By Phillippa Pitts
In 1852, abolitionist and formerly enslaved American Frederick Douglass posed a question to the audience who gathered to hear him celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is constant victim… This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
On June 5, 2020, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts celebrated a victory in federal courts. The decision from a Washington D.C. district court stated that a 2018 decision by the U.S.
“Sí han venido aquí a ayudarme, están perdidendo su tiempo. Pero si han venido porque su liberación está atada con la mía, entonces déjenos trabajar juntos.” --Lilla Watson, Activista Indígena Australia (Murri)
Saludos comunidad de Cultural Survival,
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." --Lilla Watson, Aboriginal Australian (Murri) activist
Greetings Cultural Survival community,
In May 2020, Cultural Survival made the decision to cancel the 2020 Bazaars that would normally occur in Newburyport and Tiverton in July. Due to Covid-19, schools are closed in Massachusetts and will not reopen until September, and it is not guaranteed that they will reopen at that time.
On May 10, 2020, the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota were told by Governor Kristi Noem they had to remove coronavirus checkpoints within 48 hours. However, given that the Cheyenne River Sioux only have an eight-bed facility for the 12,000 people living on the reservation, the checkpoints are an essential tool for regulating and limiting the spread of COVID-19 on the reservation.
By Alexandra Carraher-Kang
The Eastern Woodlands Rematriation Collective sustains “the spiritual foundation of traditional livelihoods through sustainable food and agroecological systems” in the New England area. The Collective’s projects are rooted in the reclamation of traditional food, wild medicines, and ecological knowledge through exchange, mutual aid, and apprenticeship within Tribal territories of the northeast. These projects focus on local infrastructure needs of their various food cultivation spaces with the goal of building capacity through trust and care to others.
On March 27, 2020, in the midst of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Chairman Cedric Cromwell was informed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that the Tribe’s reservation will be “disestablished” as ordered by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, David Bernhardt.
By Octaviana Trujillo, Laurie Smith Monti, and Gary Paul Nabhan
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
