January, 2022
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Indigenous Matters and the 2024 MA Legislative Agenda
It is important to the rebalancing that I imagine is possible that we acknowledge that we live on lands loved for millennia before us by people of the Massachusett, Mohican, Nauset, Nipmuc, Pawtucket, Pocumtuc, Seaconke, Pokanoket, Pocumtuk, Nipmuc, Abenaki, Wabanaki Confederacy and Wampanoag tribes and nations. I give thanks to the indigenous people who stewarded the land and waters of Massachusetts for more than 15,000 years. I acknowledge that I inhabit land seized and stolen from these indigenous people, whose descendants still live among us. I am committed to honoring their wishes for respect, restoration, and independence and invite you to join me.
The 2022 Massachusetts Legislative Agenda
You may think you know all about why to support the MA Indigenous Legislative Agenda but there is still much to learn if you … WATCH THIS POWERFUL ONE-HOUR VIDEO OF THE JANUARY 11 INDIGENOUS PANEL SPEAKING ABOUT THE NEED TO SUPPORT INDIGENOUS-CENTERED BILLS IN MASSACHUSETTS!
And if you don’t have the time to be further re-educated and inspired …THEN JUST TAKE THIS ACTION STEP:-Go to https://bit.ly/SupportIndigenousBills and send an automated letter to the members of the legislative committees where the bills are currently sitting, asking that the bills be reported out of committee favorably. You can customize the letter if you want. Please share and get your friends and organizations to write, too!-Learn more about the bills and get updates via http://maindigenousagenda.org/-Email for more information: info@MAIndigenousAgenda.org or info@uaine.org
Move our bills out of committee before the deadline!
The 2021-2022 Indigenous Legislative Agenda includes 5 priorities: Remove Racist Mascots, Honor Indigenous People’s Day, Celebrate and Teach Native American Culture & History, Protect Native American Heritage, and Support the Education and Futures of Native Youth.
Join us in calling for each of these bills to move out of committee!
An Act prohibiting the use of Native American mascots by public schools in the Commonwealth. (S.2493/H.581) Currently about 30 public high schools in the state use Native American mascots. This bill would task the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education with establishing regulations to prohibit Native American mascots in MA public schools.
An Act establishing an Indigenous Peoples Day. (S.2027/H.3191 ) This bill replaces Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day in the Massachusetts General Laws.
An act relative to celebrating Native American culture and history. (S.382/H.651) This bill addresses the lack of Indigenous curriculum in Massachusetts public schools.
An Act providing for the creation of a permanent commission relative to the education of American Indian and Alaska Native residents of the Commonwealth. (H.582) As a State Education Agency, the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education must engage in timely and meaningful consultation with stakeholders. Representatives of Indian tribes located in the state are explicitly identified as stakeholders.
An Act to protect Native American Heritage. (S.2239/H.3377 & S.2240/H.3385) This would ensure that Native American funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony (those of cultural, traditional or historical importance to their heritage) held in governmental, municipal or non-profit collections are not sold for profit.
Wesley Williams
A Black Man’s Life in America During the Twentieth Century
I am a man of few words and must say from the start that words do not come easily to me. Which makes the fact I am saying anything, especially about myself, quite unusual. I think of myself as a man of action more than deep reflection. And although I do think about some things as much (or as little) as the next man, I am not an especially introspective person. Nor do I dwell upon the complexities of life. Nor am I terribly well read, although a few books have had an immense impact on my life. The fact is, as I think about it, that I have gained my way into this my eighty fifth year on the planet, mostly by persistence, desire, brawn, by my sheer physical strength, and my immense stubborn will. By my deeds, I say … deeds and few words. The fact I am saying any of this at all actually makes very little sense, but I’m trying.
The fact is I don’t talk about myself and I don’t philosophize. Never have. Never found it all that interesting frankly.
