Video Transcript for Indigenous Peoples of the Commonwealth and National Day of Mourning

John Dunlap: John, want to tell me when everyone is in the room.

John Dawson: We're are all set. You can go ahead.

John Dunlap: Great, and I'll just start by letting everyone know today's presentation is being recorded. My name is John Dunlap and I am the chief human resources officer for the UMass System Office. Thank you all for joining us today.

Cedric Woods from the UMass Boston campus is our special guest, and he will be facilitating the conversation on the National Day of Mourning as an entry point to dialogue on historic and contemporary Indigenous peoples of the Commonwealth. This will include a viewing and reflection of a brief film on the National Day of Mourning, a presentation on the contemporary demographics of the Native community in the Commonwealth and dialogue on the complexities of responsibility for the ongoing impacts of historic actions and erasure of Indigenous communities, Indigenous resistance and resilience, and what this could mean for the UMass system as part of its efforts to be a more just and equitable educational institution.

Closed captions and a transcript will be provided by a certified real time captioner.

Once again, the presentation is recorded.

And now, I would like to introduce my friend and colleague, Chanda Wolf, who will introduce our keynote speaker.

Chanda: Thank you so much John. Hello, everyone. My name is Chanda Wolf. I am a member of the DEIA Team. I am excited to have you with us today.

Let me introduce our guest, Cedric Woods. He combines over a decade of tribal government experience with a research background and is the founding Director
of UMass Boston's Institute for New England Native American Studies and Graduate Program Director of the MS in Critical Ethnic and Community Studies. The Institute's purpose is to connect native New England with University research, innovation, and education.

Currently, Cedric is working on projects with tribes in the areas of tribal government capacity building, Indian education, economic development, and substance misuse prevention. He holds a BA in political science from UNC Chapel Hill, MA in political science from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut.

And I'm sorry, I'd like to just go back - Cedric Woods is a citizen of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina. Please welcome, Cedric Woods.

Cedric: Thank you so much, John and Chanda. Delighted to be here with you today to talk about native people's of the Commonwealth and using a brief film that the DEI team for the UMass President's Office identified on the National Day of Mourning.

I am now going to attempt to share my screen and hopefully that will work out very smoothly and we'll begin some additional introductory comments as we talk about Indigenous Peoples of the Commonwealth using the National Day of Mourning as an entry point to what I hope is the beginning of this dialogue.

As you can see from this photograph, it is of the sun rise over our beautiful part of the world known by many Indigenous peoples as the Dawnland. And the term Wabanaki and Wampanoag closely related terms that very much reference the place where the sun rises.

Now many of you may be quite curious, why is a Lumbee Indian, if any of you have done any research about my tribe or out of just shear curiosity, as to who I am, my community is from North Carolina, the Southeast, not New England or the Northeast.

Why am I here talking with you about New England native peoples?

There are a variety of reasons. First is academic training, my dissertation looked at the growth and evolution of tribal governance structures within the Mashpee-Wampanoag community and the Mashantucket-Pequot tribal Nation of Connecticut. So I certainly have academic credentials to do this kind of work.

I would argue most significantly though that my own personal community connections, being descended from related peoples in Virginia and the Carolinas, situates me for additionally doing this work. Although I have resided and worked directly with native communities in Connecticut and Massachusetts for twenty-seven years now, my home community, the Lumbee, have many of their ancestral lines from the Powhatan Chiefdom of Virginia who are certainly part of the long line of sister nations for Indigenous communities here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Being a sister nation means many things. It means that we shared common political structures, related languages, and are still very much in contact with one another today with many members of regional communities visiting my homelands for Pow Wows and cultural activities and traditions. And my people, spending significant periods of time, appear at traditional gatherings as well.

When we think about the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this is a map I will frequently use to underscore that it is a place of diverse Indigenous communities before sustained contact with Europeans and other peoples as well as a diverse area now.

Where I am located at, my home as well as my academic institution, is within the traditional territory of the Massachusett. Many of you are located in traditional territories of Pocumtuc, Nipmuc, or even Stockbridge Mohican peoples to the far western parts of the state.Again, all of these Indigenous communities speak closely related languages within the Algonquin language family and many of them still exist today, although, as a result of some of the processes we are going to talk about like Virgin soil epidemics, and non-natural processes such as warfare enslavement, many of those communities are with us in memory only.

