Greetings One and All,
State Senator Jo Comerford, (D-Northampton, State Senator for the Hampshire, Franklin and Worcester district) who is a driving force behind the legislature’s efforts to change the flag and seal and the lead sponsor for bills to ban the use of Native sports mascots in public schools, and to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day in Massachusetts (which await passage in the next legislative session) offers this advice to all supporters of Indigenous rights:
Take a moment today to contact Governor Maura Healey, and thank her for signing the bill to change the flag and seal.
Use this email address (you may have to copy and paste it if the live link does not work) or phone number to thank Governor Healey and urge her to “Please swiftly appoint the members of the new advisory commission to change the flag and seal, and finalize the work.”
Governor Maura Healey, Office of Boards and Commissions
appointments.governor@mass.gov / 617-725-4010
Then, if you are relaxing at home, or looking for a good beach read during summer vacation, here is a long form version of the article first printed in the August 8th edition of the independent weekly Montague Reporter covering the events of the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival at Great Falls in Montague.
Enjoy, and share the link with friends!
Return to the Great Falls
Sacred Drum of the Iron River Singers / Carol Fournier photo / CAFournierArts
By David Detmold
Since 2012, the first weekend in August has been more or less set aside as Indigenous “Old Home Days” here at the Great Falls in Montague.
Again this year, the Nolumbeka Project, a local organization that celebrates and builds awareness of the histories and cultures of Northeastern tribal nations, brought together hundreds of Native people with allies, friends and members of the general public eager to hear and learn from an impressive lineup of speakers, musicians, and cultural historians at the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival.
Craft vendors plied their wares, while savory aromas from the cook tents rose and blended with the sound of drums, flute and fiddle, as occasional thunder rolled in the distance.
In this shared space, where five rivers meet above and below the Great Falls, Native people have gathered since time immemorial to renew kinship ties, to exchange trade goods, news and knowledge.
So it was again this year, in a steadily widening circle.
I: Hawaiian Dancers Bless the Waters at Wissatinnewag
There was something at once soft and subtle, pliant and yet powerfully firm about the way the hula dancers placed their honey-brown feet on the damp green grass beneath the performance tent on August 2nd, at the Nolumbeka Project’s 11th annual Pocumtuck Homelands Festival.
Their dance steps told us, as no words could, “We are Here. We are dancing on Native Land. We are Home.”
The Pua Ali‘i ilima o Nuioka dancers began their part of the weekend’s festivities with a traditional “blessing of the waters” at the troubled bend of the Kwinitekw, the Northeast’s longest river.
Across the way, on May 19th, 1676, during the general conflict we call King Philip’s War, Captain William Turner led a dawn massacre at a refugee village of old men, women and children from the Pocumtuck, Nipmuc, Narragansett, and allied tribes, who had come here seeking refuge from the wider regional war.
Much healing and reconciliation work has been undertaken since Narragansett Medicine Man Lloyd Running Wolf Wilcox (1933 – 2019) led a tribal delegation to meet with the Montague selectboard on the bank of the Kwinitekw on May 19th, 2004.
The Narragansetts signed a document of reconciliation with the Montague selectboard. They exchanged gifts. Then Wilcox led a “Bury the Hatchet” ceremony; the first time, he said, that the Narragansetts had performed that ceremony in 328 years.
This year, Pua Ali‘i ilima o Nuioka brought traditional dances from their Hawaiian Islands to the bank of the Kwinitekw, mingling their footsteps with their Native sisters’ and brothers’ from the clamshell edge of the Atlantic, from the freshwater ponds and cedar swamps of the Nipmuc, from the Green Hills and White Mountains where the long river rises, and from the flint land of Kanienkehaka, the Mohawk country.
As Na Kuma Hula (lifetime master teacher) Vicky Holt Takamine led her strong and graceful troupe through their paces to the beat of her handmade, double-gourd, ipu hula drum, she braided the lore and wisdom of the Kanaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people, into a living filament, attaching the fishhook of her 1,500-mile long Pacific island chain firmly to the mainland and revealing the true expanse of Turtle Island.
Takamine soon made clear that the geopoetics of North American indigeneity are not the only unifying threads that bind the tribal nations gathered at the Homelands Festival.
There are also the brutal histories of settler violence, treachery, and centuries of ongoing oppression to be reckoned with.
Many of the traditional hulas were offered in homage to Queen Lili‘uokulani, the gracious sovereign whose two-year reign as Mo‘i Wahine ended with a coup organized by American business leaders backed by U.S. Marines on January 17th, 1893.