This particular project actually began because of my grandson Robert. A strange young man, I tease him, who comes over to my apartment on One Hundred and Seventeenth St. one fine day and informs me he is taking an oral history class at City University and that he wants me to tell him the history of my life. Gives me this little tape recorder and these tapes. Says to me, “Grandpa, please just tell me the story of your life,” as if it was a story I actually knew, when truth is I have hardly looked at myself for one minute of one day, except in the mirror when I dress or shave, or walking past the window of some darkened storefront on the avenues. “What do I have to say, young fool,” I ask him. And he says, “Come on, gramps, be real, you know your life is an interesting story, please, just talk into the tape recorder as if you were talking to me and telling me one of your tales.”
Now honestly, there is nothing inherently more interesting in my story than in the next fellow’s story if you ask me. I didn’t fight in a war overseas. I didn’t win a gold medal at the Olympics. I haven’t written any books. And it’s damned sure I haven’t amassed a great fortune. And I wasn’t even the first Negro fire fighter in the history of the New York City Fire Department. But I was the first Negro fire chief in the history of the New York City and surely I was the first Black Battalion Chief in New York City Fire Department history, maybe unto now for all I know. And I suppose that’s what Robert thinks about when he asks me to tell him my story.
I have lived in these so-called United States of America all my life. What can I tell you? I’ve actually lived in New York City all my life. Fact is, I’d just as soon not leave the Bronx or Manhattan if I had my druthers. As an adult I was certainly free to leave and I clearly and definitively did not, notwithstanding the pain of the everyday and of our history. I am an American, after all, and I am proud of that fact as a Black man.
This whole project, of me recording into this tape recorder thing, actually started out because my grandson Robert, a strange young man I tell him, came over to my apartment on One Hundred and Seventeenth Street one day, and told me he was taking an oral history class at City University. Asked me to tell him the story of my life. Gave me a little tape recorder and these tapes and said with that straight and earnest face Robert has, “Grandpa, please, just tell me the story of your life and I‘ll have the tape running,” as if the story of my life was a story I actually knew. Strange young man, that Robert. Always into books. And oh my how earnest he is. Truth is I have hardly looked at myself for one minute of one day, except in the mirror when I dress, or shave, or walk past some of the big windows of some of the storefronts on the avenues.
Oh I know well that some people regard me with a admiration and respect, at least these days they do, but that has to do with my deeds, my rank, my status, my accomplishments and not with the inner man, although I’m sure the inner man is a reflection of the outer public man, and vice versa. I just really never looked at it and I don’t think anyone ever actually asked me to.
“What do I have to say about anything, young fool,” I asked him.
And he said, “oh just please, grandpops, please, just talk into the tape recorder as if you were standing at the pearly gates reviewing your life with god.
“Now you know I don’t believe in that foolishness, Robert, you know that,” I said.
“Well then just talk into the tape recorder as if you were telling your mother what happened to you after she died. Tell grandma what happened to you. Tell her.”
“You are a pushy bookish young man, Robert. You know that?” I said, and I knew I was smiling as I said it.
I have lived in these so-called United States of America all my life. What can I tell you? I’ve actually lived in New York City all my life. Fact is I’d just as soon not leave New York City at any time if I had my druthers. The Bronx and Manhattan, that’s where I live, and have lived, and chose to live. Lived in Jersey for a short while with Frances but didn’t really like it. Who needs all those trees I say, just give me blacktop, brick, bright lights, and sidewalks. Throw in a siren. There is no freer place on earth for me than walking down the streets of New York City. Yes, son, New York, that’s my home.
As an adult I was certainly free to leave New York City and I clearly and definitively did not, notwithstanding the pain of the everyday and of our history. I am a New Yorker, an American, and I tell any African who visits these shores that I am as proud of that fact as I am proud to be a Black man.
