(soft music) - To the Narragansett people, land is much more than just like a place, right?

It's actually a place world.

The entire landscape is imbued with meaning and significance and history and stories.

And you can go out in the back of this church and there's a graveyard and you can go all around this place and know a lot about the ancestors, know a lot about the history of this place just by being at this place, right?

- The history of the Narragansett Indian Church, it's one of the earliest churches in Rhode Island.

We utilize the church for our own betterment as a place to meet and a place to gather.

If you actually go to the church, you'll notice that the pulpit is right behind the window that's in between the two front doors.

Most churches, the doors are in the back.

We have our doors in the front.

And as it's always been told to us from oral history, in the colonial times when we weren't supposed to be gathering to talk about political issues of the day, economic issues of the day, the concerns of the day, whoever was up on the pulpit talking was the only one that couldn't see anyone approaching.

And if anyone in the, quote, unquote "congregation" broke into a hymn, that meant stop talking about the issues that we were talking about 'cause someone's approaching that shouldn't hear it.

And so these were strategies that our ancestors did in order to ensure our continuation.

And as a grandmother myself, that's important to me.

Everything that I do is important for the next generations that come and our ancestors did that, they ensured that we're here today.

And my job is to ensure that my great-great-great-great grandchildren down the road are able to be here.

And so I think that that's really important and why I do the work that I do and why we tell the stories that we tell.

(drumming) (water rushing) - It was probably the best place to be in the world at the time.

(soft music) The reality is that there's not these huge religious wars.

The reality is that there's not these endemic diseases, They come later, but when we're talking about pre-contact, that doesn't exist.

Where we are right now, within a mile, you could be in Cedar Swamp, you could be in deep forest, you could be in freshwater ponds.

There's springs all over the place.

You could be in open ocean, you can be in saltwater ponds, right?

The abundance is tremendous here.

If I had a choice, I would much rather be in the Dawnland, probably than anywhere else in the world.

The shape and sizes of the colonies and later states come pretty much out of the reality that those were the dominions and domains of the Indigenous communities.

When the pilgrims, the Separatists, or the Puritans come and they interact with the Wampanoag or the Massachusetts, and they start to have their relationships and alliances, they're gonna try to claim the territory that the Wampanoag and Massachusetts claim.

So pretty much what you see as Rhode Island today was the dominion of the Narragansett, the Niantic are in Southeastern Connecticut.

One of the things that pushes the Niantic and the Narragansett to be such a tight confederacy is the Pequot, right, that are kind of pushing against the Niantic dominion.

- The Northeast was in fact, among the most diverse, heavily settled and prosperous parts of North America at the time of European contact to begin with.

And that this century of disruptions that the Spanish and then the French, and these English mariners and others bring to the region so thoroughly destabilizes the region by 1620, that the British are able to settle, as one scholar calls it, a widowed land.

European diseases have taken extraordinary toll in the region, Indigenous slave traders have come to the region and trafficked dozens of peoples away from their homes.

And the Puritans learn pretty quickly in part through their Indigenous informants and guides that certain peoples are in deep tension with one another.

So enlisting Narragansett suppor Puritan leaders begin a series of initiatives to essentially dislodge Pequot supremacy along the Connecticut River, which is the major artery into, as we all know, the northeastern interior.

The Pequots are powerful, they're concentrated, and they put up a relative resistance initially in some of these growing tensions.

Puritan leaders mobilize a large military force that attacks the Mystic community in 1637 and burns and essentially destroys the largest, I think, concentrated village within the Pequot Confederacy.

Survivors flee, captors are enslaved.

Ironically or not, 1637 is an important date in the kind of founding of so many Connecticut towns and many of the most kind of largest kind of ports communities of the region are established within, you know, months or a year or so after the Pequot Massacre.

- The Pequot War is gonna be framed as a just war.

And this is important for English jurisprudence because in a just war, you can take land for sure, take treasure for sure, but also enslave people.

Although the people that come are Separatists and Puritans and they're thinking about establishing a city on a hill or being able to establish this community where they can practice, you know, their religious beliefs unencumbered, the reality is that they are economic endeavors and they have benefactors in England that expect to reap rewards from this investment.

And prior to the Pequot War, there were no rewards to be reaped, right?

They were struggling to be able to pay back these benefactors.

So what the Pequot War does is it creates a new revenue stream in enslaving people.

(light string music) - If you don't understand your own history fully, then you can't heal from the trauma.

The reality is some of our people were enslaved.

They were enslaved here in what is known as Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations.

And some were enslaved through the exodus of enslaving people in the islands, Bermuda, Bahamas, but all the way over to Spain and Portugal.

There was this vast slave trade that was happening here.

And this place that we now call Rhode Island was knee deep in it.

- Native people were extremely afraid of being enslaved, right?

More so a lot of times than dying because if you are enslaved, then you're taken from your land, you're taken from community, all of the connections that youve ever had, you're not gonna be buried in this place.

Lots of people moved into the marginal places, into the swamps, into those places where they couldn't, colonial authorities couldn't come and get them.