President Grover Cleveland acknowledged the illegality of her overthrow, but the US Congress provided an official stamp of approval.
The insurrectionists in Honolulu formed a provisional government, imprisoned Lili’uokulani in her own palace and plotted for US annexation, which they achieved in 1898.
Lili‘uokulani, a world traveler, diplomat, philanthropist, author and composer, was forced to abdicate on January 24th, 1895 to save her closest advisors from threatened execution.
Though she spent the remainder of her long life struggling for her people’s rights and sovereignty, she was the last queen of sovereign Hawaii.
In her 1898 book Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Lili‘uokulani wrote, “Think of my position, – sick, a lone woman in prison, scarcely knowing who was my friend, or who listened to my words only to betray me, without legal advice or friendly counsel, and the stream of blood ready to flow unless it was stayed by my pen.”
The Pua Ali‘i ilima o Nuioka dancers, who hail from New York City, pantomimed love for their Mo‘i Wahine with bold, synchronized arm motions, extending from their hearts to the sky, punctuating each motion with graceful gestures of their fingertips.
Their flaring red and orange skirts swayed with the rhythmic movement of their hips, as their feet kept time to the flat slap ricochet beat of the ipu hula drum.
In the swelter of humidity and sunshine, against the sinuous backdrop of the moving river, their dancing evoked the dazzling underwater choreography of a school of Hawaiian akule.
Other hulas spoke of reverence for sacred mountain Maunakea, home of the gods who gave birth to the Hawaiian people.
Maunakea is the tallest mountain on the archipelago, and (since most of it is under the sea) the tallest mountain on the planet, more than twice the height of Everest if measured from Earth’s core.
Takamine told of the ongoing struggle of the kia‘I mauna, Indigenous protectors who have led opposition to the construction of a giant Thirty Meter Telescope atop the sacred mountain since 2014. In July of 2019 the governor issued a state of emergency and called out the National Guard to arrest 34 Hawaiian elders who were blocking access to the construction site.
The protest has gained worldwide support, varying court rulings, and is ongoing.
“They already have twelve observatories on the mountain,” Takamine pointed out.
“Why do they need a thirteenth?”
Traditional hula dancers are not to be mistaken for some lightweight airport lounge attraction. They are audacious ambassadors defending and upholding the honor and heritage of their people.
With the firm placement of their feet on the grass, centuries of finely honed craft leapt from Hawaiian shores to the banks of the Kwinitekw.
“It takes four stitches to attach each feather,” to their intricately woven headdresses, Takamine noted.
As they learned each step, each stitch, each dance, the six women and one man of the Pua Ali’i ilima o Nuioka troupe carefully prepared to bring tropical brilliance and a storied past to life in our riverside village. That is a kind of beauty we should see more of downtown.
“Men wear flowers in their hair in Hawaii,” Takamine told the crowd. “You should try it.”
II: William Apess, the Indigenous Frederick Douglass
Floral beadwork designs from the Northern Woodlands tradition, applied to earrings, medicine pouches, and articles of clothing, were in plentiful supply at 40 Indigenous craft vendor tables assembled along the trailside at the festival.
So was wampum and stone jewelry, gourd art and basketry, leather goods, quillwork and birch bark art.
As the drums of the Iron River Singers (the official Native drum team of the Boston Red Sox!) percolated through the impromptu marketplace, families and friends strolled the shaded path, shopping and swapping news, sharing exploits from the powwow circuit, and questioning cultural historians, many of whom had books for sale detailing tribal lore and knowledge.
The local Reparations Collective (www.thereparationscollective.org) had a table, inviting passersby to join in their efforts to send semi-annual reparations payments to the Black-led Crossing the Waters Institute for Cultural Exchange, based in Amherst, and to the Chaubunagungamaug Band of Nipmuck Indians, based in Webster.
Across from the Happy Eating Grounds and Stone Soup Café’s pop-up kitchen, Old Dominion University professor of Native American literature Drew Lopenzina was selling copies of his books, including Through an Indian’s Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (UMass Press, 2017).
Next to Lopenzina’s table, Seekonk Pokanoket Wampanoag artist Deborah Spears Moorehead sold her vividly detailed paintings.
Moorehead, a lineal descendent of Ousamequin, the Massasoit, teamed up with Lopenzina at the history tent on Saturday and Sunday to share her family’s story along with her brilliant painting of William Apess at the Wampanoag town of Mashpee, while Lopenzina outlined Apess’s history-making role as the central figure of the “Mashpee Revolt” of 1833.
