♪ ♪ DAVID WEEDEN: There's never a time where you're done fighting.

It's just prioritizing which issues do you want to address?

(drumming) We are a first contact tribe.

And so the, the structure of Mashpee has changed over time.

In the early period, it started out as a plantation and then progressed-- 1763, it was transitioned over to an Indian district.

Mashpee has written a lot of petitions.

1763 we actually sent a delegation over to England to petition King George III.

Reuben Cognehews was a Mohegan native that came up here to teach in our schools.

As an educated Native American, you know, he helped us to frame a petition and traveled all the way over to England to deliver that to King George.

He got the king's ear and the petition successfully lobbied for a higher level of autonomy and self-governance.

It wasn't implemented.

Although the king did rule in favor, and instructed the colonies to provide a higher level of autonomy.

It didn't happen right away.

The right to govern ourselves is the primary issue.

We were trying to play by the rules imposed upon us, and yet we never got a fair shake.

When they recruited us, there had to be some hard decisions to be made at that point in time on which side to serve.

To go out and fight for your folks and your people and your lands is an honorable thing to do, culturally.

RICHARD DESORGHER: By researching, we were able to come up with 67 individuals, from Mashpee, the vast majority being Wampanoag, that served in the Revolutionary War.

Mashpee had one out of every five.

Mashpee at a higher percent than any other town on the Cape.

We had 15 Wampanoags that died in the war-- they fought in places like Valley Forge.

Isaac Wickham, he was in the Battle of Yorktown, so they played a major part throughout the war.

Those who served in the Revolutionary War, were entitled to a pension.

We can only come up with two individuals that actually received a pension.

Many Wampanoags didn't know about it, didn't do the paperwork, could not obtain whites that would verify their action, so.

What's very sad is the vast majority of Wampanoags did not receive a pension.

Post-Revolutionary War, those things never really came to fruition.

1795 petition is an interesting one because it looks back and it actually cites and references some of the expectations that motivated our men to serve.

We fought with the understanding that everything that's captured in the Constitution and civil liberties, and things of that nature, we thought those things were going to be extended to us.

That's why we fought.

And continued writing and lobbying for our self-governance, and continued that fight.

SAMARA JACKSON TOBEY: As Wampanoag people, when we understand the Revolutionary War, our youth benefit.

When we truly understand what it means to petition a government, the Crown at that, we are reengaging our sovereignty.

It's never going to be unheard because there's always somebody else to tell, hey, this wasn't answered.

We need answers.

And our youth have to know that story.

In honor of the 250th anniversary, we wanted to do something town-wide.

So we put together a booklet that focused on those from Mashpee that served in the Revolutionary War, but in particular, the 15 Wampanoags that gave their life for their country.

And so we wanted to involve young people, and then we also wanted to tie the youngest students in, and we used the Weetumuw School at the tribal headquarters, and they did some different drawings for us.

We just thought it was very important to involve the young people with this project.

I believe that education is really important.

We want our people to be educated and having a foundation for kids to... begin with a love of learning and a love of school, and an understanding that they can fit in school and that school doesn't have to be something that other people do.

It doesn't have to be something that white people do, that it can be something that we as Wampanoag people, fit into with our culture.

Having our own school helps to create a more positive experience for people.

We use Montessori pedagogy, kind of in service to Wampanoag language and culture.

Actually, we like to call our curriculum Wampus-ori instead of Montessori.

The kids don't have to choose whether or not they're going to be students or Wampanoag, right?

They can be both of those things at the same time.

And they should be both those things at the same time.

Kids and future generations are able to, like, untether from past trauma, from generational trauma.

The kids that come to this school, they have a lot of really explicit cultural teachings, and so when we think about self-governance, like, that, to me, is one of the most important things, is understanding... our relationship to Mashpee.

We are Mashpee Wampanoag.

TOBEY: So Wampanoag history, Wampanoag education is everybody's education.

So it's up to us to keep the education going, to figure out where there's, like, disagreement and to struggle with that and create new opportunities of learning that hopefully look like new petitions.

Hopefully, look like new bylaws, new opportunities for all of us to shape a better future.

That's what learning about the American Revolution means for all of us.

♪ ♪ (seagulls squawking) LAUREN MCCORMACK: Marblehead's a beautiful town.

A place that has so much history.

And I know about the long history of Marblehead from walking around.

♪ ♪ The mid-1700s, Marblehead was really an urban community, a bustling shipping industry community.

And that is the industry that Jeremiah Lee and his father, Samuel, become very involved in.

