Arla Patch and the Art of Healing
600 years ago, I would have been burned at the stake. I see visions and hear voices. In artist terms, I see a piece in my mind’s eye. In Quaker terms, I receive audio promptings from Spirit. Thank goodness for the Quaker core value of tolerance.
Finding Doylestown Friends Meeting at age 12 was my salvation, I now see. My mother finally divorced my violent Navy pilot father, and we moved to Bucks County, PA. A sleepover with my childhood friend created the opportunity for me to walk in the doors of Doylestown Friends Meeting for worship. I felt like I had come home.
First Day School, led by the wonderful Larry Miller, planted a seed within my 14-year-old heart, about the abuses to the Natives peoples of this land. In my 60s, a trip to the Navajo reservation is when that seed germinated. When I got home, I did a computer search: Quakers, Native Americans, Maine.
The Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission came up, the first in the US. It was finally an AFSC conference call that led to an invitation to sit down with Wabanaki people on Indian Island. My volunteer work for the truth commission began.
Please Abide With Me
As an artist who has used art as a tool for healing, any form of healing is of great interest to me. I stumbled onto the power of mask making and the impact it had on me: externalizing early trauma in my life and the opportunity to heal it. This led to breastplate workshops for women who had experienced a mastectomy. It was powerfully transformational.
One early morning vision was a woman made out of ferns. Using photography, I was able to recreate this image and shared the process with incarcerated women, at risk teens and wrote two books documenting their results.
Working for the truth commission in Maine, I became the Community Engagement Coordinator, teaching other Mainers why we needed a truth commission. In collaboration with my Native colleagues, we developed an educational program on the true history I had never learned. I brought this program with me when I returned to Pennsylvania in 2015. The Executive Director of the Kidsbridge Center suggested we partner and apply for grants from the NJ Council for the Humanities to develop local programing. We collaborated with New Jersey tribal leaders and developed and taught educational workshops.
Then in 2019 several of us were in Harrisburg to hear the findings of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission on Neshaminy High School using the “Redskins” mascot. When they ruled that the district could keep the name but needed to stop using imagery, we decided to form the Coalition of Natives and Allies (CNA) to take this issue to the State House and follow in the footsteps of states like Maine that created a successful law to forbid this practice. CNA is also an educational resource and gives presentations on the true history of the colonization of this land.
For more information about Arla and her work and witness, please visit www.coalitionofnativesandallies.org and www.arlapatch.com.