Dear Friends:
The Walk for a New Dawn is leaving the City of Fitchburg for the Town of Harvard as I post this. We will arrive in time for a big potluck today, August 9th at 6:00 pm at the Harvard Unitarian Church. All are welcome.
The Walk began at the New York border at Williamstown, and has kept a steady pace, walking through sun and lots of rain: over the Berkshires, down the Mohawk Trail to Great Falls where we joined the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival, organized by one of our 19 co-sponsoring organizations, the Nolumbeka Project, on the first weekend in August each year. This year’s festival was another great celebration of Native culture, crafts, storytelling, historical presentations and arts. Many good meetings occurred there, and the Walkers handed out hundreds of leaflets in support of our goals.
The Walk for a New Dawn supports long-stalled legislative priorities backed by the Mass Indigenous Legislative Agenda (such as : changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day statewide; banning the use of Native mascots in Massachusetts public schools; celebrating and teaching Native history and living Native cultures in all our public schools; protecting Indigenous archeological treasures and sacred relics from sale on the private market; and tracking the educational outcomes of Native and Alaskan students in our public schools so we may improve them).
The Walk supports the long-stalled effort to change the Massachusetts state flag and seal. Now that the Indigenous leaders of the Massachusetts Seal, Flag and Motto Advisory Commission have asked for a pause to emphasize Education rather than a rush to replace the flag and seal with some vapid AI-produced alternative design, we are in complete support of the Advisory Commission Indigenous leaders’ call for the creation and implementation of a broad-based educational program to help the general public understand the true history of settler relations with Native Nations, and to understand why the flag and seal – a glorification of that genocidal violence – must be changed.
Only then will we back the public hearing process to finally change the flag and seal.
The Walk for a New Dawn upholds three main themes.
We call for: 1) Listening to Indigenous Nations, 2) Defending Sacred Homelands, and 3) Honoring All Peoples.
In Defense of Native Homelands, we call for a Halt to Sand Mining in the pine barren sacred to the Herring Pond Wampanoag in the area around Plymouth, where 100s of acres have been stripped of their sand and soil and vegetative cover in pursuit of private profit, destroying Herring Pond archeological treasures and gravesites, and threatening the aquifer that provides drinking water to 200,000 people.
We also call for “No New Nukes” in Massachusetts (or anywhere, for that matter) even as Governor Healey pursues the goal of reversing a voter-approved 1982 referendum prohibiting the construction of any new nuclear reactors in Massachusetts until the legislature is able to certify that safe storage for nuclear waste is available, and until a majority of Massachusetts voters agree.
Repealing that referendum is on the bargaining table now in a closed-door conference committee where just six legislators, all of whom represent districts east of 495, will decide whether or not to build new nuclear reactors in the Commonwealth, and whether our children’s children for thousands of years to come will inherit yet more carcinogenic radioactive waste, in order to power AI facilities, each of which would require the equivalent of enough electricity to power 500,000 new homes.
So we say: No New Nukes – – the entire Commonwealth is a sacred homeland!
Our third goal is to Honor All Peoples. For this we say: No One is Illegal on Stolen Land. ICE out of Massachusetts NOW.
To find out more about the Walk for a New Dawn, and how to join us for a mile or a day as we walk on from Harvard to a final rally on the Boston Common in front of the state house at 1 pm on Aug 13th, please go to: http://tinyurl.com/MassWalkRoute or: http://tinyurl.com/WalkForANewDawn
For those who cannot join the Walk of join us on the Boston Common for the 1 pm rally on August 13th, please donate to meet the continuing and growing costs of the Walk for a New Dawn, and the canvassing that will continue in the districts of the six legislators on the conference committee to decide whether No Nukes will be built in our sacred homeland, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!
Donate here: https://tinyurl.com/NewDawngofundme
(banners courtesy of Sally Ally Muffin Stuffin)