I was born in the summer of 1897, well before what these white people call World War One. Funny how language, and those who shape the language, also shape and influence a people’s perception of reality. I mean, thirty five to sixty million Africans were ripped from their homes and families and forced to live in the most horrific and degrading conditions for centuries, treated worst than dogs, owned and unfree, and that is called a “peculiar institution,” while fifty to sixty thousand young American white men die in foreign lands between 1914 and 1917 and it is called “the war to end all wars.” I ask you.
My father James worked as an attendant at Grand Central Station for half a century. Worked as hard and steady as any man who ever lived. Loved his work, and loved bringing home his paycheck and putting it on the kitchen table for all to see. “Honest week’s work. Honest week’s wages. Land of the free, home of the brave,” he would say.
His father had been a slave. Now there’s a story there worth telling. And my mother herself had been born a slave, although as a young child she and her mother were freed and came up to New York City. Slavery has defined me, has defined our people, and has defined our country from the beginning. When I was a boy we lived in the Bronx in an apartment my father rented way over by Pelham Parkway. You can’t quite imagine what the Bronx was like nearly one hundred years ago. But there were farmhouses still. And people kept cows and chickens. And if you were Black you lived in . And there were no public schools for colored children. And I was born at home in my mother’s kitchen, with a hot tub of water on the floor, and my mother’s mother Rachel and the neighborhood midwife standing by. No drugs. No doctors. No medicines. No alcohol in that house. Just my mother screaming, “Damn you, James, see if I ever let’s you touch me again. Ever.” Screaming and laughing and panting hard you know, and swearing things she never meant but in her times of urgency and birth.
I was a skinny runt of a kid. Not an ounce of weight on me, when Ramsey found me. Now Ramsey, there was a man’s man. Just lived in that neighborhood, a quiet, never no nonsense man. Had a little gym in the garage next to his house with some weight lifting equipment. Inherited that house free and clear somehow. Hardly ever employed. Lived just to work out and exercise. Loved to bring every kid in the neighborhood if he could into his garage and show them how to lift weights, do push ups, jump rope.
First Alarm
The alarm rang four times. I hadn’t been asleep that long as I tumbled out of bed, sensing more than seeing the men moving about me. I was still half asleep as I slid down the pole. I hit the ground and stepped into my boots. The door to the station house was already wide opened. The dogs were sitting on the front seat of the pumper barking. The sirens were blasting. It had been awfully cold when I got to work around eight P.M. It was well below freezing now. I pulled on my jacket and gloves, slammed on my helmet, and clambered up onto the seat of the tiller at the back of the hook and ladder. Rory O’Malley started the engine almost before he was fully seated and we were moving into the night. Not two minutes had elapsed from the sound of the first alarm until all twelve men of our company and the rear of the sixty-foot long hook-and-ladder had cleared the station house doors. I was oriented and awake.
Wesley Williams, the city’s first Negro commanding officers, led the way in the Chief’s sedan. It was his job to read the alarm and know the fire’s location. The company’s job was to follow the Chief to the fire, to take orders on site. My job was to help get the ladders there, to keep the rear of the hook and ladder in line with the engine that pulled it, to make the tight curves, and miss the cars parked in the narrow city streets.
The fire we found was in a five-story walk up on 183rd. Residents of the building were already standing in the street shivering in their nightclothes. Flames could be seen behind the windows of a front facing apartment on the fourth floor. Firemen from another company were running up the stairs leading into the front hallway. Ladders were being extended along the street side of the building. Someone had to get into the building and into the apartment and someone had to get onto the roof. A fireman I worked with named Kretowicz was moving up the first ladder toward the window with the flames in it. He liked fighting fires. He loved the Chief. He’d hung an axe in a hook on his belt and had tossed a blanket over his shoulder. I could see he had no gloves on. A pumper from another engine company was pushing a hard stream of water at the building façade. Spray and mist were bouncing off the bricks, hitting the rungs of the ladder and freezing. I saw Kretowicz’ foot slip, saw him fighting for a grip, saw his boots slipping as he fell to the street like a diver trying to right himself before entering the water. He never made it. There was something dreadfully wrong in an instant. A fireman was never supposed to be lost or injured. Some standard operating procedure had not been complied with, some foreseeable risk had not been appreciated. Appreciated. Fuck appreciated. Dead. Now there’s something to think about.
