(bright music) (bright music continues) - Good evening, and welcome to Generation Rising.

I'm Anaridis Rodriguez.

Tonight we're joined by two dedicated leaders in Indigenous education and empowerment.

Lorén Spears, the Executive Director of the Tomaquag Museum, leads Rhode Island's only Indigenous-led museum, which is dedicated to preserving and sharing Native history and culture.

With Lorén, we are pleased to also have Samantha Cullen-Fry, the Program Manager of the museum's Indigenous Empowerment Center.

Welcome to you both.

- Thank you, welcome.

- Thank you for being here on a very important month.

November is Native American Heritage Month.

Why is it celebrated in November, Lorén?

- Oh, that's a big question.

I'm thinking it's because of the founding mythology of this country and the "First Thanksgiving" and all of those kinds of things as to why it's celebrated in November.

You know, we're happy that people are focused on Indigenous people in November, but we also like to remind them that we're here all year round.

And as a museum, we do cultural education and programming and exhibitions all year round that speak to our history, that's much broader and has so much more depth than just the sort of mythology around the "First Thanksgiving".

- Yeah.

This is a special time of year for the Indigenous community.

Why is that, Samantha?

I read your newsletter, and a lot happens in the fall.

- Yeah.

(laughs) Right as we come over the cusp of the fall season, leading into Indigenous People's Day and then into Thanksgiving, programming picks up, and there's a certain pinpointed interest in our communities and our culture, and so our programming internally picks up.

And then, our education, from my lens, through the Indigenous Empowerment Center, really focuses in and around how to show up in spaces and be an ally and advocate for Native people, and we try to make sure that we push that on our social media.

We had been focusing mostly towards our community, but we've just branched off, follow us on tomaquag_iec on Instagram, to be able to educate the larger public about what does it mean to be in partnership, what does it mean to be an ally, and how do you advocate in these spaces during this time, in this season.

- You've been around for 66 years, and it all started with two women.

Tell us about the story behind the founding and how you've grown so much in such a short, relatively short, period of time.

- Well, thank you so much.

Princess Red Wing, who was a Wampanoag and Narragansett and Wampanoag woman who was an educator, a culture bearer, a tribal leader, and Eva Butler, who was an anthropologist and scholar, they actually worked together to bring to fruition the idea of Tomaquag Museum, Princess Red Wing as that first-person voice, and Eva Butler as that scholarly academic behind the scenes, and we have been in existence for such a long time.

In the early days, a very volunteer-run organization.

It was really in the last 10 to 15 years that we really made the transition to a staffed organization and have grown tremendously because of that.

- You're in a very intimate space right now in Exeter, right?

Tell us a little bit about, for people who have never been to the museum, what they can expect when they go.

- Oh, we would love them to come and see us right now.

Our museum is chock-a-block full of amazing belongings, the word that we call artifacts when we decolonize, because they're connected to us, to our people, to the artists that created them historically, as well as how they represent our communities today.

And so, they can talk with an Indigenous educator.

They can learn about Indigenous foodways.

They can learn about Ellison Tarzan Brown, who won the Boston Marathon twice.

They can learn about the Narragansett August meeting powwow, which is the oldest recorded Native gathering in the whole entire United States right here in Rhode Island.

They can learn about Indigenous bead work and basketry and pottery and weaving.

They can learn about our history and how there is no Rhode Island history without Narragansett or Niantics and other First Peoples' history, and there's no US history without First Peoples' history, and how we're woven throughout all of the things that have taken place in the formation, in creation, and continuation of this country.

- You have some of the beautiful artifacts here with us today.

Samantha, can you tell us a little bit about what we're seeing here?

- So, on the table, we have beaver fur, and so Tomaquag in English is beavers, plural.

It is the anglicized version, but that's what it means.

We have a turtle shell.

So, our calendar is based on the 13 wounds, and so on the back of a turtle shell, you'll find 13 squares in the 28-day cycle.

And then this one actually happens to be a pocketbook, that in the back, it's got leather.

- It's beautiful.

- Yeah, and some fringe.

And then we have some traditional corn, a gourd, and then a deer antler here on the table, and so this is just some of the things that we would bring to educational programming in and around the state.

Every educator at the museum has their own kit that has things that are connected to them or connected to our exhibits of whatever the topic area might be.

- Why is it important to be a Native-led museum to you, to you both?

- Well, I think it's really important for us to have that first-person voice.

I mean, there's a lot of people and lots of museums that are talking about Indigenous people and Indigenous cultures, but there's not as many where the people themselves get to tell their own history, their own stories, their connection to the exhibitions.

So, for example, in our exhibits, you can learn about Indigenous foodways, and Samantha would tell that story.

The main tenets would be the same, but she would tell it differently.

Some of the people spotlighted in the exhibit are my grandparents, so if I were to tell the story, I'm telling it from an extremely first-person perspective.

