Maine spends $132,000 of taxpayer cash on group who say state should be renamed ... trends now
Maine officials are coming under fire after handing a $132,000 contract to a racial justice group, only for it to conclude with a 30-minute webinar on 'problematic' place names.
Taxpayers footed the bill for the lecture as part of the state's employment of non-profit Atlantic Black Box (ABB), which claims to 'engage the public in the collective rewriting of our regional history.'
In footage of the webinar this week, ABB founder Meadow Dibble urged attendees to acknowledge suffering caused by 'white settler people' as she rattled off place names Maine residents should feel offended by.
The towns of Norway and Mexico were seen as insulting, 'Old Maid Rock' was determined to be sexist, and Maine should be rebranded to 'Dawnland' to represent the Native American Wabanaki tribe's original name, Dibble argued.
'You could say that reading Maine's place names is something like reading a book,' Dibble said. 'And some folks will tell you it's a comedy. But when you read these names through the lens of racial equity, this book can read more like a horror novel.'
The seminar also included a Native American representative claiming she researches names of places before travelling and purposefully avoids anywhere sounding 'suspicious.'
Atlantic Black Box presented a slide-show on Maine's 'problematic' place names, which came after landing a $132,000 contract with the state to 'reckon with our region’s complicity in the slave trade'
Meadow Dibble, the founder of Atlantic Black Box, used the presentation to remark on the 'painful histories behind some of these names that normalized white supremacy and violence against BIPOC communities'
The woke lecture, first reported by The Maine Wire, reportedly began with Dibble listing her pronouns as 'she/ they' before insisting attendees to re-evaluate 'what is behind the names that are all around us.'
Among the names she took objection to included the small island of Nipple, Maine, and the naming of Maine itself, which she felt would be better suited to the Wabanaki tribe's 'Dawnland'.
The host then displayed a standard place name sign with the sites replaced with monikers such as 'Land Thief Hill', 'Enslaver Lake' and 'White Supremacy Hill.'
Certain place names were also deemed to 'objectify or denigrate women, sexualize the landscape or play on tropes of loose women and witches' - with 'Old Maid Rock' seen as particularly troubling.
Dibble added that 'that is a topic that deserves its own presentation', potentially after another taxpayer-funded contract.
She continued: 'Once we