Another grounding point I like to use to situate Indigenous peoples' obvious place and it's significant to what we are talking about in relation to National Day of Mourning is local Indigenous peoples and my ancestors did not live in Tipis. We were farmers. We were agriculturalists. We grew our own crops. Particularly being heavily dependent upon corn, beans and squash. We lived in villages. Stable, year-round habitations. But also moving periodically so that the soil would have a chance to renew itself.

Depending upon whether it was winter or summer, our wetus, which is the traditional name here, or yi-hakan, the traditional name around the Powhatan. Could have been the external versions could have been made out of either mats or bark, depending upon the time of year.

And our planting fields would be near by, again with corn, beans, and squash being significant, but by no means the only way, of subsisting on food stuffs that were provided by Mother Earth for our peoples - we also relied heavily upon fishing, either line fishing, fish weirs, spear fishing, and hunting.

And we shaped our world and lived closely with this ecosystem in ways that made it most useful for us and for our non-human relatives.

I always like to show part of a fish weir, which was found in what is now Boston Common to underscore the point that the places in which we live and walk now have been home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

It may not look the way now that it did even 500 years ago.

Instead of the images that I just shared with you of wetus, of pallicated villages, of corn, beans, and squash, what is most frequently known by many residents of Commonwealth are a variety of things - one is the myth of Thanksgiving, the first Thanksgiving here in Plymouth, Massachusetts and what that fanciful notion that people may have, it included or resembled.

Native mascots are ubiquitous here in the Commonwealth as well. Caricatures of native people another frequent touchstone, of what people think they know about Indigenous peoples and also historical markers. Native peoples in the past tense, whether it is tied to King Phillip's War or Metacom''s Rebellion, which the National Day of Mourning centers heavily in the narrative in the documentary film you will see.

Or Casinos. 

So widely differing views of Indigenous peoples, but rarely linked to contemporary Indigenous reality, resilience or accurate history of native peoples.

Now I will turn it over to my colleague, who is going to share the brief film on the National Day of Mourning and then I will pick back up to share again and we will have a conversation and some reflections on that.

[No audio as switch is made between presenters].

News Reporter 1: Pilgrims and Indians sat down to the first Thanksgiving dinner in Plymouth, Massachusetts. They ate wild turkey and corn and everyone had a good time. 

Reporter 2: Most Americana celebrated Thanksgiving today by eating turkey, praying, and or watching parades or football games.

[Indigenous music plays].

Russell Peters: There was a ground swell of native awareness beginning to happen in the late '60s and early '70s.

[Indigenous music plays].

And that led to the National Day of Mourning.

Hartman Deetz: There are days and there are times when some of those stories need to be able to spread out and make some room for the story that's being told here and now. And on that place, on that day, Cole's hill, at the feet of Metacom above Plymouth rock, that day, that time, that space, that should be a space for Wampanoag people to tell our story. 

[Indigenous music plays].

Russell: The first Thanksgiving of the pilgrims as their holiday and it's a complete farce because it had nothing to do with celebrating the unity of the Indian people and the pilgrims, and it was the beginning of all things to come, and so we have nothing to celebrate.

Paula Peters: As a first grader, when the Thanksgiving story became the focus of our teachings at school, I remember the teacher talking about the pilgrims coming to Plymouth and how the friendly Indians taught them how to live, how to plant, how to fish in the area. And then she said they had this great Thanksgiving feast together and unfortunately after that all of the Indians died of a horrible plague.

And I must have been waving my hand madly. And I told her that it's not true, they are not all gone, because I am a Wampanoag.

And she smiled, and just said, "Well, of course you are."

Russell: There was a groundswell of actions that was beginning to happen all over the country. And it was happening here in Massachusetts as well as across the country.

News Reporter: A group of militant American Indians moved into the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington last night. And after some scuffling with the police, took the building over.

Man: We see no reason why we should have to go to any other building but this one, so we're staying.

[Cheers from the crowd].

Reporter: Well, for a month now, the Indians have held Alcatraz. And though the federal government has asked them to leave, they show no inclination to depart.

