Hope they look at Charlestown
Brown University
A page from Francis Allyn Olmsted's "Journal of a voyage around Cape Horn," 1839-1841. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
A $4.9 million grant to Brown
University’s Center for
the Study of Slavery and Justice will fund a partnership
with Williams College and
the Mystic Seaport Museum that
will use maritime history as a basis for studying historical injustices and
generating new insights on the relationship between European colonization in
North America, the dispossession of Native American land and racial slavery in
New England.
The collaborative project, titled “Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom,” will create new work and study opportunities at all three institutions, particularly for scholars, curators and students from underrepresented groups.
It will result in a new Mystic Seaport Museum
exhibition on race, subjugation and power, and a “decolonial archive”
spotlighting a diverse collection of stories from several New England
communities.
The grant was awarded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of its Just Futures Initiative, which in Summer 2020 invited 38 colleges and universities to submit project proposals that would address the “long-existing fault lines” of racism, inequality and injustice that challenge ideas of democracy and civil society.
“A myth in the founding narrative of the United States is the idea of New England as a ‘city on the hill,’ a place founded on the idea of liberty for all,” said Anthony Bogues, director of Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
“But it is important to
consider that this site of America’s founding was also a site of Native
dispossession as well as racial slavery. Brown and Williams have told stories
about both of those histories, but rarely have we explored the relationship
between the two.”
Since its founding in 2012, the CSSJ
has explored the history and legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and
racial slavery through research, study, public conversations, exhibitions and
more. The groundbreaking
work of the center’s researchers has catalyzed international
scholarly conversations and inspired similar work at colleges and universities
across the country.
But Bogues, who will oversee the
grant-funded project, said that in recent months, he and his colleagues felt
their mission must expand to include the investigation of New England’s role in
displacing Native Americans — something he believes is as foundational a part
of American history as racial slavery.
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| Cape Verde-born Joe Gomez settled in New London, Connecticut, and worked as a whaleman aboard the ship Charles W. Morgan. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Portuguese-speaking Cape Verdeans made up 11% of the ship's crew. Photo: Mystic Seaport Museum |
To help draw connections between racial slavery and Native American dispossession, Bogues and his colleagues reached out to scholars at Williams College in Massachusetts — a growing group of whom focus on Indigenous peoples and racial slavery in early America — and Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum, which for more than 40 years has worked with Williams to offer the program Williams-Mystic, a unique liberal arts-focused semester at sea for undergraduates on its museum campus.
Together, the three institutions devised a plan for a three-year
partnership that will draw on each institution’s strengths to generate new
scholarship, student experiences, K-12 education programs, public events and
more.
“We chose Williams as a partner because they have some very fine young historians who are thinking critically about Indigenous dispossession,” Bogues said.
“The college has made it very
clear that they sit on Indigenous land, and they are convening courses and
programs that reckon with that. As well, we have wanted to partner with Mystic
Seaport Museum on an exhibit that touches on racial slavery and the sea for
quite some time. This is an opportunity for our three institutions to come
together and think hard about the links between two major historical injustices
in our country.”
Christine DeLucia, an assistant
professor of history at Williams and one of the grant proposal’s co-writers,
said the project will present both institutions with an opportunity to
collaborate across academic departments — from Africana studies to
religious studies to art history — to reinterpret the details and
consequences of historical injustices in New England.
“This is an urgent time to reckon with the close ties between slavery and settler colonialism, and with the mythologies that have arisen from these profound violences,” DeLucia said.
“The
ocean is a vital focal point for understanding these histories as realities
grounded in specific places, experiences and memories. As so many generations
of communities and scholars have emphasized, enslaved people endured extreme
trauma and loss aboard the ships trafficking them to and from New England. The
ocean is also where many members of Native nations pursued risky livelihoods as
mariners and whalers as essential survival strategies in the face of escalating
colonial dispossession. We’re especially interested in connecting those
histories with diverse communities’ longstanding pursuits of liberation and
sovereignty, and emphasizing that history is a living process.”
The project has four major
components, Bogues said: a new research cluster at the CSSJ, an online
“decolonial archive,” a major exhibition at the Mystic Seaport Museum, and
expanded courses on historical injustice in early America for students at
Williams and Brown.
Bogues said the new research
cluster, housed at the CSSJ, will focus on how societies founded on
historical forms of injustice can become more inclusive and just. Faculty,
staff and students from Brown and Williams will collaborate on scholarly
projects, sometimes engaging in research work as part of joint Brown-Williams
courses. Both institutions will regularly host community practitioners who take
part in seminars and discussions. And two visiting faculty fellows with
relevant expertise, one at each institution, will be in residence for five
semesters beginning in Fall 2021.
To create an online “decolonial archive,” the three partners will work with leaders in New England’s Black and Indigenous communities, Brown’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, the John Carter Brown Library and staff at the John Hay Library to gather oral histories of New Englanders who have experienced the effects of centuries of institutional racism and dispossession.
Bogues said part of the
archive will consist of recorded community conversations organized by Brown and
Williams, which will help ensure stories are gathered and shared in ways that
reflect community desires, rather than in an exploitative, extractive manner.
The planned exhibition at Mystic Seaport Museum will run from Fall 2023 to Summer 2024 and will juxtapose well-worn maritime narratives about early New England with engaging artifacts that tell a different story about the past — from archaeological materials to documents and literature to music and oral histories.
Some of those new
insights, Bogues said, are hiding in plain sight, like the repeated allusions
to racial slavery, Puritanism and Native American genocide in Herman Melville’s
whaling epic “Moby-Dick.” Others live in historical archives rarely glimpsed by
the public, including those at Brown, Williams and Mystic Seaport Museum.
“As the country’s leading maritime museum, we are uniquely positioned to be the venue for an exhibition that marks an imperative, transformative and inclusive reflection on how America’s activities on the world’s oceans have and continue to play a part in our country’s society from the position of race and slavery,” said Christina Connett Brophy, Mystic Seaport Museum’s senior director of museum galleries and senior vice president of curatorial affairs.
“Working with our
partners, and through the fresh lens of ships and the sea, we are excited to
engage new audiences in critical conversations that have long remained
unfinished.”
Over the next three years, all three partners will also offer a wide variety of learning opportunities for students of all ages. Brown and Williams will develop several cross-disciplinary courses focused on colonialism and historical injustices, and many of them will unite students from both institutions in one virtual classroom.
The CSSJ and its
grant partners will also build on their Mellon Foundation-funded academic work
by developing a K-12 curriculum that helps the next generation of New
Englanders understand the region’s complex past — a venture the center will
fund itself.
Bogues said he hopes the project will
help transform the CSSJ into a venue for the sustained exploration of how
racial slavery, colonization and Indigenous dispossession were intertwined.
“Our nation was founded on two major acts of deep historical injustice: racial slavery and Native American dispossession,” Bogues said.
“How can we confront that history and use it to
transform this society into one that is equitable and just? I don’t pretend I
have the full answer. But what I do know is that if we don’t understand the
full story of our nation’s founding — if we cannot understand and grapple with
who we were and how that shaped our history — then we will never become a just
society.”