Moorehead’s family suffered violence from the settlers long ago, including Ousemequin’s sons, Wamsutta, who died of poison, Moorehead said, after parlaying with the Pilgrims, and Metacom, called King Philip by the English, who was slain in battle in Hope Island, RI in 1676. Metacom’s body was drawn and quartered, his head cut off and put on a spike in Plymouth to rot for 20 years. The settler violence to her family continued through the centuries. As recently as 1924, two of her great-uncles were tortured and murdered, she said, by land speculators who had been pressuring them to sell their land, now the site of the state-owned T.F. Green International Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island.
Against this canvas, Lopenzina told the tale of Apess, a Pequot born in Colrain, MA in 1798.
Apess rose from extreme privation and indentured servitude to become the first ordained Indigenous Methodist minister, and the first Indigenous author to publish an extended autobiography in America, A Son of the Forest (1829), followed by four other books.
In the 1830s Apess gained a growing reputation as an itinerant preacher and orator, traveling and speaking up and down the Eastern seaboard, from rural camp meetings to the major cities (including Boston, where he performed his Eulogy for King Philip to sold out crowds of thousands at the Odeon Theater).
Lopenzina argued that Apess purposely and strategically reframed, through a Native lens, the contemporary historical narrative of colonial settlement, conquest, and cultural genocide in the Indigenous Northeast.
Befriending newspaper editors including William Lloyd Garrison, who published notices of Apess’s upcoming engagements in his weekly emancipation journal The Liberator, Apess placed the suppression of Native sovereignty in Massachusetts in the news alongside accounts of the contemporary crises of South Carolina’s nullification of federal tariffs and the constitutional violence of the forced removal, in defiance of longstanding federal treaties, of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia and North Carolina.
Lopenzina, a graduate of Berkshire Community College in his hometown of Pittsfield, undertook years of painstaking field research to recover biographical details of Apess’s life.
Though no copy of Apess’s birth certificate has come to light, Lopenzina, accompanied by Abenaki scholars Lisa Brooks and Marge Bruchac, used the details of an old Colrain map of Pocumtuck and Catamount mountains to pinpoint, in the broad Pocumtuck Homelands, the probable location of Apess’s birth.
According to Apess’s autobiography, he was born “in what was then called the back settlements” of the Connecticut River Valley, in Colrain, where “my father pitched his tent in the woods.”
Apess grew to become the Indigenous equivalent of Frederick Douglass in the years immediately before Douglass gained regional, then national fame for delivering stem-winding lectures on emancipation.
In 1833 Apess, adopted by the Wampanoag in their major township of Mashpee, published a series of proclamations declaring null the laws of Massachusetts consigning the Wampanoag to a state of perpetual serfdom as wards of the Commonwealth.
On May 31st, 1833 those resolutions, signed by more than a hundred Wampanoag tribal members, landed on the desk of Governor Levi Lincoln, informing him, among other things, that as of July 1st of that year, “We, as a tribe, will rule ourselves, and have a right to do so, for all men are born free and equal.”
No longer would white overseers rule Wampanoag affairs, nor would white men be allowed on Wampanoag land to harvest hay, fish, or cut lumber.
The white Congregational minister named Phineas Fish, funded and installed by Harvard University to preach to the Mashpee, had been stealing from them, and even prohibiting them from attending their own house of worship.
Those practices, too, would end.
On July 1st, when the Sampson brothers, local white farmers, entered Mashpee land without permission and began felling trees and loading up lumber, Apess and other Wampanoag men surrounded their wagon and unloaded the lumber.
Apess made sure local editors knew of their nonviolent act of resistance.
As the word spread from one newspaper to the next, Governor Lincoln canceled his plan to send in the state militia to suppress “the Mashpee Revolt.”
On July 4th, following a heated confrontation at the Mashpee Meetinghouse with outraged members of the local white community, Apess wound up in jail for leading what Lopenzina called “the first successful act of civil disobedience in American history.”
He used his month behind bars in Barnstable to begin writing his next book, Indian Nullification of the Illegal Laws of Massachusetts.
With the press in full halloo, the governor backed down, and within a year the Massachusetts legislature unanimously agreed to the main Wampanoag demands, acceding to the obvious truth that Native sovereignty and self-governance preceded the foundation of the colonial state, which had no right to revoke it in the first place.