Hartman: They took over Alcatraz in 1969. It stayed occupied through 1970.

Russell: There was a clause in the Fort Laramie Treaty that said that all government lands that were no longer being occupied, had to go back to the Indian people. And Alcatraz had been unused for a number of years and they went out there and they took that.

[Indigenous music].

Frank James: Every Indian brother, every sympathizer, will go back to their homes with a different thought about what Thanksgiving Day means to the Native Americans. It is a day of mourning.

Russell: Frank James was a school teacher from Chatham. He was a member of the Aquinnah tribe as a Gay Head Native. Frank was very well spoken, very well educated.

Hartman: Folks in Plymouth decided to make an invitation to Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag to ask him to say some words about the 350th anniversary at that point of the Mayflower and the Plimoth Colony.

Russell: They were stuck in that belief that their little picture that they drew of themselves and the Indians was the reality for everybody.

Tall Oak: They said, well, we can't allow you to read that because 90% of the people would walk out. He said he wasn't going to change it.

[Indigenous music playing].

Tall Oak: We decided that we would declare it a National Day of Mourning for Native people.

Hartman: It's really a very mild and passive speech by many of today's standards when you look at it. It simply just reflects on that history was not always kind to the Wampanoag people. The Wampanoag people didn't always fair well from this meeting. And that bad things had happened in the past and hopefully we can reconcile and move to better things in the future. And that's about the best you can say and be truthful about
what actually happened.

They decided to start observing a day of mourning as opposed to Thanksgiving.

Russell: So he came back with the American Indian Movement. Russell Means, Dennis Banks, they ran the AIN flag up on the Mayflower.

Linda Combs: Everything was a huge - just a sea of people. You know, up by the statue of Massasoit. You know, climbing the statue, and I remember when they climbed the Mayflower, the masts of the Mayflower and good old Captain Jones took a header over the side. You know, it just made us aware of what it meant to be Native and what our history means. And what happened to us in history and how we should be responding to that.

[Indigenous music plays].

Hartman: Certainly there are days when having these commemorations - these commemorations are a part of being able to share and tell our story to be able to tell our truth to the world around us.

And that's an important thing because it's been something that's been denied us as Native People far too often.

Russell: There's been 50 years - 50 years. And we're still fighting the same fight. In general, the attitudes of some have changed. But for the most part, the deniers, they just want to say either get over it, we are all Americans right now.

The bottom line is they have too much at stake, to give us what is rightfully ours. 

Hartman: We're still having to do, where our ability to put our land into trust is being put under threat. Right now as we speak, it's being put through the halls of the United States Senate. Right now, as we speak, we are having to prove our identity to a Colonial Government. Right now, we have to deal with the impacts of the environmental damage that folks that have come here from other places have done to this Homeland that we have.

To have to fight for that simple acknowledgement is crazy because we are here, we have always been here.

[Indigenous music plays].

[No audio as presentation is transitioned].

Cedric: Thank you, John. I hope everyone was able to see majority of that. I was having some connectivity issues, so it kind of started and stopped for me, but I do know that Kristina, Chanda, the DEIA colleagues here certainly will make sure that you have that link in case you missed any of it.

Thank you again, John, for sharing that. I hopefully am going to be able to pick up where I left off. Is everybody able to see that okay? Great.

So you've done the film. I just want to have a couple of questions that I know that you all have used in the past in terms of thinking through about the video selection. And these are just some questions that I have that we have worked with, and just going to start with one and work our way through.

Some of you have responses that you may want to share in relation to your video, particularly thinking about how you felt about it. Did some of these things feel unfamiliar to you in terms of the perspectives that were being shared with you from these Wampanoag participants?

Or were some of these thoughts and ideas very familiar with what you have been exposed to?

And then other questions.

How thinking about your reactions, responses, in terms of how you engaged with it, or in terms of how you observe your current space during this particular day or holiday, or from this framing, this day of mourning, versus a holiday?

And then I would say very importantly for the reasons why we are here, what might this video mean in terms of connections with this and what we are all doing here today as far as how we work with UMass either within the system, at our respective campuses, in our areas of responsibility.

Last, but not least, do you think this video calls for any actions for you to take? Or not?

