Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice & Environment
Minutes: Monthly Meeting April 20 2022 via zoom
Land Acknowledgement
Working Group Reports
Watertown Faces Climate change is working on a list of priorities for next steps in enacting the Climate Action Plan, continues to watch the school reconstruction and new development, and works to promote 350’s legislative agenda. Locally they are working to pass the Fair Share Amendment a millionaire tax surcharge to pay for transportation and schools.
Watertown Community for Black Lives and its several interest groups are focusing on DEI in Town Government, Equity in the Schools and monthly vigils. An upcoming Race Reels is on the Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide.
Refugee Support Group recently welcomed a Ugandan Family to Watertown. Busy helping them with basic necessities, helping the mom secure a job, and the daughter to adjust to Watertown Middle School. They recently celebrated a family birthday and are hoping for some in person activities soon.
Friends of Bees has been planting in the public gardens, DPW and the senior Center. There will be a plant swap at Filippello Park on May 15
Peace and Common Security, our newest working group, will be meeting in May and planning a monthly meeting on nuclear weapons.
The Pigsgusset Initiative has been working with New Rep to bring excerpts of their play Listen to Sipu to the schools, and develop lesson plans and curriculum around the play. Long term vision is to create meaningful dialogue and better understanding of the history of this land before colonization. Another initiative is renaming of the Columbus Delta ( in Watertown Square) to a more inclusive name that recognizes the people who lived here before Columbus. They have petitioned the City Council and expect a meeting shortly to present why the name should be changed. They are also looking at the town seal, which depicts a story of a biscuit and fish, portraying a peaceful exchange between the English and natives when in fact subsequent interactions were violent and genocidal. One of those forms of violence was bounties offered for native skulls in the early colonial days.
PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION OF BOUNTY
The Pigusset Initiative presented and led discussion of the film Bounty, part of the Dawnland film series. The film reveals the hidden story of the Phips Proclamation, one of many scalp-bounty proclamations used to exterminate Native people in order to take their land in what is now New England. In the film, Penobscot parents and children resist erasure and commemorate survival by reading and reacting to the government-issued Phips Proclamation’s call for colonial settlers to hunt, scalp, and murder Penobscot people. A discussion followed where participants shared their reactions and how the knowledge of these bounty policies challenges the narrative of our settler history .
Respectfully submitted,
Deborah Peterson