugus Seneca territory and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in nearby Pennsylvania.

While most Indian Boarding Schools closed by 1975, when Congress enacted the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the generational trauma and racial harm initiated by Quakers and other Christian congregations on indigenous communities persist. “Colonization, Christianization, re-education, the boarding school, eliminate the language, beat the Indian out of you, and assimilate, and be good people, dramatically had an impact on us as a people,” says Kimberly Vele of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans.

While the road to hell may have been paved with good intentions, it’s unclear what we need to do to pave the way to reconciliation with our indigenous neighbors. Are statements of remorse and apology enough? Are land acknowledgements at our congregations, schools and workplaces enough? Beyond these symbolic and performative acts, how do we build a new world that respects indigenous sovereignty, celebrates Native culture, and restores justice to those we have wronged?

One remarkable attempt at reconciliation is the growing collaboration between Quakers and the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans in bringing back Native people and indigenous culture to ancestral lands in New York. I had the privilege of volunteering at Powell House when the executive director, Erin Kaiser-Clarke, and members of local Quaker meetings hosted and welcomed the organizers of the Homelands PowWow. The conversations, connections and laughter we shared while breaking bread together offered a powerful antidote of love and respect in the midst of a society slowly descending into bitter division, historical amnesia and chaotic violence.

“I’m honored to be here as a direct descendant of the Mohican people and to come back to my great, great grandparent’s home and to be able to retrace the Trail of Tears,” stated Gordon “Gordy” Williams, who helped plan the Homelands PowWow. “I’m glad to see all of these Mohicans from Wisconsin and beyond here, retracing who we are as Mohican people. We are standing on billions and billions of our ancestors.”

Members of the Stockbridge-Munsee and local Quaker communities expressed gratitude for our newfound friendship during a tree-planting ceremony conducted in front of Powell House. The cedar tree, which was donated by the Stockbridge-Munsee, holds spiritual significance in Mohican culture, often used in rituals and ceremonies for purification and healing. Erin Kaiser-Clarke, executive director of Powell House, thanked the Stockbridge-Munsee for the gift of this sacred plant, symbolizing life and protection, and extended a welcome and invitation for future years to come.

Members of the Stockbridge-Munsee also expressed a desire to return as stewards of their ancestral lands to help protect Mother Earth for future generations. They expressed dismay at the current deterioration and disregard for the health of our water and land resources. They stressed the importance of understanding the connections between all humans to the rivers, mountains and trees that sustain life.

“You are the descendant of your ancestors, but you are also the ancestor of your descendents,” explained Homelands PowWow organizer Shawn Stevens. “Looking at all these diverse people, we are all relatives. Even science is catching up with what indigenous people have been saying all along: everything’s connected.”

During the PowWow, organizers urged attendees not to look at the event as “entertainment” but as an opportunity to dance and celebrate our humanity in the sacred circle of life. Perhaps a focus on stewardship and inclusiveness could be a fruitful way to strengthen this nascent friendship and collaboration between the indigenous people we harmed and those of us who belong to groups that have historically perpetrated the harms. We have much to learn from each other.

Like my visit to Acoma Puebla during the San Estevan Feast Day, I was overwhelmed with emotion while sharing the pure joy and laughter of the Stockbridge-Munsee as they celebrated their return to ancestral lands. To suffer centuries of dispossession and ethnic cleansing, attempts to erase their language and culture, the traumatic kidnapping and abuse of their children – and, yet exhibit the exuberance of survival with dignity, to speak again their Native Tongue, move their bodies to their traditional dances and songs – was difficult to witness without tears.

How do we build a world where we are each other’s mirror and recognize ourselves in each other? Where we respect the inherent dignity and potential of every single life? Where we acknowledge the harm we put out into the world is actually harming ourselves?

John Choe is currently traveling in the ministry as a member of the People of Color (POC) Worship & Reflection Group in the New York Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. During his journey south along the Pan-American Highway, John is documenting the stories of the people he meets and the communities he visits along the way.

Watch this video of James Baldwin speak and be amazed

Parks & Rec

It’s Too Early for Land Acknowledgements in Palestine

By John Choe

August 15, 2026

One of the least known aspects of visiting Jerusalem is the opportunity to enjoy the scenic wonders surrounding t…

Read more

Friends Fiduciary: All Hail the Elon!