So we will start with that.

I am going to see if one of my colleagues can help me read out some of what might be in the chat.

Kristina England: I can do that, Cedric. So we do have one comment so far from Chanda Wolf. "Thank you, Cedric. It was painful to watch but necessary. There is familiarity, but a lot of distance."

Cedric: Thank you, Kristina.

[Cedric pauses - no audio].

And if someone wants to raise their hand for a comment, I think Kristina can help me out with that, if someone would like
to share. 

[No audio while waiting for questions].

Kristina: I do have one more in chat from Preethi Lodha. "Call to action: When celebrating and discussing the history of Thanksgiving, it is important that we not misrepresent the cultures and perspectives of the Native American people.

Cedric: Thank you for sharing that and thank you for reading that, Kristina. I'm going to take a couple of more and then I'm going to provide some broader framing and context for the National Day of Mourning.

Yes, Wendy. And then Candyce.

Wendy: I understood what the younger man in the video was saying - that why should we have to fight for the things that are ours, but I am wondering do you feel like there is more awareness that the National Day of Mourning is making a difference and making people aware? I feel like since the 1970s or since the takeover of Alcatraz, I feel like we or the Indian nations seem to be fighting the same battle.

Cedric: An excellent question and observation, Wendy. I think that Hartman Deets, the young man you are referencing shares that view - the same battles are still being fought both locally and nationally. We will talk more about that too as we work our way through the presentation. Candyce. Thank you for that.

Candyce: Hi, Professor Woods. Thank you so much for coming and speaking to us. I really appreciated the presentation and the video. What can we do now as allies, so to speak, to for instance, the gentleman that was speaking in the video, things that are happening now, lands are being taken away or things in Congress are decided on behalf of a whole group of people. If you have anything to share like that, I'd really appreciate it.

Cedric: Lots of things, Candyce, and one of the things I will put out there - current Supreme Court case being heard on the Indian Child Welfare Act. Absolutely impacts Native people here and in all other 49 states as well. Ongoing issue of tension of a need for advocacy, and I can certainly recommend some additional resources for you to look at and to think about.

And also land in the trust, which applies to federally recognized tribes and does not apply to non-federally recognized tribes, which is the status of most of the communities we are going to briefly talk about today.

So, additional need, separate and apart from what the current federal mechanisms are designed to deal with and address.

Megan.

Megan: Cedric, thank you so much for joining us, and for educating us more and more. I watched the video a while ago and I watched it again today. And what felt familiar was the narrative that we have been all hearing for years and years.

I'm an Immigrant and I came to this country in 1983 and I remember the first Thanksgiving dinner I had at my uncle's house. That's how the narrative started - the first Thanksgiving with the Native Americans. 

And I think we need to change that narrative, and my first thought was why is the media not talking about this more and how do we get the media's attention?

And the other thing is at the micro level - how can we individually change things and the first thing I was thinking about was the resources we share through the DEIA newsletters we send - it was a children's book and I think we can learn so much from children's books.

And we can share it to our children and also read it ourselves because I think it's very complex and it's going to take us a long time before we understand the severity and the impact of this, not only to Native Americans but as a whole society - all of us as human beings.

So I wanted to get your thought about the media and also about resources and books. Thank you.

Cedric: Absolutely, and the role that the media plays to shape, influence, and hopefully inform our broader society. Absolutely. Certainly conversations that are worth having and how do we center those voices in our current media atmosphere.

Great questions and I have some thoughts but by no means do I have definitive answers on that, Megan. I wish I did.

Megan: Thank you.

Cedric: John.

John: Thanks and thank you so much for being here. As I was looking at some of those pictures of the first Thanksgiving as it was depicted, it hit me that I think a lot of us resist learning because it disrupts some very old nostalgic stories that we don't want to lose from first grade, second grade, being told what Thanksgiving was and having that become part of our family's present day culture, and then to some extent not wanting to hear information that disrupts that narrative.

Cedric: Mm-hmm.

John: And that came up for me. When I was looking at those drawings, I could remember seeing them 45 or 50 years ago. 