- That's beautiful.

- And when another educator, they might speak to foods that their parents or grandparents make, they might talk to harvesting and gathering that they do in their family, and so it's always connecting the exhibit content to our actual people today, our real lives today.

- There's the education, there's the preservation side of it, but a lot of your values are also anchored in uplifting the Indigenous community that lives in Rhode Island.

Tell us a little bit about what the status quo is on the Indigenous community who are living and working here in Rhode Island today.

- Yeah, so I guess that goes a little bit to my expertise or what I do at the museum.

So, the Indigenous Empowerment Center, it was named and sort of happened in 2016, but it's something Tomaquag has always done, and Tomaquag, also, there was a school there called Nuweetooun that Lorén ran, and we kind of joke that the Indigenous Empowerment Center is Nuweetooun Part Two.

And it really is about creating partnerships within the state to have trust with the community and an understanding with the partners on what can be done, so what's the reciprocal relationship, and what can a partner institution do and what does the community need.

And then, what we found in 2016 through grants was that there were partners who wanted to partner and didn't know how to get into the community and that the community had wants and needs, but didn't necessarily have trust in outside sources.

So, trust is a big issue within the community, and so if we're talking about status quo, right, we don't always make the charts and the graphs and the numbers when we're talking about poverty, education, whatever the main tickers are, whether that be the census or whatever, and it's really hard to get into the community.

So, what we do is leverage our relationships, both with the community and with partner institutions, and create that synergy and create that understanding so that we have a safe space and a shared understanding on how to make those connections.

- Yeah, what are the outcomes of having those types of partnerships and relationships?

- It's pretty incredible, we've had some really standout partnerships that have come out of it.

We have a four-week summer camp that we do for Indigenous youth that's completely free of charge, and that partners with Mystic Aquarium, Kettle Pond Visitor Center, US Fish and Wildlife, and I might be missing a partner.

And we also have two Summer@Brown scholarships that are set aside for, or three actually, at Summer@Brown when we partner with them in a multitude of ways, and we have educators that go to their environmental curriculum that they have in a BELL's program, so we have Indigenous educators now that we're looping into that to become educators.

And so, there's a lot of different large things, but on a day-to-day basis, it is really about connecting one-to-one.

So, if you've got a kid or an adult who's interested in a new opportunity, it's about finding that resource and that partner that fits that and finding out how to make that work.

- What is the feedback from the community, Lorén?

What did they tell you after establishing, you know, the Indigenous Empowerment Center?

Do they feel seen or more connected now than they did before?

- I think they do.

I think one of the biggest things that started the process was talking to Native artists.

There was a whole survey about the lack of outlet for artists because they only were doing their representation at powwow and summer festivals that were very Native-specific.

And recently, over the last, like, maybe eight to 10 years, we've really worked hard to partner with lots of major gallery spaces to do Native shows, but also to include Native people in not Native-specific shows, which I think is really important.

And we've had some amazing people win juried shows.

We've had people doing solo shows now, and I think we see that there's this new awakening to the beauty of Indigenous art here in the Northeast that was just not there 10, 15 years ago.

- Wow.

- And so, we see a lot of changes in the small arts businesses that are there, but we also impact other businesses.

Like, we helped a mason learn how to get his, now I can't think of the word, bonded, how to get bonded.

So, even though we're not necessarily a bonding agency, we had a network where we could find out about that and help that person figure out the process.

And so, we do everything we can to help any Native person, Native artist, Native business to go to the next step and find educational and job/career opportunities for them.

- It seems like for a very small museum, you have a rather, you know, extensive reach within the community, and the impact made its way all the way to Washington DC because you started out the year announcing a really big grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that's going to help you build a new home.

Tell us about this grant and what it will allow you to achieve.

- Yes, the National Endowment for the Humanities has a challenge grant, and it's a little over $444,000, and you match it one to three.

And that will help us to begin construction sometime in 2025 on our new museum, which we are doing in partnership for the location with the University of Rhode Island.

And we're really excited because it takes us out of a very rural space and puts us in the very center of the southern part of the state space, where tourists can find it, individual families can find it, school groups and the community can find it, but students and people that live in the urban can hop on a bus and go right down on the 66 (laughs) to Kingston and come see us, where now you can't.

You have to have Uber, you have to have your own car, you have to do something by a vehicle to get there, and so that will be tremendous.

We'll also be expanding our current museum, creating an accessible archives collections research storage facility, which will be part of the museum.

It'll have a much bigger exhibit gallery, telling more in-depth stories.

It'll have a temporary exhibit gallery, which we're very excited about.

It'll also have a cafe and an expanded museum store, which we have a very tiny one right now.

So, we're very excited to grow all of these things and create opportunity for the community at large to be impacted about Native history, culture, and the arts.