By the late 1760s, Jeremiah Lee is one of, if not the wealthiest, person in all of Massachusetts, and builds his gigantic Georgian mansion.

Not only, though, is he building the mansion, but next door to it, he erects a brick building meant to serve multiple purposes.

One is to be a detached kitchen.

One side of it is to serve as a carriage house.

The building also served as a living quarters, a working quarters, for those he enslaved.

♪ ♪ DR.

YAMANDA WRIGHT: I was participating in figure drawing classes.

And I was told that just across the street, there was a museum that was doing an exhibit about enslaved people of Marblehead.

And they wanted a Black portrait artist to depict the enslaved people.

I was just really curious how many enslaved people were there, where did they get the information for the portraits.

And... ...to be totally frank, I did not know who Jeremiah Lee was.

MCCORMACK: As things start to heat up with the British government, Jeremiah Lee becomes the colonel of the town's militia.

And he uses his maritime connections to obtain arms and supplies, most of which end up in Concord, Massachusetts.

(gunshot) Really, he is so important to the early patriot cause.

♪ ♪ But the more we looked into this history, the more we were finding hypocrisy.

Jeremiah Lee, for example, he is an enslaver, fighting for liberty, using the language of slavery to complain to the Crown, to Parliament, that what you are doing to us, you are enslaving us.

So the promises of the revolution are different for different people, of course.

(drawing) Were they a cook?

Were they a coachman?

Were they a ladies maid?

I didn't want that to be the whole story about them, that relation to the enslaver.

But have them be a whole person.

And also, I cannot imagine a more rebellious act than rest if you were an enslaved person.

And so I tried to imagine for each person what almost stolen moments of rest might look like.

MCCORMACK: For so many of the people enslaved by Lee and others, so many questions remain.

But that's not to say that information about these individuals doesn't exist, because it does.

For instance, General John Glover's ledger book that records supplies given to his soldiers.

I was turning the pages through that one day, looking for something, and there was Diamond Lee.

Surprisingly enough, he was entered into Glover's ledger book on July 4, 1776.

He was given a knapsack that day.

WRIGHT: I was really focused on drawing him as a strong, wise elder.

The military ledger documentation fed into that.

Diamond was likely skilled, and for that reason, he cost more.

But also for that reason, he probably had gravitas.

And part of that was drawing him with a proud stature.

It was six months of drawing, so eventually they became very, very real, and they became individuals to me.

We remember you, Jemmy.

DONNA COTTERELL: Yes.

MEYI: Flora, we all these years later, recognize you.

COTTERELL: Pompey, the global freedom-seeker.

He not only self-emancipated, but took on work and traveled.

Basically became a sailor.

Shows his ambition.

MEYI: According to records once returned, Trevett "sold and disposed of Pompey."

We feel your pain.

(seagulls squawking) COTTERELL: The past... ...informs the present.

It shapes the future.

It is glorious.

It's messy.

But it's real.

♪ ♪ THEO LINGER: If you deny a people their past, whether it's trans people or any variety of other queer people, it is that much easier to deny that people their personhood in the present.

Who does this American experiment benefit?

♪ ♪ JOAN ILACQUA: It's important to us to show that queer and trans people have always been part of Massachusetts history.

That we have made an impact.

We are also part of this very long American story.

Queers History Boston is working on a podcast this year.

Our goal is to start with the Revolution itself, and talk about people who were revolutionaries during their lifetime.

For our first episode, we're talking about gender and the Revolution.

And so the first figure we hone in on is, a person who we'd now call assigned female at birth, feminist icon, Deborah Sampson.

They-- and I'm using they/them pronouns because we don't know how they would have identified.

They cross-dress, they enlist, and they serve in the army.

Eventually, they get caught.

They are honorably discharged.

And later on, their story becomes well-known.

They fight for a pension, and they become the first woman in the United States to receive a military pension.

(tapping microphone) What made Deborah Sampson... ...famous?

Cause she was interested in the celebrity in part to support herself and her family later.

That she was actually going-- trying to get a pension.

Going on the stage to-- selling her story in book form.

She made her story public and detailed and undeniable.

And also because she was able to point to her service in the Continental Army, to her role in helping to create the American republic, it was also something which people could not deny.

ILACQUA: It strikes me of how personally important a project like this is to queer and trans people who have not seen themselves in history before.

MIK HAMILTON: When you don't fit into mainstream narratives, I think sometimes you can feel this lack of belonging.

And I think when you can see yourself in history, that lack of belonging is countered, you feel, like, more entitled to take up space.

ILACQUA: One of the conclusions we come to is, these are people who fought to live the way they wanted to in their own time periods.