Cedric: Thank you so much John. I think the whole reason I am here is to provide this broader context. The National Day of Mourning is not an attack on gratitude, it's not an attack on families. It's an attack on the erasure that happens after the gathering, which there was a gathering, again, not tied to let's invite the Wampanoag over and celebrate, probably linked to an exercise of firearms, which the Wampanoag heard and thought that the English colony was under attack, and they actually did have a formalized treaty of mutual self defense, so they responded en masse to aid their English military allies.

That's what most historians think the original gathering was really about.

But once everyone was there, the rules and norms of hospitality dictated that if they are here and they're our allies, we should be hospitable. And Massasoit or Ousamequin sent out men to bring venison, so that they could, in this very impromptu, unplanned gathering, share a meal or meals together while they made sure that there was no attack happening, there was no need for defensive military action and then disbursed back to their traditional villages and homelands.

Those same Wampanoag people who are talking about the ongoing consequences of Indigenous erasure, also point to thirteen different Thanksgivings within their calendar. So gratitude is a critical part of Native culture, but not gratitude for a fantasy and not gratitude for erasure of Indigenous Peoples following that period of  relatively good political relations and what would follow that period.

Native people are not frozen in time. There's a lot that happened from then to National Day of Mourning, which is not taught, to Megan's point. And that's why the National Day of Mourning came to be.

It's the silence that is imposed by the media, by school systems, by academics in many cases, as to what happened, not just to Wampanoag, but to other Indigenous communities following that brief period of peace, and we will get into some of that.

And it's also - many of my students will learn about what happened next and they'll feel quite angry, and they'll feel guilty or bad that they didn't know.

My response always as an instructor is - you can't be held accountable for what you were never taught. But now that you know the big question is, what are you going to do about it? How are you going ensure that the next generations have a more accurate understanding of Indigenous history and perspective going forward?

So thank you all. There will be time for additional questions and answers, but I am just going to continue on here.

So some of those things that happened and had started even before the establishment of the Plimoth colony was native enslavement - multiple Native peoples, including the one most commonly known as Squanto, were enslaved by English sailors, and taken from their homelands and home waters; most never returned. Tisquantum was the exception and he was from the place - the Wampanoag place of Patuxet, now known as Plymouth.

And when he had returned, the majority of his community had died from what - academics use the term virgin soil epidemics, meaning diseases to which local Native peoples had no natural resistance or immunity because these diseases were not from here. They were from Europe, Africa, Asia, quote on quote Old World.

And so those diseases had devastating impacts on our populations. In many cases, the death rate was between 50 to 90%.

So you can think, just given the recent pandemic we've all lived through, the social, economic, political, and spiritual disruptions that would have on Indigenous Peoples.

Also as a result of an insatiable desire for native lands by English colonists, it ultimately resulted in large scale warfare between Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc peoples, and English colonies. It's known as either King Philip's War or Metacom's Rebellion. And it's estimated that 90% of the Native communities actively opposing the English were killed.

And even 50% of those who served as allies to the English, who were living in praying towns, like the Mashpee and Aquinnah, who some of them became allies with the English fighting their Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett relatives.

At the end of that war, many of the surviving Native peoples particularly active combatants, were enslaved and ended up in the American South, in the Caribbean, at English Plantations there, and also in Bermuda.

And the image you have here is part of - one of the reconnections festivals, where the descendants of those enslaved peoples in Bermuda, on Saint David's Island in particular, are hosting a Pow Wow and an event reconnecting them with Native peoples from here, from New England.

Many Wampanoag people that you saw on that video participate in this, as well as Narraganset, Nipmuc, and Pequot people as well, to reforge those connections, to rebuild those connections, that were broken by the institution of slavery. 

So when I talk about resistance, I talk about resilience, these are not abstract things, but actionable items that contemporary Native peoples are pursuing.

Another example of survivance - it's a term coined by Gerald Vizenor - and it ties economic activities that Native People had engaged in before King Philip's War. This is a quote from Daniel Gookin, a missionary, a speaker of multiple Indigenous languages, and historian, talking about the great skill that the Narragansett in particular were able to engage with in terms of being stone masons.

And it is still something - some of the most highly sought after stone masons in the region are still Narragansett, and are highly regarded for their skillsets in that - and there are also many Wampanoag and Nipmuc who were married in, who also exercise this today.