We've, you know, I think we got that amazing award because of the amazing amount of partnerships we do each year.

We're averaging about 50 organizationally each year, but we're also impacting a lot of people.

Last year, in 2023, we impacted 22,000 people, and that's a lot of people for a small, rural organization.

- And I love the backstory for the grant.

Senator Reed brought the head of the NEH down.

Tell us a little bit about that.

- We did meet the head of the, the chairperson of the NEH.

It was really phenomenal to have this opportunity, and I actually got a chance to do a very short, like 10-minute, presentation to the NEH Chair, and it was really, really wonderful to be able to do.

They're not really on the panel when they do the grants, but it is great, on a national level, for them to be aware of museums in Rhode Island that are doing really interesting things and that we're an award-winning museum.

The National Medal is a phenomenal honor for us.

We're only one of two places in Rhode Island that have received it, and so we're really honored to have received that award.

- What does it feel like to you both coming, can you tell us a little bit about your background, coming from this community to be able to see how the museum and Indigenous culture is received now whereas where it was when you were growing up?

- Yeah, so it's very interesting, right?

So, there's all of these preconceived notions on what a Native community looks like or what an Indigenous community looks like, and a lot of that comes from the schooling you get in K through 12, so it's a lot of misnomers.

So, growing up, you grow up sort of being your own educator anyway, and if you're not your own educator, then you just kind of acquire it somewhere in the back of a classroom.

And then, coming from that kind of perspective, where, as a kid, you're kind of like, "Oh, well, you know, we are still here," but you're learning that there was an erasure that happened in your history books, but you are an enrolled citizen of a tribal nation that doesn't necessarily live on a reservation or live in the ways that are being taught to you, to come to a space and a place, and we talk about this all the time, how empowering and impactful that is to work in a still woman-led, Native woman-led, institution, to be able to have that voice and to have the words and the definitions and the ability to not only educate others, but educate yourself, and come in and really start to dive deeper into who you are and what you want to portray as being an Indigenous person, and I think that is something that's invaluable.

- Yeah.

How does that lived experience for you both connect and inform your educational programming with the public?

- It directly informs that.

I mean, we really advocate a lot around educating K-12 college students accurately.

And, you know, I mentioned the mythology that's out there, and I think that it's really time to deconstruct those myths and tell the truths that are happening there.

And I think when we're talking with teachers, we do a lot of professional development for K-12 teachers, and we talk about that there literally is not any content that you're teaching that does not have Indigenous people part of it if you actually know where to look, and even if you don't know where to look, if you ask the right questions, your students can look.

And I think when they start to realize that, one, they realize it's not hard to be inclusive, and two, that their own education was not accurate and not complete, and so they're misinformed themselves.

And so, we're really trying to break the cycle of that misinformation, not to use the word of the century right now, but the idea that a lot of things are left out.

There's a lot of erasure in the way that the history is taught, and it leaves out what's happening.

I often talk about history being, you know, a pie or a cake, a circle, and the center point is the point in time we're talking about, and all the slices are the perspectives of that point in time in history, and until you tell the whole circle, we can't be informed citizens.

We need to know all of it, and so I think that that's really important, and I think that that's what we advocate for.

One of the things someone told us is that we tell history with grace and compassion, and so we are trying to teach people, but not in a way that's to make you feel bad for the history that took place, but to be informed and to understand and understand how that history impacts Native people today, not just Native people from 400 years ago.

- Yeah.

- We're still here, and we're still being impacted by the policies of the history that's taken place to create the formation of this country.

- What are some of the challenges you face in this endeavor?

I'm sure you have, you know, come across people who have these misconceptions and are not gonna change their mind about it.

- You know, that is a challenge, and one of the things that I teach all of our education team is that you have to pick your battles.

If they are not ready to hear you, then you need to move on to another topic and go on to something that they might be able to take in.

Our job is not to have a big fight with someone in the museum, our job is to educate, and so sometimes we can use that example for someone else.

Like, an example of that is I had a gentleman quite a few years ago that came up to me.

I was being introduced by someone else.

They introduced me as Narragansett, and he told me about the "real Indians" elsewhere, and he kept using the word "real" over and over and over again, and I kept trying to inform him I was real, (laughs) I was real, and that's the kind of thing.

Now, I couldn't change his mind at that moment.

No matter what I was saying, he just couldn't understand 'cause his history that he'd been taught is there were no "Indians" on the East Coast, which, of course, is not a truth, and because of that, he was misinformed and he couldn't reconcile it.

But we could use that example with someone else and help them reconcile it because now they're not feeling attacked, 'cause it wasn't me talking directly to the person that was making a mistake, it's talking to a different group that doesn't have any, you know, feelings about that per se.

- Yeah.

- It's meeting people where they're at and understanding that if they've made it all the way to your doorstep, there's a why behind it, and so if you can get to their why, of why they've walked in, then you might have to pivot.

