Solidarity is not always obvious. The best intentions indeed have too often
paved the road to destitution for Indian peoples. Consider the
recommendations of the U.S. friends of the Indians, the Lake Mohonk
Conference, back in the 1880s, when as pro-Indian professionals, their
movement championed the Dawes Act (1887), resulting in the loss of millions
of acres of lands belonging to Indian tribes. And those were the liberals.
The conservatives – including such noted political and cultural voices as
Theodore Roosevelt and L. Frank Baum (later author of Wizard of Oz) –
simply advocated for outright genocide.

So good friends are hard to find and to keep. Among those who have been
friends of Indian people are the wonderfully perceptive people of Onaway
Trust, in Leeds, England. Largely the work of a sensitive seer and his
companion, and their circle of trustees, Onaway Trust emerged in the
mid-1970s as a foundation that could be trusted to respond to the needs of
grassroots Indian people in the Americas.

John Morris, elder statesman, in the planning for the Onaway Trust,
traveled among a good variety of Indian communities during the hey-day of
resistance and rebellion in the 1970s. He met important elders and
activists and understood the need to provide seed funds for indigenous
community projects. Today the trustees of the Fund are keenly well-informed
on Native issues, and have for decades stressed the preservation of Indian
living cultures and the rights to land and self-sufficiency of Native
peoples.

Onaway Trust is not among the large foundations. It gives away
approximately a quarter million U.S. dollars a year, mostly in grants of
less than 10,000 often limited to two or three thousand dollars. Yet it is
remarkable the kind of difference that level of funding can make for
American Indian community projects or indigenous peoples in developing
countries. Many community projects, whether it be putting in a water well
for a remote homestead, plowing gardens with traditional families,
seed-saving gardens or curriculum guides for a community, funds for
training health practitioners and midwives and even to buy gas money for
elders to participate in their peoples’ ceremonies, Onaway Trust has been
there to help move our issues forward in some way.

Maya leadership in many fields have benefited from Onaway’s grantmaking,
not a few winning timely access to freedom and safety as a result of the
Trust’s reliable attention to matters of life and death. Onaway’s early
support of Caribbean indigenous currents in the 1980s and 1990s was
instrumental in allowing modest community leadership to attend important
gatherings and also to meet appropriate specialists who can help preserve
and evaluate elders’ natural medicinal and Permacultural knowledge.

At various points in its some 30 years of generous leadership and service,
Onaway’s well-meaning patience with modest projects has been nothing short
of magnanimous. By extending lenient but continuous guidelines, by always
opting to educate rather than dismiss, they often have kept alive projects
that other foundations would pass up, but which proved most tenacious and
infused with that wonderful “community pride/volition,” which is not always
easy to discern and support.

Twenty years before the world heard about the plight of Native languages,
Onaway was in print with its magazine, to inform international institutions
about the particular loss to humanity, for any people or tribe to lose its
Aboriginal language. While celebrating Indian medicinal knowledge, Onaway
was among the first to advise against too much Western intrusion into
Native life. They cautioned Native communities to understand the negative
forces impacting the Native community sense of togetherness. They proved
serious advocates when many of the people in North, Central and South
America and the Caribbean emerged to take their place in the chorus of
community voices denouncing human rights abuses against their leaders and
peoples. Onaway’s elders assisted when Native communities resisted the
attempts of those years to destroy the legal and physical bases of
indigenous peoples.

Now Onaway Trust continues, still backed by the elders who have gifted
Native causes for three decades of keen and useful generosity. We take a
moment to celebrate them, in their preferred anonymity, for their cultural
and spiritual sensitivity, worldly intelligence and generous heart. May
Onaway Trust always be known and respected in Indian country and throughout
the Native Americas.