So if you go either to the Narragansett Indian Tribe's Pow Wow Festival, their tribal office building, the tribal office buildings at Mashantucket, many of them at Mohegan are still built by Narragansett and other Native stone masons.

Whaling. Something that was extremely significant economically to this place and also traditionally to the mythic traditions of Wampanoag people. What you see as the tribal seal of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, which Frank James is descended, is Moshup the Giant, holding up a sperm whale, which Moshup would catch sperm whales to feed his much smaller Wampanoag relatives on the island of Gay Head, or Noepe, as the Wampanoag term for those places. 

And Amos Haskins. He was an Aquinnah Wampanoag whaler, who sailed on six whaling voyages. And also a Mashpee, Solomon Attaquin, who actually owned his own ships. And yet another Wampanoag who people frequently don't think of as Wampanoag is Paul Cuffe, the whaler, an advocate for emancipation of enslaved African peoples owned several ships and directly employed - his Wampanoag brother-in-law, who was from Aquinnah, as well as his own children - his wife was Pequot - and their extended family, on many Indigenous whaling ships across the region.

This next photo also underscores that when we talk about Indigenous Peoples of the Commonwealth, we are not just talking about the impact of King Philip's War, the impact of allotment of native lands, enslavement of Native peoples. It's not just a Wampanoag story; it is also a Nipmuc story.

I know many of you are at Shrewsbury or are there intermittently or at Worcester, the Medical School, traditional homelands of Nipmuc people.

And still, in spite of the breaking up of native lands by the Commonwealth, the Nipmuc people did not pack up and disappear. They have tenaciously held on to this four acre parcel to which they have held title and control since the 17th century, long before King Philip's War. And this particular family plot is tied to James the printer, who did the typeset for the first book published in the England colonies, which was the Bible translated into the Massachusett-Wampanoag language.

So again, resilience, persistence, resistance.

And Native peoples use writing, today and then, as a way to advocate for their communities, for their peoples, both historically and contemporaneously, whether we are talking about Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and now Stockbridge-Mohegan as well by a National Park Services project.

These are all important partners that I had in my institute, and which many other institutions - UMass Amherst I know has worked closely over the years with Wampanoag and Nipmuc, and other Native peoples in the region.

But the reality of it is, in spite of this hard work this advocacy, many native peoples have lost all the acreage that they control collectively and it's not an accident. It is an actual, active process by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, the state of Connecticut, the state of Maine to break apart native homelands and to reduce native self-sufficiency.

You will have access to these slides.

These are the many communities that are still here in our region, in the Commonwealth, who have not disappeared, and also for whom some relationships exist with my institute, but not with other institutions of higher education that are in their backyard, that have occupied their traditional homelands today.

Another reality of contemporary Indigenous peoples in the Commonwealth, just as it was diverse before sustained contact, it is even more diverse now, with the majority of Native peoples in the Commonwealth being from native communities outside the Commonwealth.

I am Lumbee from North Carolina, my wife is Turtle Mountain Chippewa from North Dakota. And most Native People who live in Massachusetts today are from similar backgrounds.

There are also thousands of Indigenous First Nations peoples from Canada who reside in the Commonwealth and thousands - and an increasing number of Indigenous Peoples from south of the Rio Grande, whether we're talking about Aztec or Nahuas speaking people from Mexico, Maya Kʼiche' people from the highlands of Guatemala, other Indigenous peoples from El Salvador, Honduras and also South America. 

So an even more diverse reality when we use the term Indigenous to the Americas and what that means here in the Commonwealth.

So in addition to the tribal homelands, we also have a very large urban native population.

We are very fortunate - there are only 33 urban Indian help centers in the United States. One of them is in Boston, and this is photograph of the North American Indian Center of Boston, established first in 1969 as the Boston Indian Council.

So, even then, the National Day of Mourning, the establishment of the Boston Indian Council, this activism feeds and informs one another, many of the same people that were there for that National Day of Mourning were also doing the articles of incorporation to create the Boston Indian Council.

For this important touchstone, of the tens of thousands of native peoples residing in urban areas, the North American Indian Center of Boston is not the only Native organization. Out in Western Mass, we now have the Ohketeau Cultural Center, Kinship Heals, an organization very recently established to support Native women survivors domestic violence and sexual assault. Greater Lowell Indian Cultural Association. An organization almost as old as the Boston Indian Council - The Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness.

