An exercise for young Friends · Jeff Kisling
Almost none of this history was hidden. It was in newspapers, in federal files, in a national magazine, and in the ground. So when people say Friends covered it up, they are half right in a way that lets everyone off the hook. Our own papers failed in three different ways, and only one of them is a lie. Below are nine real records. Decide what each one is.
Read these once. Then sort.
Written down, accurately, and available to anyone who looked. Most of what Friends kept is this.
Kept selectively, so the page is true and the picture is false. This is the one that is a lie.
Kept faithfully and never read. Nobody lied — nobody said anything at all. Most of the failure is this.
Somebody finally went and looked, and passed on what they found.
Each one is real, and each one is in Friends' own history or in the public record around it. Pick a label. You will get the reason either way.
One caution about intent. Lying means knowing. We do not know what the clerk of a Quaker meeting knew or intended in 1883, when Grace Yellowhair died at the West Branch Industrial School. The twentieth-century historians are a much easier case — the records were in the building where they worked. So grade the charge document by document, not across the whole tradition.
The same three states, following a single child from 1883 to the day her family came.
A record nobody has opened does not need a confession to open it. It needs one person to ask, in writing, of somebody who has to answer. Fill this in and send it — the reply, whatever it is, becomes part of the record.