III: Memorial Stone on Cave Hill Road, Mishoonash on the River
When the Puritans sailed over from England in 1630 to take possession of the Shawmut Peninsula (modern Boston) and establish their commercial venture on these shores, they brought with them the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company, chartered in 1628 by King Charles I, who felt Native land in North America was his to dole out by divine right.
The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company was a vile caricature of an Indigenous man, dressed in a loin cloth of leaves, carrying one downward pointed arrow and no quiver, with a speech balloon issuing from his mouth with the words, “Come Over and Help Us.”
It may have been a translation error.
Their slogan should have been “Come Over and Help Yourselves to Our Land.”
This offensive symbol became the central image of the current flag and seal of Massachusetts.
Now, the speech balloon has been replaced with a colonist’s hand holding Myles Standish’s broadsword over the head of the Indigenous figure. A Latin motto has been added beneath, which is commonly translated, “She seeks a quiet peace with liberty under the sword.”
This symbol which celebrates, to quote a recent Special Commission on the Seal and Motto, “the history of violence perpetuated by settlers against the Indigenous populations” has been the subject of protest by Indigenous leaders for decades.
In 1985, Wampanoag medicine man John Slow Turtle Peters, (1930-1997), worked with former African American state representative and civil rights icon Byron Rushing of Boston to file the original legislation to change it.
By the time it is completed, that work will have taken 40 years.
But on July 29th, 2024 Governor Maura Healey signed a bill to create a new flag and seal for Massachusetts – by next summer.
On Friday, August 1st, a memorial stone was unveiled at the Nipponzan Myohoji Peace Pagoda on Cave Hill, in the town of Leverett, in honor of Slow Turtle’s life and work.
Carol Fournier photo / CAFournierArts
This event, attended by Slow Turtle’s family and a large delegation of Mashpee Wampanoags, provided something of a prologue to the weekend gathering at the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival.
Nipmuc sculptor Mark Burnett, deputy fire chief in Leominster, was present at the memorial stone’s unveiling, to which he contributed the bold cast bronze relief sculpture of Slow Turtle, sharing space with the founder of the Nipponzan Myohoji order, the venerable Nichidatsu Fujii. Slow Turtle met and befriended Fujii in Vienna in 1983, when Fujii was 98 years old.
Slow Turtle invited him to come to Turtle Island to found the first Peace Pagoda on these shores, and the Guruji came that same year to establish the Peace Pagoda in Leverett.
Plaques mounted on the memorial stone feature Slow Turtle’s words from the inaugural ceremony of the Peace Pagoda, 40 years ago, on October 5th, 1985.
“We’re joyful to see that People have come here with a true thought in mind of Love and being able to give the great gift of Love to all the People in the world, and the idea of Peace. And so we welcome you, and I speak from the People that are originally from this land, Turtle Island…. This symbol (the pagoda) should be recognized throughout the world as a gift of Love.”
While this ceremony was taking place at the Peace Pagoda, ten miles to the north two hand-carved mishoonash, traditional dug-out canoes, were being launched into the Kwinitekw.
The Wampanoag had used mishoonash for thousands of years to travel and fish and hunt whales in the coastal waters of the Atlantic. Inland nations like the Nipmuc and Abenaki also plied northeastern rivers in these laboriously crafted dug-out canoes, and the Kwinitekw was the main north-south highway.
Although today the river is blocked by dams and marred by a current-reversing, fish-destroying pumped hydro generating plant just three miles upstream from the Homelands Festival site, Wampanoag, Pequot and Nipmuc voyageurs honored the timeless centrality of the Kwinetekw to intertribal life and took to its waters again in white pine mishoonash on the morning of April 1st to open the Homelands Festival.
Nolumbeka board president, David Brule, of Nehantic descent, was there.
In 2019 and 2020, Brule had worked with Jonathan Perry of the Aquinnah Wampanoag to slowly burn away the center of an 18-foot long white pine log. They used an adze to scrape away the charcoal and hollow out the log.
Brule accompanied Pequot and Wampanoag paddlers for Friday’s launch.
“The surface was like a millpond, with swans feeding quietly along the shore of the far island where the eagles used to nest,” he said.
Andre Strongbearheart Gaines led a contingent of six Nipmuc paddlers in a second mishoon, and they in turn were accompanied by about 40 local voyageurs in kayaks, canoes and paddle boards for a journey up the river toward the French King Gorge.
“We made offerings of tobacco to the river before setting out,” said Brule.
“Out on the river, we made an impressive procession through the Narrows to the beach where I had spent hours as a boy, watching birds and the quiet water. We spoke together there and told stories.
