The Baltimore Yearly Meeting wholeheartedly supports the establishment of a national commission to seek truth
and a measure of justice for those still suffering the residual effects of public policies that created and maintained
hundreds of boarding schools for Indigenous children in the United States from 1869 through the 1960s. We
support legislation to fund such a commission. Once established we will hold the people who come before it and
the commission members in the Light, in expectation that airing of harms and traumas will lead to some healing
of long-suffered wounds. We want a commission that yields real results and changes, not a report that gathers dust on a shelf.

We applaud the fact that one intention of the commission is to prevent continued removal of Indigenous (American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian) children from their families, communities, and cultural connections by adoption and foster care agencies.

We urge research by faith groups that ran residential schools, especially the Religious Society of Friends, to
provide explicit data requested by the federal government as part of the commission’s documentation of all
boarding schools and students. We believe accountability requires robust cooperation.