Free Republic

PORTLAND, Maine — In November, Portland residents are being asked to approve sweeping changes to the city’s charter including controversial items that would result in a strengthened mayor, a financially independent school board and a citizen-led police oversight board. But, amid the ongoing fury, one charter change question among the eight-question list has been largely overshadowed. It would make Portland the only municipality that officially recognizes in its charter that it sits on unceded land, stolen from Indigenous peoples by European colonizers. The question, which would alter the governing document’s preamble, was written by charter commissioner Pat Washburn. It reads,...

When Jane Jameson attended elementary school in the 1950s, American Indians served one purpose in the curriculum: providing color for the class re-enactment of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth. Jameson remembers dressing up in paper-bag vests and wondering how real Indians could have stayed warm in such outfits. November is still a time for teachers to talk about American Indians. But forget the paper bags. Teachers today are tackling the subject in depth. Jameson, a teacher at Portland's Riverton Community School, taught her second- and third-graders this year to make shaman false-face masks and kachina dolls, which symbolize the ancestral...