Years in, panel tasked with offering new Mass. flag says it needs another extension amid ‘public misunderstanding’ – The Boston Globe

Yet, the full 10-person panel has not gathered in a meeting since, nor has the commission held a series of legally mandated hearings to gather public input ahead of a Dec. 15 deadline to produce its recommendations.

It appears unlikely the panel actually will do so. A commission spokesperson told the Globe that the panel intends to seek a second extension, and is “aiming” to have its next full commission meeting at some point in December.

“The Seal, Flag and Motto Advisory Commission has been hard at work engaging experts and the public about what they want to see in our state’s symbols,” Alana Davidson, the commission spokesperson, said in a statement. “We believe that more time is needed to ensure robust community engagement.”

Davidson did not respond to a question about how much more time the commission would seek from the Legislature, which wrapped up formal sessions for the year earlier this month.

The panel, similar to the one before it, has been trying to navigate a fraught debate about representation and potential erasure in the iconography the state assigns itself.

The effort to replace the flag dates back decades, but it gained traction in 2020, when the murder of George Floyd sparked a nationwide reexamination of race and historical emblems, including the Massachusetts seal.

Members of the state’s Indigenous community are themselves split on how to replace the state’s current 19th-century emblem, which sits on the state flag and depicts a colonist’s arm holding a sword above the image of a Native American. The image is draped by a Latin motto that roughly translates to: “By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.”

The design draws on the original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which featured a Native American man, naked but for some shrubbery around his groin, saying, “Come over and help us.” And the sword depicted once belonged to Myles Standish, a 17th-century military commander for the Plymouth Colony known for his brutality toward the Indigenous population.

When the panel released a set of new designs in August it had culled from public submissions, commission members cautioned that the proposals — which rated the highest during a round of internal scoring — were not the finalists from which a final recommendation would emerge.

In the months since, a group of commissioners have met in subcommittee meetings, during which members lamented moving too quickly to ask for ideas without better educating the public — and commission appointees themselves — about the problematic history of the state’s official emblem.

The commission’s work is also unfolding during a different time than in 2020. Over the last five years, the racial reckoning that helped spur the first commission has largely receded from the public view.

The debate over changing the flag has also since migrated onto the campaign trail, where some of Governor Maura Healey’s Republican opponents — both past appointees of former governor Charlie Baker, who signed the initial measure in January 2021— have cast the state’s effort as an attempt to erase the state’s own history.

“There’s a public misunderstanding about why the current flag is not appropriate,” Kate Fox, the executive director of the state’s Office of Travel and Tourism and the commission’s co-chair, said during a Sept. 9 meeting.

Critics have long said that the placement of a broadsword above the Native American figure is racist imagery and symbolizes the violence inflicted on Native American populations. Still others, both on and off the commission, have warned against eliminating Massachusetts’ Indigenous communities from the seal entirely.

The first iteration of the commission voted unanimously in 2022 for replacing the state’s motto and seal, but it disbanded the next year without offering specific substitutes for either.

Summer Confuorto, a current commission member, said in a late September subcommittee meeting that she’s heard pushback casting the panel’s effort to rethink the flag as a “liberal state that wants to make this change” and that Native Americans themselves aren’t driving it. In fact, she said, Indigenous leaders have been talking for decades about why the imagery needs to change.

“It’s not to waste people’s time and . . . there’s a purpose and intent” behind the commission’s work, said Confuorto, who has Gros Ventre, Cree, Mi’kmaq heritage, according to her employer, the Mass Cultural Council.

In a late October meeting, Rhonda Anderson, an Iñupiaq – Athabascan commission member who also is the Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, said the advisory panel needs to both educate and reframe its work, including to other Native Americans, that “we’re actually providing something better” with a new emblem.

“When people believe that we’re taking something away, they just really clutch tighter,” Anderson said. “I don’t want to take anything away from anyone, but I do want to do better.”

Efforts to reach Confuorto, Anderson, and other members of the advisory commission for this story were not successful.

John “Jim” Peters, the executive director of the Commission on Indian Affairs and a state seal advisory commission member, said in a phone interview that the panel is tackling a “difficult question” and he himself is at odds with others on a path forward.

He said he’s made his preference clear: The “most effective” option, he said, is to simply remove the disembodied arm and sword from the state, and change the state motto.

Actually changing the seal and flag, however, is “something that the citizens of the state need to be on the same page [for],” he said.

Whenever the panel does submit its recommendations, the governor is required to submit legislation “to codify the new state motto and designs for the seal and flag,” though the law does not dictate when it must be submitted. The Legislature ultimately would then have to approve any changes.

Peters is not among the commission members who’ve sat in on subcommittee meetings in recent months, the last of which fell shortly before Halloween. But told the Globe he was aware that the advisory panel planned to seek an extension.

“Another holdup,” he said.

Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.