Signs... of a Village’s Values

Left: Peace sign in the window at Basically Bicycles. The Montague Reporter, September 12, 2024, Reporter Staff Photo. Right: Peace sign in the window at the Carnegie Library. The Montague Reporter, September 12, 2024, Reporter Staff Photo:
 

by Pat Hynes

October 2024

Turners Falls, once a planned industrial community with paper manufacturers, cotton mills, and the largest cutlery factory of its day, is now a thriving post-industrial village in the town of Montague, with 23 Peace signs on downtown windows and doors. I asked some of the shop owners and community organizations: “If your Peace sign could speak, what would it say?” A stream of responses flowed forth.

Librarians Angela Rovatti-Leonard and Scott Schmith replied: “If the Peace sign in the window of the Carnegie Public Library could talk, it would say, ‘All are welcome here! The Montague Public Libraries offer materials, services, and programs to foster educational, cultural, and recreational enrichment in the community. Everyone is welcome through our doors.’”

Dave Carr, owner of Basically Bikes, expressed that his Peace sign spoke ardently to his greatest concern: “Our country’s deepening division… No rational country would elect a convicted felon.”

Mary King conveyed why they welcomed the sign at Montague Catholic Social Ministries: “We were glad to hang the Peace sign on our window because it reflects MCSM’s core mission, to promote non-violence and harmony in our community. Peace represents feeling safe, accepted, and welcome for all of the newcomers to Turners Falls.”

“To me, peace starts from within,” Sage Botanicals founder Laura Torraco replied, “and with our work here at the apothecary, we support folks as they navigate their goals through an initial place of radical self-acceptance. This self-acceptance is, to me, the initiatory step toward liberation and peace… [Peace] requires holding complexities and nuance, whether that is between the self, another, or even larger.”

One of the many volunteers at the Finders Collective, the free store, community space, and lending library, replied, “At the end of the day, we just want more peace as opposed to senseless fighting. Finders Collective is based on trust—that people will take what they need and share with others. We act from an assumption of peacefulness.”

Sadie’s bike shop owner, Nik Perry, answered quickly: “Why wouldn’t I put a Peace sign in my shop window? I have a passion for bikes and wanted to open my shop and feed into the community that was here with its distinct spirit. I think about this a lot; otherwise, life can be aimless.”

Evelyn Wulfkuhle, owner of Harvey’s restaurant, chose to display a sign because “Violence is never the solution. While it can be an effective tool for gaining control and war, it fundamentally disrupts the grounding necessary for sustaining a peaceful future.”

These responses took me to the words of the author Patrick Mazza, who looked at our “world of ongoing crises” with “too many trends moving in the wrong direction,” and asked where we can begin to make a change. “That place is the communities and bioregions where we live,” he writes. “We must begin to build the future in place.”

Turners Falls, one of five villages of Montague, Massachusetts, has a longer history than its settlement by white colonialists, industrialization, and post-industrial revitalization. For over 10,000 years, Native Americans lived at what is now called Turners Falls in a sustainable relationship with their Mother Earth—fishing, hunting, farming, and holding ceremonial activities. Many regional tribes traditionally gathered to share in the abundant seasonal salmon and shad harvest, a place where fish would defy gravity and scale the dramatic falls.

In the early morning of May 19, 1676, Captain William Turner and his troops attacked the sleeping multi-tribal encampment and massacred 200 to 300 Native people, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Later, the falls and the village were named after him. In recognition of the colonial militia’s horrific massacre of the original inhabitants, the Town of Montague, on the 328th anniversary on May 19, 2004, joined with representatives of various Native American tribes in a reconciliation ceremony.

Anemone Mars, of the Narragansett tribe, gave the invocation in Narragansett and in English. She invoked the spirits of those massacred, which “remained in a state of limbo, and without rest for centuries, for over 121,000 days, never at peace. At this time, we come here, we ask the Creator to help us restore a level of healing to this place.”

How concordant with this reconciliation are the Peace signs displayed in downtown Turners Falls.

Pat Hynes of Montague is a Traprock Center for Peace and Justice board member, Peace Sign Project director, and a WILPF member. Please contact Pat with any questions at hphynes@gmail.com. Here’s Pat’s March 2023 ENews with photos: "Greenfield Shops for Peace."