So regardless of where we are, there are Indigenous peoples. We didn't disappear, we didn't vanish, we're still very much present still very visible,

And I'm going to share my screen one last time. My apologies, somehow my slide slipped off, but we as employees of our various institutions have the possibility of expanding those networks, those relationships to include Indigenous Peoples at our institutions. UMass Amherst has had a Pow Wow for a very long time. Intermittently, depending upon funding, we have one at UMass Boston.

But Indigenous peoples are also embracing one another. This other photograph is of the Maya Kʼicheʼ community from New Bedford being given shared ceremonial space with one of the Native communities from the Commonwealth for one of their ritual specialists to conduct traditional Maya ceremony for their benefit here.

And so that then begs the question what responsibility do we have? What action might we choose to take moving forward? What responsibility does one of our sister institutions, UMass Amherst, have as being a land grant institution? Or as they are referred to in Indian country - land grab institutions, given that financing as a result of the Morrill Act, directly went to land grant institutions from the forced appropriation of native lands in the 19th century.

Questions for us to consider.

Again, I don't have answers for all of these things. I'm hoping that this is the start of a dialogue, that looking at this National Day of Mourning film in thinking about contemporary Indigenous communities in the Commonwealth will spark that conversation, and that the conversation will lead to action, to where action plans can be developed and taken for either the system or individual institutions.

As an Indigenous guest here in the homelands of the Massachusett, I feel that I have a personal obligation, ethical obligation, and also the mission of my institute to support and engage Indigenous communities both in the Commonwealth and elsewhere as it makes sense to do so, driven by their needs, by their interests and my ability to access resources both in terms of intellectual capital at my institution and funding secured by external means.

But those are the questions. That's the conversation that I'm hoping that this presentation will spark today.

And so I'm going to open it up again. Kristina and Chanda, or John, whoever's willing to help me address any other conversations or comments.

[Two people go to speak at once.

Chanda: Thank you, Cedric. I'm sorry, Kristina. I'll just mention that John Dawson and Kristina England are going to be co-facilitating the Q&A via chat and the raise hand function, so if there are any questions, comments, please feel free to do so in those two ways. We have about 11 minutes. Thank you.

Kristina: And I do already have a question, but the person couldn't use the raise the hand feature. Debora Ferreira, if you want to jump in to ask a question.

Debora: Thank you, Cedric. That was a wonderful presentation and so much information.

For me, I guess I have like two questions - one would be for - how do you - do you have pointers in terms of how to have this conversation with friends and with family members, right, who might have a different understanding about Thanksgiving or the National Day of Mourning?

So if you could kind of share some of those.

And then, I had asked this previously in my chat - for UMass, what could UMass do as a land grant? Some ideas around that, especially around increasing native students and Indigenous students attending our institutions.

So those would be my two questions. Thank you so much. 

Cedric: Thank you, Debora. I will start with your first one. The way I would approach this would be that gratitude is a wonderful thing, and we aspire towards equitable relationships between Indigenous Peoples and Non-Indigenous Peoples but that's not where we are at. It existed for a brief moment, and if it existed then, how can we get back to it?

The first part of that is education. We have to make ourselves aware of the painful history and actions taken by either Plimoth colony, Mass Bay colony, like King Philips War, the enslavement, enforced dispossession of Native peoples, of their lands, even those who remained, by the Massachusetts Indian Allotment Act and Enfranchisement Act.

So before Native peoples were having their lands broken up across the United States, it started here. It is called the Dawes Allotment Act nationally. But before he was Senator Dawes from Massachusetts, he was Attorney General Dawes from the Commonwealth.

So this is ground zero in terms many of these deleterious policies selected nationally.

A former President of MIT actually developed up a plan of let's break apart the political entities of tribes. 

So these are things, Debora, I point to for family members rather than saying that we shouldn't be thankful. Absolutely we should be. And then what does that mean being in a privilege where we are grateful for these things - what does that mean in terms of responsibility? Because when I think of gratitude, I'm giving thanks for the blessings that I've received and for those people that have allowed those blessings to exist. If I've treated them horribly, then that means I have an obligation to make that right, would be how I would approach it.

