An exhibit · Jeff Kisling

How It Reached Us

One grave, read four ways. What was done to a fifteen-year-old Arapaho girl in 1883; what Friends wrote down about it; what was public; and what reached me — a Quaker boy who went to school two miles away and did not learn her name for fifty-eight years.

Years
What was doneTo Grace Yellowhair, by name.
What Friends recordedOur own minutes, ledgers, and burying ground — and what they left out.
What was publicIn the newspaper, in federal files, in print.
What reached meJeff Kisling, born 1951. Read down: by this row, had any of it arrived?
1883
Grace Yellowhair dies Fifteen, Arapaho. Brought in Third Month 1883 to a school in West Branch, Iowa, run by a Quaker couple paid $167 a year per child. Dead of malaria on September 11th. Theodore Rogers, an eight-year-old Osage boy, had died of the same fever that June.
Left out A Friends’ section of the cemetery The graves are there. Unmarked. No stone, no name, and nothing in the book about how two children in our keeping came to be in the ground within six months of each other.
Printed in the town newspaper Both deaths, the year they happened, in West Branch — known to the neighbors, whatever was known to us.
1884–1950
The system runs on Friends operate Indian day and boarding schools into the 1960s.
Never opened The archived records fill Twenty thousand pages of Quaker boarding-school ledgers accumulate, unread and uncataloged. The two graves stay unmarked for another lifetime.
Nothing is withdrawn from print The newspaper record of 1883 remains where it has always been.
1966–1970
Grace has been in the ground 83 years Two miles from the school.
Never opened The records sit Nobody has looked. Nobody is stopping anybody from looking.
Still in print, still in the Archives And the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library is in West Branch itself.
Scattergood Friends School Four years. Meeting for worship, a curriculum, queries, work crews, and hundreds of miles run on the gravel roads around that cemetery. None of this reached me
1971–2023
The grave stays unmarked A hundred and forty years, and the ceremony her people would have held has not been held.
Left out The official history is written Careful, warm, complete-sounding. The schools are a paragraph, and the paragraph is about good intentions.
Everything above remains public For fifty more years.
A life of service, and nothing arrives Volunteer service in Indianapolis, forty-five years without a car, years at the Kheprw Institute, reading and organizing. The phrase “forced assimilation” reached me long ago. Grace did not. None of this reached me
2024
the paper
Grace has been in the ground 141 years Nothing about her situation has changed. Everything about ours is about to.
Opened at last A ranger writes it up Peter Hoehnle, a National Park Service guide at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site with a doctorate in history, researches and publishes The West Branch Industrial School — from sources that had been available the whole time.
A paper anyone could read Public, like everything before it. Being readable has never been the problem.
Judy Cottingham thinks of me A Friend of West Branch meeting comes across Peter’s paper, knows my concerns about the boarding schools, and sends it. Somebody knew I was on the other end. That is the first link, and the whole difference.
2024
the chain
The descendants are found Fred Mosqueda writes back: his wife, Mary Fletcher, was raised by her grandfather, Gustave Yellowhair, and he believes the line can be traced to Grace.
Opened at last Friends carry it, person to person Judy to me; me to Paula Palmer, whose ministry is Quakers and the residential schools; Paula to Frank MedicineWater, the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribal officer tracing the children and their descendants; Frank to Fred Mosqueda, of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. Judy keeps up the correspondence and does the research to locate the two plots. Before the gathering, city staff set white flags.
White flags on the ground Two marks in the grass, two miles from my old school, where for fifty-eight years I had seen nothing at all.
July 22
2024
The family comes, and does what was never done Fred Mosqueda comes from Oklahoma with Mary Fletcher and her brother John Fletcher. They chose not to disinter her. Cedar is burned and feathers fan the smoke; Fred sings three songs with the drum he brought. Grace’s spirit, held in that ground a hundred and forty-one years, is released. Theodore Rogers is remembered in the prayers so that he too can go.
Opened at last Friends stand and witness, and set a table Judy and Jim Cottingham of West Branch Friends Meeting, Peter Hoehnle, members of West Branch Friends Church, and the town’s mayor. Afterward, a meal at the meetinghouse — the last meal Grace would share with her family on earth. A plate was made up for her and set outside, in a sheltered spot.
Not a public event This was not for an audience, and the account of it here stops where the family’s privacy begins.
Grace reached me I was there to witness, and to take the photographs the family had asked for. Fred began by telling us, from the inside, why children like Grace were taken at all — the buffalo killed, families made to choose between their children and the rations they had been promised. That was the class Scattergood never held. The ceremony was not ours. The decisions were not ours.

Read the fourth column, then read the third.

The record was never lost. Peter Hoehnle built his paper from sources that had been sitting in West Branch the entire time — the same town as the Presidential Library, two miles from the school I attended for four years. Nothing was found in 2024 that could not have been found in 1966, or 1926, or 1884.

Peter’s paper→Judy Cottingham→Jeff→Paula Palmer→Frank MedicineWater→Fred Mosqueda→the ceremony

A hundred and forty-one years, then a few months. What changed was not the archive. It was that somebody read a paper and thought of a particular person — and then each person in turn decided not to look away. A channel is exactly that long and no shorter, and every link in it has a name.

And the cost was never only mine. The silence in our record did not merely leave me ignorant. It left Grace in that ground with the ceremony undone for a hundred and forty-one years, and her family without the place to hold it. What did not reach me was also what did not reach them. That is the difference between a gap in someone’s education and a break in a relationship — and it is why the story did not lose its way to us. We did not go to it.