Why is this low-traffic email list so important?
Indigenous sites get saved when the public finds out about the short windows of opportunity that are afforded to provide formal governmental input.
Government agencies only offer the very minimum advance notice allowed so that there is no time for the public to mount an organized response.
We can counter this with technology.
When the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) office opened its formal review of the MassDOT project in Northampton that would destroy a 10,000 year old village site, the public was only given two weeks to participate. Nobody even knew about the public involvement period.
Our email list of 50,000 ready-to-go supporters was a game-changer.
MEPA received some six hundred letters of protest from all over the world, forcing MassDOT to rescind their MEPA permit application. Then, the Governor’s office received estimated one thousand letters. And there was much more.
It worked. We won. Together with the Aquinnah Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes who were actively petitioning the federal government, we saved the site.
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Nayyag Preserve 