By John Choe (July 1, 2026)

During my travels through the American South, I visited Huntsville, Alabama, where NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) is located. MS…

Read more

David Sung Ok Choe (March 17, 1941 – January 21, 2026)

By John Choe
Harrison County, Mississippi
January 21, 2026

I had made it to the Gulf of Mexico when the call from New York came. My father, David Sung Ok…

Read more

Beyond Thoughts & Prayers

By John Choe

DeKalb County, Georgia

December 30, 2025

“Rooted in both spiritual devotion and civic purpose, the Walk for Peace seeks to remind Americans that peace is not a destinati…

Read more

Welcome the Stranger

By John Choe

December 25, 2025

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me” - Matthew 25:35-40

While visiting Comer, …

Read more

Who Killed Refaat?
By John Choe

December 6, 2025

Refaat Alareer was born on September 23, 1979, and spent most of his 44-year life confined to a walled-in enclosure the size of Manhattan. Refaat was a poet. …

Read more

Inflection Point

By John Choe

October 24, 2025 | New York City

Every year, our nation commemorates the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. 2,977 Americans died and thousands more injured. As a New Yorker, I remember the day vividly. Normally, I would be working in my office at the City’s Department of Finance on John Street, about three blocks from the World Trade Center. But that day happened to be Primary Day and I was volunteering for my fellow Binghamton University alumnus John Liu in Flushing, Queens (he was eventually sworn in as the first Asian American elected official in New York). When our cell phones lost signal and we saw the smoke billowing from Manhattan, we knew something was wrong. The election was cancelled.

I felt inspired by the resilience of New Yorkers – many of whom came out to help and support each other. We collectively mourned the loss of lives and then started the slow process of rebuilding our city. I still remember visiting my family on Staten Island weeks after the attack, witnessing the simmering husks of the World Trade Center from the ferry, and imagining the rebirth of NYC founded on mutual respect and solidarity. My optimism for the future was not to last as our nation descended into paranoia, consumerism, racist Islamophobia and hate crimes as well as a revenge-fueled bloodbath in Afghanistan and Iraq where we were responsible for the deaths of millions and the rise of extremist groups like ISIS/ISIL.

These are the recollections and impressions that come to mind during 9/11 commemorations and what I tried to convey in my NYC seminars when I taught at my local college. I warn them that hope can be squandered and our fears easily exploited by those in power. However, for most of my students (who were born after the attack), 9/11 is ancient history.

How do we determine what is worthy of commemoration?

More than a million Americans perished during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 50,000 were New York City residents. There are no commemorations.

I still remember the body bags piling up in ice trucks and other temporary morgues outside Elmhurst Hospital as well as the mass burials of wooden coffins on Hart Island, the city’s potters field, and the blocks-long lines of desperate New Yorkers – many jobless or facing eviction – outside the food pantry where I volunteered during the pandemic. At the height of COVID-19 transmission, we were feeding more than 10,000 families every week. One day, we found the body of an elderly man who had passed away overnight in a cardboard box near our food pantry. Like many Asian Americans, he had carefully taken off and placed his shoes outside his home before entering.

Questions that haunt me: How can we allow senior citizens to die on our streets, alone and anonymous in cardboard boxes, without human dignity? How is this possible in the richest city in the richest country in the world? Where was our government? Where was our social contract?

During the 2020 Christmas holiday, I helped give out food, clothing and blankets to former restaurant workers. The people who had fed us, cleaned our homes and offices, and took care of our elders and children – mostly Latino immigrants who had worked for decades without health insurance or labor protections – were now discarded and forgotten when they most needed our help. Despite the rhetoric of valorizing essential workers, we left many to fend for themselves – to sleep under bridges and tunnels and parks in the dead of winter.

Politicians who praised frontline workers for keeping our schools, supermarkets and hospitals open during the pandemic, often led efforts to attack the immigrant working-class communities of color in which they lived. For example, the local Councilmember in Flushing collaborated with Mayor Eric Adams to roll back the new Main Street Busway, which was designed to expand access to safe and efficient public transit for those same workers. And, as a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes flooded our country, the local Councilmember demanded a violent police crackdown of immigrant street vendors on Main Street – many of whom had lost their livelihoods during the pandemic and had no other means of feeding their families.

