Today we have an exciting guest blog from
Jo Loosemore.
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Contemporary cooking pot, traditional design by
Mashpee Aquinnah artist Nosapocket/Ramona Peters
(photo courtesy of Smoke
Sygnals)
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2020 will mark the 400th anniversary of the sailing of
the Mayflower. The history connects five nations over four centuries. It’s
also a story with personal connections, cultural sensitivities and political
ramifications.
Today more than 30 million people claim a connection to the ship
and its passengers of 400 years ago. Our work at The Box, Plymouth is an
ambitious response to the anniversary and to the cultural opportunities it
offers. It is also a recognition of the need to genuinely reflect on the
English colonisation of America and its consequences.
Having made links with
Plymouth400 (the organisation
leading the commemoration in the US) and descendant family history societies
across the Atlantic, we began to understand how crucial and complicated the
Native American story is. It has been ignored, or marginalised, by traditional
tellings over 400 years. There are exceptions to that - at
Plimoth Plantation
for instance, and academically of course, but the Anglo Separatist colonial
narrative still dominates.
‘Pilgrims’ are powerful. They have shaped images and
ideas of American national identity for centuries. But doesn’t the 21st
century demand different voices as well? Anniversaries can applaud and acclaim,
but they also offer the opportunity to acknowledge - appropriately. With an
international partnership in place (US, UK, and The Netherlands), this commemoration
allows a real re-appraisal of the past. As an English regional museum in the
city the Mayflower left 400 years ago, we could have chosen to look at
our own 1620 world. Instead, The Box in Plymouth (UK) committed to co-curate
its exhibition (Mayflower 400: Legend and Legacy) with Native Americans
living in and around Plymouth (US) today.
With little experience of, or opportunity to work with,
‘source communities’ or the descendants of those people affected by our
ancestors’ colonial ambitions
, this
was bold. Perhaps it was also naïve, yet it felt right. Researching earlier
commemorations on both sides of the Atlantic suggested the challenges and the
choices we had to make. We didn’t want to make the mistake of 1970, when the
Wampanoag elder Wamsutta/Frank James’ commemorative speech was censored by the
Anglo American organisers of the 350th anniversary in America. The action
resulted in dismay, anger and protests from Native Americans and led to the first
National Day of Mourning. 2020 will mark its 50th anniversary.
Understandably, the Wampanoag people have a difficult
relationship with Mayflower history and its legacy. They are the People
of the First Light, who have lived in the American eastern woodlands for 12,000
years. They were also subject to attack from European disease and capture by English
adventurers. Yet they enabled the survival of the Mayflower’s colonists,
before being subjected to decimation during King Philip’s War of 1676 and
generations of repression. Today there are two Wampanoag Nations in
Massachusetts - Mashpee and Aquinnah. Would they, could they, help us?
The National Maritime Museum made the first museological
approaches. The Wampanoag Advisory Committee to Plymouth400 (US) made a film
for the new Tudor/Jacobean seafaring exhibition. We needed and hoped for more -
objects, images, and insights, which would enable us to tell a different story
of 1620 and its impact. For us, this would be new, hard, but appropriate. We
wanted to bring Wampanoag history, culture and life today to an English
audience. We just weren’t quite sure how.
The first phone call didn’t go well. I outlined our
ambitions for an exhibition which told an accurate and integrated story, but
owing to more commemorative Mayflower collecting over the years, lacked a range
of earlier relevant objects. They told me theirs were here - in English
collections - the loot of wars and oppression. They tasked me with finding King
Philip/Metacom’s wampum belt - for them, the most symbolic of all.
As a 20th century social/oral historian rather than an
ethnographer, 400 years of conflict felt a heavy burden. History and
collections are collisions. They damage and hurt, but they also prove
connections over time and oceans.
Following months of questions and requests, the exchanges
became answers and support. The Wampanoag Advisory Group recommended we
commission Smoke Sygnals (Wampanoag history and communication specialists) to
guide us. Steadily we agreed a scope of work ‘to develop a foundation of a
shared history between our people’. They offered to give ‘attention to period
correct artifacts’ in order to ‘bring a fresh, authentic perspective to your
work’. After a few months, the mother and son team of Paula and Steven Peters
were working with us on object selection, text, and imagery.
