Engaging Our Past For A More Truth-filled Future

Please join us for a very special monthly meeting featuring the Pigsqusset Decolonization Team*, a group of Watertown citizens who organized in early 2020 to engage the public in a conversation about the erasure of the Indigenous history of the place we call home. Their initial goal is to create a conversation about the future of the monument to Christopher Columbus in the Town Square. Most of us do not know that eighty years ago members of the Town Council gave the delta a name and authorized placement of a stone monument there to honor Columbus. The Pigsqusset Decolonization Team believes it is time for those of us who live here now to engage this name and the monument, and collectively decide their future. 

 

Their program, Engaging Our Past for a More Truth-filled Future, includes a series of slides and a facilitated discussion that focus on the accountability for the erasure of the Indigenous of Watertown and a decision about next steps in relation to the Town Council. It will conclude with two important questions - Why does this matter? and What can we do together?

 

As we have done in previous zoom Monthly Meetings, we will begin at 6:45 PM to provide a time for folks to chat prior to the official start of the meeting at 7:00 PM.

 

The Pigsqusset Decolonization Teams' longer-term goals include fostering a critical conversation about the Town seal, other markers and statues, celebration of Indigenous People’s Day, and review of what Watertown children are taught in our public schools about Pigsqusset, the Pequossette Band of the Massachusetts Tribe, and the Indigenous history and contemporary issues of Indigenous people in Watertown. 

 

Mishy Lesser started the group after one too many times walking by the Columbus monument in the delta, and feeling offended by it and upset with herself for not doing something about it. Mishy is an educator and co-founder of Boston-based Upstander Project. She is the learning director of Dawnland, a documentary film about the truth and reconciliation commission in Maine that set out to discover why the state’s child welfare agency was taking away so many Indigenous children from their families. In 2018, Mishy and her colleagues were awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Research on Dawnland. The zoom link to the meeting is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84279808909?pwd=cGF0emJoa09JcEFSdkZ3NzFnRWtJdz09.

 

*Pigsqusset is the Pequossestte Band's name for the place we now call Watertown. It means the meadows at the widening of the river.