- I say it all the time, there is no US history without Indigenous people's history, and there is no Rhode Island history or any other state for that matter, without Indigenous people's history.

Roger Williams could not have created this colony if it were not for the Narragansett people.

And the Narragansett nation and its sovereignty in this place, and allowing during that time, Roger Williams to even come into their sovereign space and to allow him to create a village that eventually becomes Providence in that place.

(soft music) Conquest is about greed, power, and then there's entitlement.

There's promoting fear and hate.

We use the Declaration of Independence as an example of that because they wanted to -- had major goals of new appropriations of land.

And so they call us "merciless Indian savages, whose known rules of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions."

That's vilifying and dehumanizing Indigenous people.

- After the revolution, a series of tropes develop about Native Americans that the revolution itself establishes and that others build upon.

This vision that Native Americans are so fundamentally different, that they are merciless and savage forms a paradigm of American cultural understandings that expands across the continent and forms much of 20th century American culture.

Other tropes establish Indians as being noble or kind of religiously in tune with the natural world.

But here in New England, a really kind of disturbing trope emerges that locates Native peoples as being the last of their tribe.

- How can you just declare the end of a people?

(light music) This is post-civil war, there's an economic collapse.

The states and the federal authorities are trying to go into these landscapes that they weren't interested in before so they could build railroads through.

They're going into those areas that they had been, that Indigenous peoples had been pushed into.

Well, how do you get license and authority to be able to build on these lands?

So the solution for Rhode Island is to say, "Well, there's no Indian people here," but there are.

Not just in Rhode Island, Connecticut does the same thing, this huge campaign to de-legitimize the indigeneity of Native peoples in this region by claiming that they're not native because they're Black.

- Dispossession of land, dispossession of culture, dispossession of community, of identity.

It's all of those things.

And some of the ways in which they did that is to start erasing us.

One of the ways to erase people was on official documents.

So a gentleman would go into the regimen as Narragansett, as Indian, and come out of the regimen as colored, mulatto, musty, or negro.

And so they were consistently and pervasively doing that by either taking our people away in enslavement, taking our children away in boarding schools, industrial schools, religious schools.

And so then they would use all those techniques and then they would say, we have dwindling numbers, so therefore we are not enough people to be a people.

(soft music) - When I was in school, they told us that the Narragansett didn't exist.

So I'm sitting there in class and my grandmother's at home, right?

My mother's there, I know that we exist.

But the idea is that we don't, and this is powerful because it's an act of erasure.

Unless you know that there's these things that have happened in the past that have preferenced some people over others, and that the legacy of that continues to today and where we have these socioeconomic measures that separate people.

And if you know that, then that's important because then it determines how you allocate resources.

It's not a benign history, right?

That these things have created situations that we deal with and live with today.

And if we know that, then we'll be more apt to think about solutions and ways in which we can deal with and create a more equitable society, because that's what we say and who we say we are.

- My grandfather was very, he was kind of his own person, I'll put it like that.

(upbeat music) They didn't have phones back then in the Charlestown area.

When his mom wanted to send a message a family message to her sisters, or brothers, or other family member within the Narragansett tribe, they would send him to run and deliver the message.

And a lot of the aunts and uncles said when he would get there, he'd tell them the message and then he'd sit down and invite himself for dinner.

(Anna laughing) - Ellison Meyers Brown, which is his actual name, his nickname as a child was Tarzan He was a phenomenal athlete and won many, many races in his lifetime But he's most noted because he won the Boston Marathon in 1936.

At that time, on that level, he was an unknown.

There was a reporter that did like a one-liner, something like "Keep an eye out for the Indian from Rhode Island He ran out ahead and was in the lead, but then over time lost the lead to Johnny Kelley, who was the favorite to win that year The story goes that Johnny Kelley went by him and said something like, "Better luck next time, young'un," and went on his way.

Tarzan then caught up to Johnny Kelley on the hills of Newton and bypassed him and won the race which is why the hills of Newton are now known as Heartbreak Hill It's because Tarzan Brown broke Johnny Kelley's heart by beating him on that hill and winning the Boston Marathon.

(attendees faintly speaking) (attendees clapping) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] And over 500 entries in this road race in the 50th running of th Tarzan Brown Mystic River Run, honoring one of the greatest runners in the world, Ellison Tarzan Brown.

- I'm Tarzan's oldest nephew living nephew right now.

Well, just to see his name being mentioned, to me, it's great for our family, for our tribe, and I even think for the city of Mystic here to have this race in his honor.

To me, they didn't forget who he was (attendees cheering) He set a path, I think, for many other runners to follow He grew up poor.

He had nothing, started from scratch The only way that he was to get out of poverty, I guess, was through running.

Running just kind of made him who he was.

- The runners today who win, they've got the picture on the Cheerios boxes, they have running endorsements for sneakers or clothing lines.

The runners in the Depression had none of that.

They ran for the love of the sport.

Jobs were hard to come by, but especially being an Indian in this area, because a lot of people didn't want to hire you, they would have signs in the window "No Indians," and things like that So he was hoping that from winning the marathon, he could bring attention and he could get a job.