It would be Chief Williams job to talk to Kretowicz’s widow or mother, Chief Williams who would fill out the reams of paper and forms, Chief Williams who would take the administrative heat. That Chief Williams was the city’s only Negro officer, and that he had just lost his first man at a fire, was not going to make his life one iota easier.
The Funeral
The Funeral
The day broke sunny and hot. Even so, my father put on his fire department dress uniform with his badge on the jacket front and his formal stiff dress hat. His badge had a piece of black tape across the numbers. Mother set out my good shoes, a dress shirt and a clip-on tie. The sunlight came through the Venetian blinds into the bedroom as I dressed. Mother actually kissed me softly on the cheek as I walked out the front door of the apartment into the cool marble hallway and down the stairs into the street. “What a handsome young man you are,” she said
We got into my father’s old Plymouth with the soft upholstered beige seats and drove east along the residential streets and apartment houses that are the Bronx. In less than twenty minutes we parked the car somewhere near Pelham Bay Road and walked to a building with an awning in front where lots of other men in uniform were gathered. The building was very quiet, notwithstanding the many people milling about it. My father signed a book when we went inside to a set of rooms filled with lots of cut flowers and soft purple velvet curtains and velvet covered chairs. My father shook hands with many of the men.
“Hey Marty,” the firemen say as they shake his hand. Or “Hello, brother. Who’s your assistant?” Or “who’s the new fireman?”
“Good to see you,” my father answered. “This is my boy, Sam. Son shake hands with my friend,” my father would say and I would reach out and shake the hand of one fireman after another.
“What do we have here, Marty,” a man named Captain Bannerman asked. “Looks like a fullback, or maybe a tiller man,” he said with a wink to me.
I shake the captain’s hand too.
My father holds my hand and walks over to a sparkling velvet open box. A flag is draped over part of it. Inside is a handsome man lying on his back in a fireman’s uniform. His eyes are closed.
“Son, meet Eddie Farrelli,” my father says, looking down at the face of the man in the casket. “The bravest man I ever knew. Just fought one fire too many. Eddie, this is my boy,” my father said.
I looked down into the casket at the man named Eddie Farrelli. “I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” I said. My father squeezed my hand a little tighter. I looked up into his face. He was crying.
We walked over to a woman seated on a chair against a wall with two children on either side of her.
“I’m Marty T,” my father said, shaking the woman’s hand. “I knew Eddie well. He and I had some good times together. He was a brave man. He talked very highly of you and your children.”
“Thank you, Marty” says the woman, “Eddie told me all about you too. And thank you for coming to pay respects, son,” she says to me.
We walk outside the funeral home. The city air is delightful, the sky bright. A cluster of uniformed firemen stand outside on the sidewalk. Some smoke cigarettes. Others brush and scuff the top of the sidewalk with the soles of their shoes looking down at the pavement.
“Life sucks,” says a big man with an immense moustache.
“Life sucks,” echoes a couple of the men.
“See you at the funeral,” says my father.
“See you around,” say a couple of the guys.
“I’d rather feed him than clothe him he’s growing so fast,” says one of the men ruffling my hair.
“Be good,” say a couple of the men.
“Yeah. Take good care of yourselves,” says my father.
We walk back to the car. We get inside. My father sits at the wheel for a while saying nothing.
“Let’s not go home yet,” he says as he starts the engine. “Let’s take the rest of the day off. Okay? Let’s stop somewhere and get some ice cream,” he says. “What do you like? Vanilla?” He looks at me. He rolls down his window. He looks to his left, and pulls out into traffic.
What I Left
In the middle of a mild winter on Cape Cod in Massachusetts on the land of the Wampanoag and the Nauset i escaped before the storm of ’22 that turned mild into wild.

