- My name is Deborah Spears Moorehead.

In my Wampanoag language, it's (speaking in foreign language).

So I would say, "Hello," (speaking in foreign language).

And that would be, "Hello, my name is Deborah Talking Water.

How are you?"

I grew up the youngest of six.

We lived in the area called Lincoln Park.

We were the only... Maybe there was one other family of color in our neighborhood.

Grew up with mostly, like, non-native people.

And most of my neighbors were wonderful people.

They were the greatest people you'd ever meet.

Well, it was really difficult because I didn't...

There wasn't anybody that looked like me.

So I had a really hard time relating.

- Raymond Two Hawks Watson, principal chief of the Mashapaug Nahaganset Tribe, and a part of the Rhode Island community.

So, my grandmother who raised me always sought out educational experiences where there were a diversity of people, and that's just kind of how it is in Providence generally, unless you're going to one of the very expensive sort of private schools.

So even, like, in daycare, I went to Mount Hope Daycare, which is a few blocks from here, and they were all kids from all different backgrounds.

My grandmother, Christian woman, she then put me in a Lutheran school, small Lutheran school, but once again, such a diversity of students.

We had Laotians in there, Guatemalans, other Indians from different tribes.

I think there was a Haitian young lady in there.

So always through my educational sort of experiences, my grandmother was very, very specific about making sure I was in certain environments where there would be a diversity of people that were there.

- In the fourth grade, my teacher, he was Hispanic, he asked everyone to...

He went around the room and asked everyone to tell their ethnicity, so I just said Black because everybody was calling me Black all the time and calling me the N word, so.

Mr. Blanco, he said, "What are you doing?"

So I said, "Well, I know"...

I said, "I know I'm Indian, but nobody will believe me."

And he said, "Well, I know you're Indian," and he said, "And you don't have to just say what other people are saying about you."

So, he was the only person that actually validated who I was.

- I learned from a very, very early stage that there were lots of different people around and that not everyone was like me, and that that wasn't a bad thing.

So that definitely colored in terms of how I attempted to engage as I grew up.

You're really trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong, because if, you know, if Rhode Island got started by taking land from my people, well, why should I be proud of being a Rhode Islander?

And yet when I go to school, everything great about Rhode Island.

So it's like you're consistently in this space where you're not quite sure how to even deal with society around you.

And at a very young age, being sort of introduced to that sort of conflict.

- Well, it seemed to me like society kept trying to put this message that if you weren't of a certain look, style, status, then you were less than.

So I had the self-esteem that it was like, well, I don't have, you know, white skin, I don't have blond hair, I don't have blue eyes, I don't have a Mercedes in my yard, I don't have a big car.

I didn't have all those status symbols that said that you were supposed to have self-esteem.

I didn't feel my value was really high then, and it was a very difficult time in my life because that was when I needed to think that my value was very high.

So, I made it through, but it was difficult.

- Especially growing up here in Mount Hope, because if anyone's familiar with the Narragansett Indian tribe, the reservation and the federally recognized community's all the way at the other end of the state.

So, like, middle school and into high school, yeah, I know I'm an Indian, but you know, I'm a Black man, I'm an African-American.

And I'm here in the city.

I'm gonna go be an NBA player.

I'm gonna be, you know.

We'll go to a powwow once a year if my grandmother brings me down there, that's cool, and you know, we'll eat some Johnnycakes or some chowder, but I'm here in the city, so I gotta focus on what I need to do here in the city and where I'm trying to go.

And then of course, you know, my grandmother raising a quote, unquote, Black man in an urban environment, she was always fearful of, you know, potentials for things just in society that could be harmful to me.

So her sort of advice to me and sort of grooming for me growing up was trying to figure out how I fit into this structure that's around, because you know, things aren't easy for a Black man.

That was kind of the conversation that we would have.

But then once again, juxtaposed to, "But don't forget you're a Narragansett Indian, and this is your land, and your people are still here," so very, very, now that I'm thinking about it in this conversation, very complex during those younger ages, trying to figure all that out.

- The first time I saw racism was like my first walk to school.

I don't know if it was a Monday or a Tuesday.

I was leaving my house and walking to school with my sister, and my friend's brother came by, and he was walking to school, and he just picked up a stick and started hitting me and calling me... And I took, like, two hits, and then I just got angry and turned around and got a stick and hit him back.

And that was the end of him hitting me.

And he never hit me again because, you know, I was somebody that fought back.

How dare I have color in my skin?

(laughs) It just seems so silly to me now.

And that the people that did that, they must feel so awful that they did something like that.

- I had just turned 12.

I had just turned 12.

And I finally felt like I was almost a teenager, you know?

So, "Nana, can we go to the mall?

Some of my friends wanna go hang out at the mall."

And the mall wasn't worried, this is before Providence Place was there.

"We're gonna go hang out, you know, 'cause I'm almost a teenager, and you know, we want"... "Okay, you can go there."

So I remember I'm there, there's about three or four of my friends.

And I actually touched base with one of my good friends.

He grew up a couple blocks from here as well.

And he remembered it vividly, us being at the mall and then getting approached by security, and telling us that, you know, we were just hanging around and we weren't buying anything, so we had to leave.

But here I am with my CD in my hand from the CD store.

I'm looking around and we're, like, probably some of the very few brown faces that are there.

And one of my friends asked, "Well, how come the rest of the kids don't have to leave?

We're seeing them hanging," and no real answer, just escorted to the door.

So, you know, I called my grandmother, like, "Nana, they just kicked us out of the mall.

They said we weren't"...

So she gets upset, but I'm not really processing why she's so upset.

And you know, come to find out years later, she had made several calls to the administration, like, you know, "Why is my grandson treated that way?

And there were other"... No return phone calls or anything.

As I got older, I understood, oh, okay.

- Why do I have to put away who I am?

Why do I have to put it away?

I think that colonial techniques were set up from the government to try to make native people believe that, you know, they should just become assimilated so that they don't...

There's no way that they can say that, you know, that we've been done wrong, that the treaties have never been addressed, they've never, you know, honored our treaties.

They've taken all our land, they've murdered our ancestors, all of that.

Disrespected us.

So, if the social constructs that were made from the government through colonization techniques set it up so that it's so much easier or comfortable to just say, "Okay, I won't be who I am.

I'll just be part of the melting pot.

I'm American, so it doesn't matter who I am."

And growing up in Warwick, a lot of people were like that.

They were like, "It doesn't matter who you are."

But a lot of people were like, "You have to be considered less than because you have color."

- It's an everyday struggle.

I think different of us deal with it in different ways.

I think one of the ways you see people coping with it, and this is why it's such a big problem in the American Indian community, is self-medicating.

You know, because you know that something's not right here and you can't figure out how to address it.

So I think that there's a lot of that, but then you also see the other side, where people will go, and I think that this is where I've really tended towards as I've gotten older, fully embracing their culture and wanting to get away from this thing, because you know it's not real.

I know this isn't real.

I know what happened to my people, I know what you did, I know what you're still doing, so I'm gonna deal with that in as much as I have to.

And when I don't have to, I won't.

And I think the best way to kind of capture it was in the words of my uncle, Chief Sunset, one of the last full blood Narragansetts, lived right in this neighborhood right here.

He said he's an Indian of today, a modern man who forgets not the faith of his forefathers.

- I would tell a native girl who was a teenager to always know that you have your own voice, and to use your own voice and to write your own story.

Don't let anybody write your story for you.

That's good.

- Finally tonight, in the late 1940s,