You might not be giving the standard tour that you thought you were going to give, but you've got to ask a couple of questions and figure out how to meet them where they're at and why did they come in the door, and try to engage in that manner, whatever that might look like.

And so, it's a lot of pivoting and it's a lot of being on your toes, but for the most part, we have guests who have come in who want to be there, who want to learn, who want to share a space with us and just be as supportive as they can be, but for the one-offs, we definitely have our ways of engaging.

- Yeah.

- [Lorén] And that's just through respect.

- Yes.

- You know, everyone's human, and even though we have different perspectives on things, we try to respect people for where they're at.

- Absolutely.

- And try to, as best we can, educate them and know when we've hit a wall and we need to move on to something else.

- Yeah, and I love how you said meet them where they're at because my next question was, how do we meet you halfway?

How do we empower ourselves and the people around us to accept and acknowledge and recognize and celebrate?

I love your Lunch and Learn Series, and you have one coming up at the end of November, because these are the conversations that I'm having with my children at the table, about the origin of Thanksgiving, and you're tackling just that this month, right?

- Yes, "Breaking the Thanksgiving Myth", and I think, you know, stories that countries create when they're there, like their founding stories, it's nice to have a myth.

It's nice to have people up on pedestals, but what is the effect of that?

And so, we are deconstructing that a little bit so people understand that there's more to the story than what we see in a soundbite and that there's a lot happening there.

So, please join us for Lunch and Learn.

I believe it's Monday, November 25th.

That's the Monday of the American Thanksgiving holiday.

We also do a lot on teaching people about all 13 of our traditional Thanksgivings.

You can come to our different events throughout the year, which we host several open to the public at Tomaquag Museum, or at a Tomaquag Museum location since we're moving.

We've been doing them off site.

We have Nikommo this December, 7th, and we're hosting it at Kettle Pond Visitor Center in Charlestown in partnership with the Charlestown Ramble, and there'll be an artist market and storytelling and a really great afternoon of fun, and so people can learn a lot about who we are through these different programs that we have.

In the winter months, there'll be a Native-authored book club led by Silvermoon LaRose, our Assistant Director, and that's been ongoing for quite a few years.

It's very popular.

You can stay home in your jammies and hop on Zoom and join us and discuss Native-authored books.

Next year's theme in our education programming is all around history.

You say, "If you're a museum, you're always about history."

Yes, we are, but you know, we have different themes, and I think this year was all around food and food sovereignty and foodways, which is, of course, connected to history.

But next year, because it's the 350th anniversary of what you call King Philip's War and what I call the War for New England, when you decolonize, 'cause that was the goal, was to break the power of Indigenous nations here to create a New England.

- And so, that's the anniversary of that war, and so we're gonna be talking about that during some of the Lunch and Learns.

We're gonna be having some special guest speakers and books that we're gonna also be reading that are connected to those topics, and so we would love for our people to join us on all of those amazing programs and many more.

We post them on our website at tomaquagmuseum.org, and you can check them out on our Events page.

- It's a great resource, and I love that the Lunch and Learns are virtual, too.

- Yeah.

- Samantha, we only have three minutes left.

- Oh, wow.

- I know, time flies, but could you just leave us with other ways that the public can support the museum?

I know you also support a lot of local artists and their craftsmanship.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

- Sure, so one of the things I think we haven't mentioned yet is our museum store.

And so, while it's small, it has a lot, and every item in there, we do comply with the Indian Arts and Crafts law, and we don't have time to go into that, but that's something you can google.

And so, in the store, you can buy goods from Native artists or books authored by Native people or partnered with Native people, and then there's Tomaquag-branded items as well.

There is an online store component to that through our website as well.

- Oh, that's great.

- So, some of the items are there online, and it's easier to do, but I would invite you to come down and check out the actual store.

I tend to use it as our last exhibit, so it's kind of a living exhibit.

Another way folks can sort of dive in and participate and support us is through coming to the events, coming to our programming, and giving, right?

So, something that keeps a small nonprofit going is the fundraising and development piece of it, and I know we work really hard, so subscribe to the newsletter.

We have a biweekly e-blast that comes out, we have our social media pages that you can be sharing, and those impacts time and again help us just drum up more and more visitors and supporters to come through our doors and get us to our new museum, where we'll explode and everyone will come and visit.

- That's wonderful, thank you so much, to the both of you, for the work that you do and the work that you'll continue to do.

I'm sure your families must be so proud of the legacy that you're carrying out on behalf of them.

That's so beautiful, and I celebrate that with you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

(Lorén speaking Narragansett) - We have run out of time.

I would like to thank tonight's guests, Lorén Spears and Samantha Cullen-Fry.

You can watch this episode and all our past episodes anytime at watch.ripbs.org, and be sure to follow us on these social platforms for the latest updates.

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