I took leave of my home, dog, plants, coyotes, whales, oysters, sunrises, sunsets, birds, bays, and so much more to travel by air across an entire continent and land here – link to “what i found”






What I Found
I arrived in Temecula. It is beautiful. You can buy five acres of hillside here with 2 houses and 100s of highly productive avocado, orange, lemon, tangerine, grapefruit and more trees, hundreds!, for less than a bucket of sand on the beach in Orleans. You do not have to worry about sharks. You do worry about water availability and water’s price, especially water enough to quench a growing avocado’s liquid needs.


The U.S. Army – Day One, 1960
I leave from the Port Authority building in New York City by bus to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where I’ll begin my two months of Army basic training. I’m just shy of my twentieth birthday. The Port Authority is like Grand Central Station where I was sent unwillingly to camp at age four. This is different, a decision I have made. And although there is a claustrophobic feeling of doors closing and choices made which cannot be changed, there is also the sense of adventure and maturity that is concomitant with actions taken by men.
Almost everyone on the bus is an inductee from New York City. The Jersey countryside, a dune-like succession of sandy low hills and chicken farms, rolls by until we arrive at Fort Dix, which is surrounded by barbed wire. At the entrance to Fort Dix stands a tremendous statue of “The Infantryman,” the ultimate fighting machine I am about to become.
We are herded into a huge building, formed into lines, and begin our transformation and processing from civilians into army troops, first swearing loyalty and fealty to the United States and then being given shockingly short, dare I say bald, army haircuts. We put our civilian clothes into bags. We are marched into line after line where we are inspected, questioned, sorted, and given a series of injections in both arms with air-powered guns. We move down a lengthy counter where we declare our chest, waist, weight, height, and shoe sizes and are given shirts, pants, belts, underwear, shoes, and socks, more or less consistent with our size declarations.
At the end of the counter we flow onto another line and approach a sergeant seated at a table filling out forms with the information necessary to issue each man his dog tags. When I reach the table the sergeant finds my name and military identification number on a card and asks me my religion. I’m not sure why, but I am just not able to answer him. I don’t think it’s that I am afraid of anti-Semitism, or ashamed of being Jewish, quite the opposite, I am rather proud of being Jewish and eager to stand up to anti-Semites. It is much more that I don’t really believe in religion and I’m sort of stunned and offended because I don’t think my religious beliefs are anyone’s business, especially in this context, I mean this is the United States Army is it not, and we were all equals right, brothers in arms. I mean what does my religion matter? It seems almost unpatriotic to make such a separatist declaration.
“What’s your religion?” the sergeant asks me again in a Southern drawl as I continue to stand there, in spite of my wish to answer him, quite mute, embarrassed, and dumb.
“What’s wrong with you, son” the peeved sergeant asks, “what’s your religion?”
And I just stare at him, unable to answer, unable to form the words, unable to fully understand what is going on with me. Maybe I’ll say, “no preference, sir” but I can’t make up my mind and don’t really like that answer either. So I just continue standing there, struggling with myself about these matters of personal and philosophical significance, as the sergeant grows more and more exasperated, and rightly so, thinking I’m a moron or something, and rightly so again.
“I said, ‘what‘s your religion, boy?'” he says slowly, very slowly. And I just stare at him … frozen.
“Jesus H Christ,” he growls almost menacingly, “Who are your people, boy? “
People? The word “people” startles me. Who are “my People?” Shit, I know that answer. People? “Why the Hebrews, sir,” I say.
“Hebrew,” he repeats, and writes it down. “Next,” he says, and smiles.
I receive my dog tags two days later. They read just that, “Hebrew.” I still have them, of course. I don’t imagine there are many other Hebrews in the U.S. Army, but the Hebrews are definitely my “people.” And were there ever to come a time to identify my scarred and unrecognizable mortal remains left on some desolate field of battle I think I would be far more comfortable buried as an ethnic American, dare I say tribal, Hebrew (for all that would matter) than I would be hypocritically declared a “religious” Jew.

