FITCHBURG — After two weeks on the road, three volunteers participating in the Walk for a New Dawn arrived at Fitchburg’s Monument Park for a rally and presentation on Friday, Aug 7. The walk, which involved 30 participants, crossed the entire commonwealth from Williamstown to the Boston Common to raise awareness of Indigenous peoples’ concerns, which include a proposal to change the state flag and seal.
Mayor Sam Squailia, Ward 1 City Councilor Bernie Schultz, and other supporters greeted the three weary but proud walkers as they entered Monument Park from Elm Street. The rally and speak-out was filmed by volunteers from FATV.
The next day, on Saturday, Aug. 8, the Walk for a New Dawn helped with a cleanup and replanting of Abolitionist Park in downtown Fitchburg, in honor of the solidarity work that leading citizens of Fitchburg participated in during the effort to free the slaves in the decades before the Civil War.
The walk began on July 24 at the New York border, in Williamstown. The focus was on three themes: Listen to Indigenous Voices, Defend Sacred Homelands, and Honor All Peoples.
Liberty in short supply
For decades, Indigenous leaders of tribal nations of the area now known as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have been seeking a change to the state flag and seal, which shows a white hand holding a sword over the head of an Indigenous caricature, with a Latin motto beneath that roughly translates: “She (Massachusetts) seeks a quiet peace under the sword, but peace with liberty.”
Liberty was in short supply for Indigenous people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Colonial period, when they were hunted for scalp bounties, kept as slaves in cities like Boston, or sold into slavery in the Caribbean islands, to work in hellish conditions in the sugar cane plantations, with mortality rates of 25% per year.
And “peace under the sword” is a crude euphemism for the policy of forced removal from the land, a campaign which amounted to genocide against the native people who first welcomed the early settlers, and in the Pilgrim’s first winter, saved many from starvation.
The Indigenous leaders who now serve on the Advisory Commission on the Seal, Flag and Motto, appointed by Gov. Maura Healey in 2025 to choose a new design for the Massachusetts state symbol, have first called for a program of broad-based education, called “Listening to Indigenous Voices.”
This program would “help residents understand local Indigenous history and the historical underpinnings of the previous and new seals, mottos and flags from an Indigenous perspective.”
Recently, Fitchburg City Council voted unanimously in support of a resolution to change the flag and seal of Massachusetts on July 7. As Fitchburg High School senior and Taino cultural activist Diego Barahona wrote in the speech he prepared for the City Council hearing that evening: “Why has history not taught us what our flag stands for? Why has history not shown us that when [the illustrator] Edmund Garrett made our flag he was romanticizing colonization, glorifying colonial dominance over Indigenous people? Why is it taking 50 years and more for Massachusetts to finally say, ‘It’s time to end this cycle and take a step toward reparations for colonization against the Indigenous peoples of Massachusetts?’”
New nuclear reactors
In defense of sacred homelands, organizers said the walk focused on the destruction wrought by escalating sand mining operations on the homelands of the Herring Pond Wampanoag, in the Plymouth area, where more than 550 acres of ecologically rare pine barrens have been stripped and mined for sand, exposing an underground aquifer which supplies drinking water for 200,000 people to the risk of contamination, according to the website communitylandandwater.org.
The walk also threw a spotlight on Healey’s plan, tucked deep inside her sprawling energy bill — to build more nuclear power reactors in the commonwealth, with their attendant nuclear waste — on homelands sacred not only to native nations but to all people. That plan is the subject of a closed door conference committee between six legislators — three from the Senate, which resisted the governor’s plan, and three from the House, which went along with it.
Activists said that calls are needed to all state legislators now on this vital issue, to try to stop any new nuclear plants.
On the third theme, at the Monument Park rally participants from the Walk for a New Dawn called for “honoring all peoples” by demanding “ICE out of Massachusetts now,” saying: “No one is illegal on stolen land.”
Recognizing that the descendants of the European settlers, who took this land by force, are the real immigrants in Massachusetts, and in America as a whole, the walkers called on rally attendees to “find the humility to admit this fact, and to repair our relationships with the people who first stewarded this land, and those we brought here in chains to work it for our profit, and those who have always traveled the old trade routes north and south of our imaginary border lines.”
On Sunday, Aug. 9, the walkers continued on their way to the town of Harvard, arriving in time for a potluck with more than a dozen supporters at the Unitarian Church Fellowship Hall. The walk continued on to Maynard the following day, and arrived on schedule in Boston on Aug. 13, where walkers delivered postcards, letters and petitions to Gov. Healey from people met along the way, asking the governor to “listen to Indigenous voices, defend sacred homelands and honor all peoples of the commonwealth.”
David Detmold was a participant in the Walk for a New Dawn.
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