Boston 400 – coming up “soon”

It’s Fall 2023, which means 2030 is just over 6 years away, which can only mean (here at the HP) that interest and input should start growing in the 400th anniversary of English colonizers we know as the puritans arriving on the Shawmut peninsula and shortly renaming it Boston.

This event has been celebrated in years past by most of the descendants of those English colonizers and immigrants from other parts of the globe who followed them. It has been mourned by Indigenous people and some of those colonizers’ descendants as the beginning of the many types of destruction that colonization relies on–of people, languages, trees, water, animals, and cultures.

In 1930, the tercentenary celebrations in Boston were aggressively massive.

$202K in 1930 was over $3 million in today’s dollars. That’s how you fund a “Monster Reception in Boston Garden.” That Afternoon Pageant on Boston Common lasted three hours and involved tens of thousands of people celebrating the Puritans as the font of all virtues and the founders of the nation. The legend lives on from the Singing Societies on down of the great week they called “Tercentenary”…

But in 2030, ideally, things will be different. They already are. The City of Boston authorized the Boston Commemoration Committee to “to ensure that the many diverse community voices and organizations who steward Boston’s history, and the City departments with responsibilities related to historical narrative, exhibits, curricula, archives, preservation, and event-planning, are all able to work together to deepen the public opportunities to engage with that history, in collaboration with state and federal partners.” That’s a quote from the full ordinance authoritizing the Committee, and if you read page 3 you’ll see the intention to people it with a full range of representatives.

We’re on board with this intention. As we teeter on the brink of a planetary crisis originating to a great extent in the economics of colonization, it’s time to use these “founding” anniversaries as a chance to change direction and return to the Indigenous economy that sustained the Earth in what we now call North America for millennia.

If you’re living in Massachusetts, get in touch with the Committee, and consider how you can shape local events in your own town. If you’re elsewhere in the world, investigate what’s happening locally. Let’s look ahead with optimism to 2030 and the end of tercentenary thinking!