“Then, as Mohawk elder Tom Porter would say, Grandfather thunder rumbled to let us know he was on the way, so we decided to not push on up the river. We remembered what had happened last year when we had to get off the water and seek shelter during a sudden thunderstorm.”
On the way back,” Brule said, “Andre sang out a call and response song, and the river echoed with voices.”
IV: What Tom Porter’s Grandmother Told Him
Among the books for sale at the Homelands Fest, Tom Sakokweniónkwas Porter’s And Grandma Said (Xlibris, 2008) deserves special mention.
Porter, Bear Clan elder of the Mohawk Nation, gave the opening address at the Festival, as he has for several years.
He enlivens his talk with poignant anecdotes from Mohawk lore and family history to reveal broader truths.
On Saturday he told a story about his grandmother’s uncle, Paul Oronhiatá:kon Bero.
Like many Native youth all across Turtle Island, his great uncle was forcibly removed from his family at a very young age. He was taken from their home in Akwesasne, on the New York/Canadian border, and placed in the Carlisle Indian School in south central Pennsylvania, where the philosophy was “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.”
Often they killed both.
The heartrending Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, Vol. II detailing the work of 417 federally-run ‘Indian’ boarding schools, issued by US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on July 30th, 2024, found that at least 973 Native children died at the hands of their boarding schools captors. The investigators acknowledge that this figure is certainly an undercount.
On July 14th, 2021, Haaland accompanied the remains of ten children who died at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School when they finally came home to their relatives at the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota for reburial.
Ten children from just one boarding school returned to just one tribe. How many more children have yet to make the journey home?
Porter’s great uncle ran away from Carlisle in the dead of winter “when he must have been six, seven, maybe eight years old” and made his way home by foot “through the woods all the way through the Adirondack Mountains,” a journey of nearly 500 miles, only to be recaptured and returned to Carlisle, not once, but three separate times, Porter said.
But it was his grandmother who was hidden away in the woods when the government agents came. She was never forced to learn English, or to have the old traditions beaten out of her.
“That’s how come we still have our ceremonies,” said Porter. “Because my grandmother and her cousins hid out in the woods.”
Because she spoke only Mohawk, Porter’s grandma, Hattie Konwanataha Chubb, maintained cultural fluency in the Longhouse tradition. She passed along that ceremonial knowledge to her grandson, and now, through his book, if you would like to read it, to you.
So let me end this story as it began, with Tom Porter’s words, as he gave thanks to our Mother, the Earth, “mother of all living things,” that she will continue “to nourish all that she gives birth to. And that is exactly what our Mother Earth does, every day, even to this day, since the beginning of time….
“Upon our Mother Earth, the Creator put the water that’s in the rivers and the creeks, the ponds, the lakes and oceans. The water is a living entity… that quenches our thirst every day and every night.”
Porter gave thanks to the fish, to the medicine plants, to the Three Sisters of traditional Haudenosaunee agriculture: Corn, Beans and Squash, and to the berries, especially the Strawberry “big and red, and juicy and sweet… the first berry after the big snow.”
He gave thanks to the trees, who give us breath and food, shade in the summer and wood to keep us warm in the winter, and especially to their leader, (in Mohawk tradition) the Maple, whose sap sweetens our lives as winter turns to spring.
He gave thanks to the animals, and to their leader (in Mohawk tradition) the Deer.
“Sometimes, when we are walking in the big woods and we look around, we will see a deer looking at us. That means that the Creator’s way continues; it is still valid.”
He gave thanks to the birds, each with their own joyous song to greet the new day, whose special job it is to shake up our minds, “so that boredom and lonesomeness will not find a home in our minds; so that we will have happiness and joy.” Their leader is the Eagle.
He gave thanks to the Thunder Beings “who are in charge of bringing the rain to renew the rivers, the streams, the lakes and all the things in the garden,” to the Sun and to Grandmother Moon, who regulates the female cycles of the planet.
He gave thanks to the Stars who “beautify our Grandmother Moon.”
He gave thanks to the Four Winds, who bring the changing of the season, and to the Four Sacred Beings, who are humanity’s helpers in time of war and discord, and who faithfully send a messenger as a “peace messiah” in troubled times “to remind us of our spiritual knowledge, and the way we should behave.”
And he gave thanks to the Creator, “the One that gave us the good fortune to come together here,” for the 11th annual Pocumtuck Homelands Festival.
For that, we thank the Nolumbeka Project too.
August 11th, 2024