My grandmother said one time he won a Frigidaire, so he came in second so that he could get the Frigidaire Another time, he came in second so he could get the his and her matching (laughing) He came home and tossed my grandmother hers and said, "Here, I got this bathrobe for you."

- He did unorthodox things.

You know, he would run in training, run to Westerly, run to South Kingstown.

He would run barefoot sometimes.

He would run in a race and get overheated and jump in the river or the lake and take a swim and get out and still beat everybody When he won, they wanted to do an Ellison Tarzan Brown Day, and he told them, "No, it needs to be named for my people, because that's more important."

(light music) - In state records, you're not gonna find anything about the Narragansett people after 1880 until 1898, and then from 1898, not until they issue Indian Day.

So what the heck happens to make this dramatic change from this very aggressive Supreme Court decision, right, at the turn of the century that says, "No, they do not exist.” to the 1930s where they're saying "Oh yeah, they exist."

(upbeat music) What happens in that time is that there's this really talented runner.

He looks somewhat like the typical Western image of Native People.

So when people saw him running and he had like his dark skin and his straight hair and his features and they were like, "Oh yeah, he looks like a Native."

- Not only did Ellison win the Boston Marathon and put us not on a local stage, not on a regional stage, not just on a national stage, but an international stage, while we're invisible as a people when we've been de-tribalized, right That's really important, 'cause at that point, they're writing in history books that we don't exist.

They are saying we don't exist, because on their paper genocide, we don't exist.

But the people and the government of that people all still exists.

And so Ellison Tarzan Brown was integral in raising the visibility of the Narragansett people.

(attendees cheering and clapping - [Announcer] Runners ready.

Here we go, the kids' race is underway - In 1975, my grandfather had died They approached my grandmother and asked if they could name a race in his honor.

It's so heartwarming.

It's an experience that yo wouldn't be able to appreciate unless you were here in my shoes being one of the grandchildren.

He's an unsung hero.

Some people have heard about Tarzan Brown, a lot have not.

But people are becoming more aware of him now as time is going on.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, cheering) - [Daniel] This tradition goes back as far as our oldest oral histories.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, cheering) Often we're discussed as a people of the past.

We have a lot of collective trauma as a people.

You may hear of the Hartford Treaty, you may hear of the Mystic Massacre, its really positioned as a way of, that's the end of our people.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) And we've been rebuilding ever since.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) - This would be our Thanksgiving for our corn specifically.

So when we harvest corn, which has been happening for thousands of years, we come together and we give thanks for that corn.

Thanking the creator for allowing us to have that opportunity to feed ourselves.

And then we also replenish Mother Earth with more seeds, that way she'll continue to feed us.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) - A lot of the songs that we sing have been passed down, like a lot of the songs are passed down through the generations, different languages too.

So we hear the Pequot language, you know, the Algonquian dialect, my people's language, Shinnecock is not too different 'cause we're all Algonquian from, you know, this area, this region.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) And you like, when you really get into it, when youre really deep into the songs, it takes me to another place personally.

It's our way of prayer.

It's our way of receiving medicine.

It's our way of giving back medicine.

So when we sing, we have all the dances, they dance and we get, it's invigorating.

It's powerful for ourselves too.

And it represents the heartbeat.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) - Like I've been dancing like my whole life.

I just love coming here and just like all my family is, like we're all like stuffed together in this area over here.

It's just like coming home kind of.

Within the schooling system, they like teach you about the like Trail of Tears and all these other massacres that happened to Native people.

But like, they don't really show a lot of what, like right now or like any present problems within the community or anything.

So it kind of like depicts a picture that like, Natives are stuck within a time period, but like, we're still like growing and evolving.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) So I feel like showing that we're still dancing and it just like shows people that we're still here, basically.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) - A lot of things in our culture have been involuntarily forced out, you know, by other cultures, our ceremonies, our songs.

So we're trying to regain a lot of this once again.

And I'm considered to be by my people, a culture keeper.

I got learned from my elders.

Taught from my elders.

So it's my job to teach the next generation down to keep this going.

If you still got it, you hold onto it, you hold onto it, you pass it down to the next generation, you don't wanna lose it.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) - An event like Schemitzun being able to come to every year.

I've been coming to this since I was a little kid.

Schemitzun is just a sister tribe.

Like basically it's, they're relatives to us, all New England Native nations are relatives to us.

It means a lot to be able to be included in, be in the ceremony with them.

Like as a younger wampum maker, probably the youngest wampum maker around here at all.

People see me and it shows the younger generation that they can do it as well.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing) - A lot of young ones are joining the circle at a very young age.

Even though it is a challenge to keep the attention and compete with things like social media, we have a lot of young ones that's already setting examples for their age group.

We don't come from a written language.

So the fact that you are forced to interact generation to generation, that's how information gets shared.

You're not gonna read it, you have to sit down.

You have to immerse yourself.

So that approach is one of the other reasons why we've been able to keep so much alive at a time when it was outlawed.

The importance of preserving cultural history, it allows people to understand who they are.

It gives them a starting point, and then you could always find out where you're headed once you understand who you are.

(steady drum music) (crowd chanting, singing)