Jews / Hebrews
Further explorations of the world as it is and the world as we wish it to be
HEBREWS!?
…one of the unique things about the jewish people is that historically – at least for nearly two millennia – they were not a state/nation per se altho they were and are an ethnically identifiable “people,” independent of their religion … albeit a stateless people … a little like gypsies … members/citizens of many diverse nation states in the middle and far east, in africa, asia, europe, and the western hemisphere – while simultaneously maintaining their jewish identity, but not as a nation with a state/territory as such. the advent of zionism, the notion there should be an ethnically identified jewish state (designed initially as a nationalist movement primarily to protect jews from centuries of abuse), changed all that.
i personally never much favored the idea of there being a state for jews, especially on ethnically cleansed conquered lands, even as I celebrated the pre-1967 triumphs of Israel. it is my naïve utopian hope that israel and palestine will merge as one state for all its people – a far better outcome in my view than a jewish national state living side by side in peace with a safe, just, and equitable state for the palestinian people – and equally unlikely an outcome as there being one just and equitable state for all the people of Palestine. as Gideon Levy says, “the two-state solution is dead (it was never born); the Palestinian state will not arise; international law does not apply to Israel; the occupation will continue to crawl quickly to annexation, annexation will continue to crawl quickly toward an apartheid state; “Jewish” supersedes “democracy”, nationalism and racism will get the stamp of government approval, but they’re already here and have been for a long time.” in light of that reality i’m left believing israel and palestine are one state already, albeit an apartheid state w a major civil rights problem.” and there is no palestinian state, regardless of the best intentions of the pope.
So how did David turn into Goliath?
MISCELLANEOUS

Musab
I am Musab, six years old
Two days ago Israeli soldiers surrounded our house at 2 A.M. shooting
Helicopter gunships illuminating the night
Their rotors like giant fans hung from the sky
The whine of their rockets like angry birds
Here four bullet holes through the door of the room where my brother sleeps
Here the shattered windows
“Take your clothes off, all of you, even the women” the Israeli soldiers yelled
Then father was handcuffed
Taken as a human shield to the apartment of uncle Hussan
Where their bullets pierced his door
and the chest of the old man opening it
Who bleeds to death for want of an ambulance.
After his body is removed
The soldiers withdraw
But brother is still crying
My city, Nablus, is still occupied
The old man remains dead
And I am Musab, six years old.
POETRY
- 99 Gratitudes in 3 Minutes – A Yoga Chanting Poem
- A Poem is Born
- After The News
- Alan
- Alan Is Dead
- American Wedding, 2011
- Ask the Sphinx – 2 approaches
- Baggage Claim
- Beach Plum Jam
- Beau Dies
- between spiders
- Burnt Wood – for Bubi
- Cheerio Box Speaks of Love
- Conversation With A Ladle
- Coyote in the Headlights
- Coyote in the House
- Crow’s Song
- Daybreak
- Death Factories
- Death of the Dolphin
- Furry Bug
- Gospel of the Redwoods
- Insects in Amber
- It: In Honor of Dr. Seuss
- Journey to Standing Rock
- Kevin Garnett in Africa
- Life among the barbarians
- Long ago, perhaps yesterday
- Mandalay Hills
- Mesquite Dunes
- Miles’ Ashes
- Miles’ Journey
- My First Yoga Teacher
- One Drop of Rain
- Salton Sea
- Self Love
- Sunrise
- The Love Life of Clams
- Throwing Away
- Turn up for Turnips – a song
- Uncle Sol
- What The Stones Say
- when spring arrives ice flows out of the bay
- Whispering Among The Gods
- Willow
- Winter Fog
- Work and Love are What Really Matter: a reunion poem for the BHS class of 1958 reunion