In violation of the Open Meeting Law, the Massachusetts Flag, Seal and Motto Advisory Commission met on Tuesday, April 29th without providing a live link for the public to attend their Zoom meeting.
For the first 20 minutes, the public was blocked out. Even state senator Jo Comerford, (D-Northampton) one of the chief backers of the amendment that established the Advisory Commission, was unable to get into the meeting, although she spent more than 15 minutes trying every means possible to alert the commission to the problem, as many dozens of supporters from around the Commonwealth tried in vain to find a live link.
We apologize on behalf of a state government that cannot even manage to set up a Zoom meeting in accordance with its own open meeting law. We apologize for a state government so deaf to the demand of a concerned public to even allow them to follow the proceedings of a commission charged with the historic task of changing Massachusetts’ official state symbol: a settler’s hand holding a sword over the head of an Indigenous caricature, with a Latin motto that essentially translates: Peace Under the Sword.
We do not believe this failure to allow the public to attend the April 29th meeting was intentional. Just blatantly incompetent, and an apt metaphor for a state government that tries at every turn to limit, belittle, ignore and build a firewall against the opinion of the people they supposedly serve.
Finally, after more than a full month passed, the commission has managed to get the minutes of their first meeting, held on March 20th, posted to their website. You can read them at the bottom of the commission’s homepage, here:
Is it too much to hope that the commission’s staff could also post the archived recording from the first meeting, and from the April 29th meeting that so many were shut out from attending? Or did they fail to preserve the recordings of those two meetings?
At the top right of the commission’s homepage is a large button marked FEEDBACK. Please use it to register a protest over the way the public is being blocked from meaningfully participating (or even being able to watch) the commission’s meetings.
When the public was finally provided a live link to the meeting in progress on April 29th, we found the commission wrapping up a discussion of how to solicit design ideas for a new state flag, seal and motto from students in the public schools. Presumably, that call for public art will also invite professional designers and amateur vexillologists and anyone else in the Commonwealth to submit design ideas for a new state flag and seal.
But we missed that part of the discussion.
Elizabeth Solomon, elder of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, spoke up asking that the commissioners themselves be “kept in the loop” as commission co-chair Kate Fox pushes forward to issue a request for proposals.
Without a hint of irony, Fox replied, “We want this process to be as statewide engaging and transparent as possible.”
Rhonda Anderson, Inupiat-Athabascan, asked that the timeline for the commission to complete its work be extended. After all, Governor Maura Healey failed to fully appoint the ten members of the commission within the statutory 60-day timeline.
The commission was supposed to begin meeting by the end of September in 2024 at the latest, but the governor did not complete the appointment process until mid-March of this year.
Fox assured Anderson that the commission would seek an extension on their June 30th deadline.
Solomon raised her hand again, and told co-chair Fox that the four Indigenous members of the commission should not be informed of decisions after the fact, but that their voices should be central to the process.
“I want to highlight that we are tasked with creating an educational program for the general public,” to understand why the flag, seal and motto have to be changed. “I served on the original (seal and motto) commission (from 2021 – 2023) and I wrote the educational outline,” for the original commission. “It is critical that Indigenous folks be involved. That is crucial, especially if we are removing Indigenous elements from the flag. There has to be an educational program that talks about the change from Indigenous perspectives,” so the public can understand why this change is happening.
Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler, who co-chairs the commission with Fox, assured Solomon, “I agree one hundred percent. We are deeply committed that your voice is elevated in this process.”
Fox took a different tack.
She told Solomon, “What you wrote in the first (commission’s) report is central to this process.”
Fox did not say she planned to simply cut and paste Solomon’s original outline for an educational process to inform the general public about why – especially why from an Indigenous perspective – the flag, seal and motto were changing. Nor did she promise to devote the commission’s staff and resources to ensuring that all the Indigenous members of the commission would be fully engaged in the process of preparing an educational program for the public on the flag, seal and motto change.
Solomon wrote the original educational outline almost singlehandedly, at the very end of the first commission’s tenure, despite the fact she was offering her time and expertise as a volunteer while many other members of the original commission were being paid as they attended meetings: a blatant example of inequitable apportionment of the commission’s resources and workload.
“I am glad you are here,” said Fox, as Solomon expressed frustration about being informed of developments after decisions were already being made without her input, or the input of the other three Indigenous members of the commission (Rhonda Anderson, Inupiat-Athabascan, Mass Commission on Indian Affairs director Jim Peters, Mashpee Wampanoag, and Summer Confuorto, of Gros Ventre, Cree and Mi’kmaq heritage).
“I am glad you are here,” Fox repeated in a soothing tone.
Solomon urged that in addition to the three public hearings already in the planning stages for Plymouth, Boston, and the Connecticut River Valley, the commission should schedule another one in Worcester County. The public hearings will allow residents of the Commonwealth to provide direct testimony on proposed new flag, seal and motto designs. Solomon said a public hearing should be held in the center of the state, in the heart of the Nipmuc homeland, in Worcester County, so the public there would not have to drive for hours to attend.
Tutwiler warmly seconded her call for a public hearing to be held in Worcester County.
Fox did not comment on this request. There was an uneasy feeling that no one had even read the comments from many supporters in the center of the state asking that a public hearing be scheduled in Worcester County. We know for a fact that many comments on that subject were delivered to the commission in March, via the FEEDBACK button on the commission’s homepage.
But if the commission cannot even manage to set up a Zoom meeting with a live link for the public to attend, what confidence should the public have that the commission’s feedback page is working? Or that anyone at the commission cares enough to read the public’s comments?
Nevertheless, we urge all supporters of changing the flag and seal who live in the center of the state to take the time to write another comment, urging that a public hearing be scheduled in Worcester County. Here again is the link to the homepage. The feedback button is on the top right of the commission’s homepage.
At the same time, you could urge the commission to fully involve all four Indigenous commissioners in the crucial task of creating an educational program for the general public “to help residents understand local Indigenous history and the historical underpinnings of the previous and new seals, mottos and flags from an Indigenous perspective,” as the statutory language requires.
This task should be fully resourced, and the commission should give it priority, not wait until the very last minute and then turn to one uncompensated member to revise the outline she prepared in a hurry, in an inequitable arrangement with the other 18 members of the original commission.
Yet as we have often seen, the paid officials of the settler society’s bureaucracy can patronize Indigenous leaders, and try to use them as window dressing to give cover to their predetermined aims. If someone in the governor’s office is hoping for a neat and tidy makeover of their embarrassingly offensive, archaic and violent state symbol, without truly engaging with the Indigenous leaders whose people have been most harmed by the history emblazoned on our flag, they have a surprise in store.
You can block us from attending your public meetings. You can schedule your public hearings in corners of the state where none of us live. You can tell the Indigenous leaders who are serving on your commission that their presence is welcome, and they are not wasting their time. But until you fully engage with the general public and elevate, to use Sec. Tutwiler’s phrase, the voices of Indigenous people so they may be heard from the Berkshires to the tip of Cape Cod, we will not be silent in our call.
Massachusetts has a lot to own up to in its past history of genocide and oppression of Native people. With a white supremacist regime in power in Washington, the time is ripe for Massachusetts to set a new standard – and fly a new flag – in defiance of our racist past. To do that without fully engaging the voices of the people who suffered the most under the sword of white settler violence would be a failure. We will not tolerate the sidelining or suppression of Indigenous voices any longer.