Changing the State Seal and Motto
An update on the commission I co-chair as we resume our work.
On Wednesday, the Special Commission Relative to the Seal and Motto of the Commonwealth meets for the first time in 2023. You can livestream the meeting on the legislature’s site starting at 1pm.
Yesterday, Commonwealth Magazine published an op-ed that I co-authored with the commission’s co-vice chair, Brittney Peauwe Wunnepog Walley. We sought to clarify the origins and progress of the commission, and to describe the work we intend to complete ahead of the November 15, 2023 deadline.
You can read the essay here.
I’ll add a few thoughts that are solely my perspective.
Over the course of the last 18 months, I have come to see the commission’s work as essentially reparative. We established equity in the leadership, with Indigenous and non-Indigenous chairs and co-chairs. That in itself was a step toward healing. We investigated the history of the seal and motto, and we acknowledged the centuries of harm embedded in these symbols and words. We listened actively to representatives of Indigenous communities describe their interpretations of the sword and the figure and of “peace” and “liberty” in Massachusetts. These findings take their place in the official public record, a contribution that we can count among our achievements. As we learned and disagreed and learned some more, we maintained respect for one another and our charge.
As we move forward, I am committed to sustaining an equitable process that reflects the Massachusetts we hope to become, a place where all residents can take responsibility for our past and look toward the future with compassion and understanding.
COVID-19 took many things from us as a society, including our ability to meet face to face. We were unmoored from thousands of years of practices that help us talk through differences and find solutions. One person lost to the pandemic was Ronn Johnson, the CEO of Martin Luther King Family Services in Springfield. He was someone I admired and someone whose words mattered deeply to me. He embraced his community with a spirit of love and a belief in education, and he did it while enduring physical pain and all the burdens of being a leader in this daunting world.
In our last conversation, just after Thanksgiving 2021, I was being small and muttering some complaint about work-related issue. He looked at me across the table and calmly explained that there was another approach to any challenge.
“We should always enter into these things asking, ‘What can I learn? How is this educating me?’”
Then he gave me a tour of the food bank he operated, and made sure ask me how my family was doing. That’s the example he set and the friend he was. I will spend a lifetime trying to follow his lead.
I note all this because the work around the state seal, even if done in the context of legislative machinations, news reports and bureaucracy, has been incredibly meaningful due to the people with whom I get to learn. This is an opportunity to do good work, to help with a much larger project of repair and healing alongside people much wiser than me.
Last year, after a somewhat contentious meeting, a reporter asked me, “Aren’t you stressed?”
I got why they asked it, but I did laugh, if politely enough. We are making a humble if important contribution within a history of tragedy that leads up to the present day. I have the privilege and position to contribute to that work. I am not stressed because I believe that solidarity and shared responsibility are the most important things right now.
Lastly, I believe that this is a humanities project, wherein we interpret the past, apply critical thinking to artwork and words, and engage in real dialogue. Yes, we do it in the public eye and that can be a tightwire walk. But this is why the humanities are here, and why I love the work of the humanities. I’m thankful for what feels like a formative experience.
Most of all, I’m grateful to get to know the people on the commission and be part of this journey. As Brittney and I write in the op-ed…
Over the last 18 months, we reminded ourselves that we are part of a journey that is decades in the making. The efforts to address the seal and motto did not begin in January 2021. For more than 40 years, activists, including the late John Peters, also known as Slow Turtle, and former state representative Byron Rushing advocated for change. We are fortunate to partner with our colleagues to complete this stage in that journey.