And we are seeing that fight continue for trans people around the country.

LINGER: So this is the hat that I wore throughout my career in the National Park Service.

It actually has my, my old initials inside, in Sharpie.

Yeah, I was a park ranger from 2017 to 2021.

And... ...leaving the park service actually had a fair bit to do with the fact that I'm trans.

My graduate school project was about interpreting queer history at the National Parks of Boston, and creating an entire guide for park rangers on how to do this.

Like, people only use the initialism "LGB" when they are specifically being transphobic.

And I did not want... ...that term on articles with my name on it.

And so for all of those reasons, I told the supervisor.

(sighs) Take that down.

Take the entire article down.

Um... Rather than having you butcher it, basically.

The fact that we've always been here also means that we have survived... ...a whole lot.

And that means that we can continue to do so, um.

A world without queer and trans people has never existed, and it never will.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ALENA TRAN: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I wanted to focus on this line because it literally, like, just excluded women.

Writing is one of the most important things we have as a society, mostly because of its ability to promote democracy.

The freedom of the press is one of the most important liberties that we have.

♪ ♪ STUDENT: That fits right on theme, actually.

To the American Revolution to, like, current day.

Okay, now I do have to write this down.

The prompt is like such a big and broad question in a delightful way.

It's looking into the Declaration of Independence and the promises that were made then and then just seeing how that is reflected in their lives and communities today.

♪ ♪ Who was present, whose voices were included, whose voices were excluded.

what promises don't feel like they were upheld.

ZAHRA BELYEA: Writing is a process, but also it is a revolutionary act, For my ancestry, writing was illegal for a reason.

Because writing and words are power.

My name is Vicky Su and I was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.

And I'm a current senior at Boston Latin School and incoming freshman at Yale.

I really like writing about the news, because it's sorts of relate to my love for history as well.

Looking back at history and looking at current events, you can see different connections between the two, and also learn from the past while writing for a better future.

This issue is definitely one of the most important issues Teens in Print has done.

When I was reading the Declaration, what I was thinking about is that, a lot of the things that the U.S.

stated in the Declaration that they were trying to get rid of, is something that they would, like, impose on other countries.

So I was looking at American imperialism after World War II, when America intervened in Vietnam.

Although the Declaration says that a government should derive its power from the consent of the governed, America sometimes hasn't followed its principle.

People should be more educated on how similar to other European empires, who we often learn about, like Britain and Spain.

America also did a lot of its own empire building.

JOHN GARCIA: We live in a very vibrant information economy.

And the kinds of standards and expectations that we think about for today's journalism are really grounded in the longer history of print.

The 18th century is such a fascinating period.

We start to see the development of a reading public.

That emerges in relationship to things such as newspapers, bookstores, subscription libraries and also even coffee houses.

And these venues become an important site for political debate.

Print culture in the 1770s was a way, more broadly, to exercise a form of resistance against the British monarchy.

Paine really transformed the revolutionary movement.

And he did so through a pamphlet.

He wrote for the everyday person.

Arguably, this sets a kind of template that could be used much later.

Zines have a relationship to the longer history of print in multiple ways.

They are so often aligned with a kind of critical stance on history and culture.

And it makes a lot of sense, because the people that produce zines often don't have access to mass media.

They really just want to get their ideas out there.

TRAN: My name is Alena.

I am a student at Harvard College.

When I was thinking about the promises of the revolution, I really wanted to be able to express, my own, my own experiences and my own ideas.

Through, like, an outlet that, you know, has welcomed me before.

I really wanted to emphasize the idea of fairness.

It was said that women will have these rights eventually, or women are equal to men in some ways.

But history has shown it's still not really the case.

"I know I'm lucky to be here.

"My grandmother in Vietnam "never went to high school.

"And it was only a few hundred years ago "that women in the United States gained the right to education.

"And yet, "despite centuries of progress and millions of women fighting, "it feels like we're going backwards.

"In the United States, abortion rights have been rolled back.

"Women are still paid less "than their male counterparts in most fields.

"We remain underrepresented in positions of power and leadership."

Even though my piece isn't necessarily a very positive one, I hope that in a way it inspires change, hope and inspiration for a better world.

GARCIA: Democracy and journalism are deeply intermeshed.

Especially today, younger people are really attuned to the power of media.

Zines are crucial for that longer history of informed public conversation.

SU: One of my life goals is to promote democratic participation in America.

And I feel like doing that through journalism, I've been able to raise awareness.

I feel like writing has given me my voice.

As a young person, sometimes you think you can't do that much in society, but in reality, your voice has so much power.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