I love cooking turkeys. I love eating turkeys. But I am also keenly aware that it is not based on a myth; it is based on a sincere expression of gratitude, and it can also be tied to an expression of obligation and responsibility.

And so I think of that, both in terms individually, me as a guest - I am an Indigenous person, but I am Indigenous to some place else. I have obligation as a guest here. Giving gratitude is a wonderful thing, but I have an obligation to be in alliance as an ally with Indigenous Peoples here.

What does that mean in terms of a land grant institution? I see that two fold. I see it in terms of as a state institution being responsible for supporting equitable educational outcomes for everyone that lives in the Commonwealth,

And a lot of us are researchers, right? We like data. Let's dive into the data and let's ask the question, have we met that obligation in terms of equity and support for indigenous students? In terms of a land grant institution, what is - I won't say the System - what has UMass Amherst done because that's where the cash went, what have they done to make things right for those Native peoples that were dispossessed, those homelands that they 
directly benefitted from financially.

So those are two distinct questions; related, but distinct.

Debora: Thank you. 

John: I'll let Kristina... Anything else on chat, Kristina?

Kristina: Nothing else on chat at the moment. 

I guess, Cedric, I did have a question myself. So has the Indigenous community seen any change in K-12 education, and also with organizations, such as Plimoth Plantation and Sturbridge Village - have you seen any education around National Day of Mourning and changing the narrative from those organizations as well?

Cedric: In terms of K-12 education, I was actually part of the most recent revisions of the curriculum standards for social studies and history. And the frameworks have been modified to reflect the much more nuanced, sophisticated, accurate reflection of Native history.

The challenge with that, Kristina, is the frameworks have changed, but it did not come with money to the districts to make those changes, to either create additional curricula, train teachers to do now what the state is mandating.

So if I was going to say what additional work needs to occur, districts need to either allocate funds, or the state needs to allocate funds, because there is a huge differential in terms of resource bases.

Some districts have leaned very far in, like Boston public schools. I'm working with several colleagues on developing appropriate curriculum, professional development for teachers in Boston public schools. I'm doing that with one school system, not all school systems. I'm not saying that others aren't doing good work, but I am just saying that it is not something that is occurring across the board. And I do know that resources are part of the challenge, but it's also institutional will. If entities are committed to doing things, lots can be done.

I can't speak to Sturbridge but I was part of a National Endowment for the Humanities Teachers Institute at Plimoth Patuxet Museums this summer, where we brought teachers in from across the United States actually and the emphasis was on decolonizing narratives, and the emphasis was very much on let's look at primary documents and let's look at actual history versus myth.

One of the case studies I did was actually looking at Dighton rock in addition to National Day of Mourning as well, but Dighton Rock is something - if you have ever been to the museum there - it centers every narrative other than the Indigenous one in terms of the creation of that very significant Indigenous space. Indigenous voices and the history of that place is de-centered to narratives of Vikings, or 16th century Portuguese sailors. And I'm not going to say neither of those things are not possible. They visited that place. But in terms of the creation of that as a place of ritual, sacred significance, I think they had little to nothing to do with it, and most historians would agree with that.

But when you look at that museum and you look at the erasure and minimization of Indigenous voices, that's very clear there.

Sturbridge, I don't have any perspectives or views on. I mean have been to it a couple times but I can't say that I know much about the deep history of their goals or objectives.

Kristina: Thank you. 

John Dawson: Thanks Cedric. I don't know if John Dunlap wants to add anything.

John Dunlap: I think we are almost at the top of the hour, so I thinks it's time to conclude. I want to thank all of you for joining us. I want to thank the DEIA team and the other folks who volunteered to be on this specific program for today's event. Most importantly, I want to thank Cedric Woods.

Thank you very much for being with us for this extremely interesting, informative, and, frankly, powerful presentation. We'll put you on the spot right now and ask if you will come back again? I hope the answer is yes.

Cedric: Absolutely.

John Dunlap: Okay, thank you, thank you. And once again, Cedric, thank you very much for being with us and everybody, thanks for being here and have a wonderful day.

[Multiple participants say thank you at once].