Right Relationship with Indigenous Peoples

The Right Relationship with Indigenous Peoples Working Group has been working to formulate educational programs and action items to focus attention on right relationship with Indigenous Peoples. Recent activities include:

• organizing a field trip to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Ledyard, CT.

• presenting an 11th hour with Jonathan Vogel-Borne and Minga Claggett-Borne from the Friends Peace Teams on Healing from the Indigenous Boarding Schools on the subject of the Quaker boarding school involvement.

• promoting a program by Beacon Hill Friends House titled: “The Quaker Indigenous Boarding Schools: Facing Our History and Ourselves”. 

• presenting an 11th hour in which Susan Nahvi from FCNL, who outlined their current actions in areas related to Quaker involvement in boarding schools and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The HMM Working Group for Right Relationship with Indigenous Peoples has developed an extensive list of resources.

Other Action:

The following statement on Land Acknowledgement was approved at Meeting for Business on November 21, 2021.

“As Hartford Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), we wish to acknowledge the First Peoples who lived on this land where we now worship. There were many Native Peoples who lived and traveled through this region including the Wangunk, Tunxis, Siacogs, Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, and Nipmuc.

We honor these Native Peoples of the past who were the caretakers of this land and these waters and those who still live in this region as well as the generations to come.

In our search for right relationship with Native Peoples, we will continue to listen and learn.”