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Paula Peters (Wampanoag Advisory Group), with
historic wampum collections at the British Museum
(photo c/o The Box, Plymouth)
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There are cultural differences of course. Our Native
American advisors are open to recreations and replicas, while we seek original
items imbued, from our perspective perhaps, with time and truth.
Smoke Sygnals have guided us through online collection
catalogues, away from objects mis-labelled or misunderstood over time, and led
us towards items which they value, appreciate and want to see us display.
This has meant showing the evidence of Wampanoag longevity
– fishing weights and arrow-heads of an unwritten past, pre-contact, and
powerful in their efficacy and durability. Together we have also chosen pieces
of the early contact period (a wooden ladle with a bird design, an eel trap and
a bow) which have sustained through time.
This took us to the collections of the National Museum of
the American Indian and the objects held in Washington, but representing Native
Americans across the country. There are 174 Wampanoag pieces listed in the
catalogue. We have secured three, thanks to our working relationship with the
Wampanoag Advisory Group. Generously, they supported our case and ambition for
the exhibition.
‘We greatly appreciate the sincerity and
dedication to developing authentic displays that reflect the story of
colonization and beyond from the Wampanoag perspective.
We appreciate that our tribal knowledge and
scholarly work has been consulted every step of the way, in a sense treating us
as co-curators, and giving our recommendations the highest priority’.
Paula Peters, Smoke Sygnals and Plymouth400 Wampanoag Advisory
Committee Member
New archaeological research in Plymouth, MA by the
University of Massachusetts suggests a much closer connection between the
Wampanoag people and early colonists. It seems there was a sharing of material
culture, and 400 years on, our exhibition will reflect that co-existence. But
what of the conflict? Colonisation was undeniably brutal and bloody. The 1676
war may have been the bloodiest on American soil, but it was preceded and
followed by cruel cultural clashes.
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John Eliot Bible, 1661, the first Bible to
be
printed in America, from the collections of
Exeter Cathedral Library
(image
courtesy of Exeter Cathedral Library)
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Finding the material culture and the imagery of conflict has
been challenging. It is also central to the story. For us, objects four
centuries apart will help to illustrate oppression and persecution. The Eliot
Bible of the 17
th century and the full text of Wamsutta/Frank James’
speech of 1970 are evidence of a dark past overly due for illumination.
Our Wampanoag advisors have also asserted the story of
their survivance
.
The Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag Nations in Massachusetts have a population
of 5000. Both tribal governments are enabling us to use their historic
photographic collections, while supporting new photography projects as well. We
are also pleased to be establishing new relationships with artists and
craftspeople preserving and perpetuating their living legacy. One,
Nosapocket/Ramona
Peters, is already beginning Plymouth’s
first ever commission of Wampanoag
contemporary art (see above).
Her piece will become part of the city’s permanent
collections on
its arrival here in 2020. We are also aiming to commission a new
wampum belt as well.
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Paula Peters (Wampanoag Advisory Group)
reading the
Algonquian Eliot Bible, 1680-85,
at the Foyle Special Collections Library,
Kings College, London
(photo courtesy of The Box, Plymouth)
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Presenting the cultural history of a people, pre-contact,
during colonial contact and with a living legacy, is difficult. It requires
openness and understanding, tenacity and trust. American archaeologists and
advisors (Plimoth Plantation, Pilgrim Hall Museum and the University of
Massachusetts), and British curators and ethnographers (British Museum, Pitt
Rivers and Bristol) have offered context. Sometimes they have also countered
the content suggested by our Native American advisors. Together we have
imagined an exhibition
informed by Wampanoag interests and supported by Anglo-American museums. We are
committed to the partnership and to the co-curation it has enabled. We may get
some things wrong, but hopefully we will get more things right. That is an
important course to chart 400 years after the arrival of the
Mayflower
in Native America.
If you wish to have a project you're working on profiled on the blog please email
web@museumethnographersgroup.org.uk
Mayflower 400: Legend and Legacy will open in 2020 and run for 18 months. Objects,
images and ideas will
explore early English attempts to colonise America, recognise conflict and
coexistence with Native America, address the political and religious context for the sailing of the Mayflower
in 1620, detail the lives of its passengers, and consider the cultural,
demographic and personal legacies of the story.
