Akeia de Barros Gomes (Mystic Seaport Museum), “Who Speaks? Who Listens? Sharing Black and Indigenous Stories in Museums” (Gilder Lehrman Center)

Akeia de Barros Gomes: (William E. Cook Vice President, American Institute for Maritime Studies, Mystic Seaport Museum; Exhibit Curator: “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea”)

 

In traditional maritime history water is envisioned as highway, a connector of people, a place of livelihood and survival. For Africans, their descendants, and Indigenous people of the Dawnland (New England) water is a life force, it is the place of our ancestors and the divine feminine, it is sovereign. The ocean is no different from the water in a woman’s womb—it’s a place of cycles of creation (or birth, death and rebirth). In the exhibition, Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea Dawnland Indigenous and Black community members and scholars have created a maritime narrative and an exhibition that gives Black and Indigenous communities an authoritative voice to share our knowledges and to tell our maritime histories through our voices at Mystic Seaport Museum—and people are listening.