Indigenous and Black people tell their own seafaring stories at Mystique Seaport Museum
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The United States has a long, rich and complicated maritime history, a history typically taught through the white-centric perspective. An exhibition at the nation’s largest maritime museum wants visitors to see it in other ways, through Indigenous and African ties to the waterways of New England. Diane Orson of Connecticut Public Radio has more.
DIANE ORSON, BYLINE: Mystic Seaport Museum was founded in Connecticut to preserve America’s seafaring past. You can walk through a 19th-century coastal village and climb aboard a wooden whaling ship. But for decades, most Black and Indigenous maritime histories were missing.
AKEIA DE BARROS GOMES: And so what we are doing within the exhibition, “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty And The Sea,” is telling that larger story.
ORSON: Curator Akeia de Barros Gomes says “Entwined” calls on visitors to think about history, water and spirituality in new ways.
GOMES: For the last 500 years, colonialism, slavery and dispossession have been a major factor in our histories. But if you think about African and Indigenous Dawnland – or New England – maritime histories, they go back over 12,000 years.
ORSON: Inside the gallery space, she points to an ancient ceramic cooking pot that’s partly broken in pieces.
GOMES: We are going to continue to do the work until the vessel is whole and holds water once more.
ORSON: The exhibition features loaned belongings or objects from Indigenous and African communities dating back 2,500 years. They show maritime navigational skills and spiritual connections to the ocean on both sides of the Atlantic.
GOMES: Walking through the exhibition space, you get the sense that time is cyclical, not linear, and that everything cycles and has a birth, a life, a death and a rebirth, as do our histories.
ORSON: There’s a brightly painted dugout canoe, traditional masks and jewelry and a first-edition Eliot Bible translated into the Algonquin language. There are also wampum beads found just across the river, at the site of the Pequot Massacre of 1637. Mystic Seaport Museum stands on Indigenous ancestral homelands, says designer Steven Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.
STEVEN PETERS: There was a lot of healing that had to take place so that the communities became comfortable sharing within those spaces.
ORSON: He says before loaning any materials, local tribes wanted to be sure that along with the hard history, there would be stories of strength and resilience. Peters and de Barros Gomes spent nearly two years meeting with Native and Black community members to shape the narrative.
PETERS: It had to be both African and Indigenous communities that were saying, here’s the story that we want to tell.
ORSON: This is not the first time Mystic Seaport has worked with outside advisers, says Elysa Engelman, the museum’s director of research and scholarship.
ELYSA ENGELMAN: But the first time that we’ve had an outside committee that was responsible for the content and really was the voice of the exhibit.
ORSON: Adviser Anika Lopes traces her ancestry to enslaved Africans and members of the Niantic Indian tribe.
ANIKA LOPES: It reminds me always of your foundation, foundation, foundation. Like, who is at the table and who are you involving in the discussions from the very beginning is so important.
ORSON: Standing outside the gallery, visitor Susie Gagne says “Entwined” makes Mystic Seaport better.
SUSIE GAGNE: I’m appreciative of the language. It was, for the most part, written in, like, we and I perspectives, written by people in the groups that it’s about. And obviously, there are historical atrocities associated with Mystic alongside all of the good historical connotations.
ORSON: Back inside, de Barros Gomes guides me through two smaller, darkened rooms – first, an attic space with ship carvings and spiritual objects of enslaved Africans, then an Indigenous hut called a wetu.
GOMES: And then you walk out into this light, bright, contemporary space.
ORSON: And see a large collection of art by current Native American and Black artists. There are paintings, sculpture and traditional clothing.
GOMES: Art that really speaks to contemporary artists reclaiming their ancestry and their ancestral stories.
ORSON: She says, for too long, others told America’s maritime history. “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty And The Sea” shifts the tide.
For NPR News, I’m Diane Orson in New Haven.
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