Excerpts from remarks delivered Sep 9, 2023
Welcome to this dedication of the revitalized East Acton Village Green. My name is Jim Snyder-Grant, chair of Acton’s Select Board. With me is Bettina Abe, recently retired from the Town of Acton, who has been taking the lead on this project. Each of us has a few words to say, and then we will be witnessing a ceremony led by Strong Bear Medicine of the Nashoba Praying Indians.
This park is dedicated to the memory of three of Acton’s environmental foremothers, Alice “Mikki” Williams, Carol Holley, and Mary Michelman. Each was deeply concerned about the health of Acton, and their sense of what health meant clearly included plants and animals, earth, air and water, and their sense of caring extended well beyond the boundaries of the present Town of Acton. They were each taken from us way too early, but many of us got to know them while they were with us. They helped to start and run organizations that are still with us, and their spirit of environmental care sparked a lot of us in Acton to seek to do the right thing.
Here’s just one example. Mary Michelman started the stream teams in 1998, organizing volunteers to do the first stream survey of Fort Pond Brook, Nashoba Brook and most of its tributaries. The data still serve as a baseline for stream conditions in Acton.
Nashoba Brook is right over there, one of the two brooks that together gather all of the flowing waters of Acton and bring them to Concord and beyond to the sea. The name Nashoba comes from the name of the are where the brook begins, the Indigenous territory of Nashope. Part of Nashope became the Praying Indian village of Nashoba created by the cooperation of the local Indians of the Massachusetts tribe and the Rev. John Eliot, Puritan missionary. The village lasted as a sanctuary for only a part of the second half of the 17th century. We are blessed today to have direct descendants of these Praying Indians who are still keeping their culture alive, including Strong Bear Medicine, who has recently moved back to Littleton, on land that was part of Nashope and the Nashoba Praying indian Village. If you want to learn more about the history of the Nashoba Praying Indians, one good way is to seek out Dan Boudillion after the ceremony and ask him about how to purchase one of his new books.
I would like to invoke the possibility that all of us here today, and everyone who comes here to this inspiring new park in the future, will learn from Micki, Mary, Carol — and from Strong Bear Medicine and his family — how vital it is to wake up to the aliveness and light all around us, how it is our joyful duty to protect and nurture it, as it nurtures us in turn.