The latest betrayal by our government is the railroading of a predatory casino proposed by billionaire hedge fund manager and Mets owner Steve Cohen, who has flooded our political system with millions of dollars in donations to elected officials and civic groups. Despite the permanent removal of public parkland and the risk of massive displacement of local residents and small business, everyone from the Community Board, Borough President, City Council and State Legislature to the Mayor and Governor is moving the project forward over the objections of workers, tenants and immigrant advocates.

In this context, the current depredations of the Trump Administration are only a more extreme and dramatic expansion of the existing war on immigrants, communities of color and working families. Instead of supporting and rewarding the people who risked their lives to sustain us during the pandemic, essential workers are now being targeted for detention and deportation by masked men in unmarked cars. Federal cuts to food stamps and health insurance will devastate the working families and small business owners who are the foundation of our economy while billionaire oligarchs pay less taxes, corrupt our political system and control an ever-increasing increasing chunk of our national wealth.

We are at an inflection point.

Despite decades-long efforts to build solidarity and community across race and religion, many New Yorkers like myself have witnessed the slow death of our city and nation. The gross mismanagement and corruption of Mayor Adams and his cronies presaged the greater criminality and fascism of President Trump and his white Christian nationalists. Refugees seeking sanctuary in the United States are themselves becoming victims of the bigotry and persecution they once fled in their own homelands (often enabled by frequent American interventions around the world). The chickens are indeed coming home to roost.

One source of hope has been this year’s election of our next Mayor. Zohran Mamdani has inspired a city desperate for change and organized a grassroots movement that is multi-generational, multi-ethnic and multi-faith. In winning the nomination of the Democratic Party, he not only shocked the political establishment and their financial backers, but also reshaped the landscape for what is possible – especially for working families who can no longer afford to live in our city and are considering leaving. Fixing and expanding access to our public transit system, child care, and affordable housing are not optional policies, but ideas that should have been implemented years ago. If anything, by endorsing Zohran’s platform of affordability, NYC is merely catching up with other world-class cities that have already surpassed us in livability.

I have endorsed and already voted for Zorhan Mamdani as our next Mayor and urge you to vote for him as well (on the Working Families Party ballot line). We need to turn around our city and nation. Our future depends on your vote.

Early voting is taking place now from October 25 to November 2.

Election Day is Tuesday, November 4, 2025. Polls are open from 6am to 9pm. For more information about the election schedule and where to find your poll site, visit vote.nyc.

There are other citywide elections (Comptroller, Borough President, City Council, etc.) as well as six ballot referenda questions. The only ballot measure I am strongly recommending a “Yes” vote on is Question #6 (moving future city elections to the same even years as Presidential Elections to take advantage of the greater voter turnout). For more information, visit nycvotes.org.

Vote. Our lives depend on it.

If you have any thoughts, please comment.

In Friendship,

John

From Fear to Love

By John Choe

September 8, 2025 | Saint Francis of the Woods, Oklahoma

It was a time of political chaos in which established institutions had lost legitimacy amidst militarism abroad and aut…

Read more

Protect the Sacred

By John Choe

September 2, 2025 | Acoma Puebla, New Mexico

Tears were streaming down my cheeks during the annual San Estevan Feast Day in Sky City. Saint Stephan is the patron saint of Acom…

Read more

Finding Faith

By John Choe

August 10, 2025 | Faith, South Dakota

In December 2024, I received my driving license and was introduced to the privileged world of car culture. Our country’s relative lack of inve…

Read more

By John Choe

July 15, 2025

First Witch: When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch: When the hurly-burly's done,

When the battle's lost and won.

T…

Read more

To wrap up Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month, it might be interesting to review my pilgrimage to the “Siamese Twins Museum,” an exhibit organized by the Surry Arts Council located across the street from the Andy Griffith Museum at 215 Rockford Street in Mount Airy, North Carolina. The Siamese Twins Museum tells the story of Eng and Chang …

Read more

May 25, 2025

Quakers walked 300 miles over eighteen days from Flushing NY to Washington DC to deliver copies of the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance to elected officials as part of an interfaith movement to hold our government accountable. At the end of the Walk, we worshipped and nailed a copy of the Remonstrance on a door at the National Mall, th…

Read more

Before arraignment, I spent time exploring Historic Watson Mill Bridge State Park, which was a wonderful and rejuvenating experience. The beauty of the water flowing under the old mill bridge, the friendliness of those I met, and the sun shining through the magnificent trees helped calm and strengthen me before I headed to State Court of Georgia to plea…

Read more

Read more

Subscribe now

Read more