Dear Friends,
I write to you from the lands of the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Pokanoket to offer my gratitude for the discernment of Friends of our Yearly Meeting to express our apology to Native peoples, and for the faithful and prodigious work of the Right Resources Relationship Group who have been shepherding our sending out of that message. Since stepping into the shoes of presiding clerk several months ago, I have been fulfilling our corporate call to send letters of Apology to each of the Native communities in our region of Turtle Island.
My work over the past few months has built upon the considerable progress that Bruce Neumann, former presiding clerk, had made. Each letter of Apology is accompanied by my personal message to the leadership of each tribe on behalf of our Yearly Meeting. These communications are sent with respectful care and the hope that we may together, if desired by those receiving our apology, begin to build (or continue and grow established) relationships in a manner that is meaningful and useful. This correspondence has indeed spurred conversations that offer openings, possibilities, for growing friendships.
To date, there have been a few very meaningful engagements in response to our letter. Please allow me to update you on my learnings from this process including some concrete conversations initiated as a result of our correspondence, and some planning begun for upcoming projects with Native American communities.
We are working with representatives of the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust to bring their work in community food access to the awareness of Friends in the southeast of our region with whom the Pocasset Pokanoket hope to partner. The Narragansett master gardener who is leading this project will share with us about their grant-funded Indigenous Roots Forever program, a tribal community micro-farming program developed by the Indigenous People’s Network of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. We have also helped in fundraising strategies and grant writing with the Tribe. And there is a possibility of sharing an office area with them to provide conference/meeting space that they very much need.
Friends in the southeast are engaged with Narraganset leaders about the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island ,to create a new and expanded facility on 18 acres of rural land abutting the University of Rhode Island campus. We will be providing the venue and help in planning for an information session and fundraising event at the Providence Friends Meetinghouse for Quakers and the wider community. My thanks particularly to the Aquétuck group of Providence Meeting for their work on this.
In addition to this forward motion, I have meetings scheduled with other tribes in the near future and expect that they, too, will bring specific suggestions of how we may grow our engagement. So stay tuned for more updates.
In all of these developments, I feel it is a great honor for our New England Yearly Meeting of Friends to be invited into communication with and support of the powerful, strategic, and visionary leadership and initiatives of tribes of the northeast. I know that there are many other initiatives, ongoing relationships, and much good work happening in other areas of our region and I am grateful to all the monthly and quarterly meetings and individual Friends who are carrying out leadings of right relationship building.
I hope that in future editions of this newsletter we will have more news from south to north and east to west of the work of nurturing right relationships.
In light and love,
Rebecca Leuchak
Presiding Clerk