And we'll get this underway. So anyway, my name is Adam Braver. I'm the library program director. I also am on faculty in the creative writing program. As some of you may know, I hope more of you know, the library puts on several unique programs per year from the annual Burst Memorial Lecture, which will be next week, next Thursday at 4.30 in the law school, about Slaughterhouse 5, to the Vermont Fellowship in Fiction and Nonfiction, to the various scholars at risk social justice initiatives. But perhaps the signature series is to talking the library series. This series, endowed by an alumna, Mary Teft White, who for which this room is also named for, class of 76, 1976, was created with the belief from Mary Teft White that there is always inspiration in hearing the story of someone's path to their life's work. But tonight, this evening, we're adding a new program to the repertoire, which is talking beyond the library. And as some of you know, you started beyond the library, but now you've come back to the library. With this program, we're joining forces with academic programs, in this case, the University Honors Program, to take specialized talks directly into the programs, encouraging new lines of inquiry and thought on a more localized level. So we are glad to have Honors as an inaugural partner, and in particular, the Honors leadership and Dr. Jeremy Campbell, who will introduce tonight's distinguished guest. Thank you. Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming out. I'm Jeremy Campbell, director of the Honors program here at Roger Williams. And I want to thank you guys for being here. I want to thank Associate Director Bill Pom, Laura Turner, Betsy Lernad, and Adam Braver from the library. And thank you to the students, because what you're in for tonight is a real treat. When Adam approached us with the idea to come up with someone to invite for the inaugural Talking Beyond the Library series, we thought, we thought, we thought. And then in a moment of Eureka, it hit me, my old friend Lorenz Spears, executive director of the Tomaquag Indigenous Museum in Exeter. Lorenz and I have worked on a few different projects over the years within the context of the Honors program. And it's just a real pleasure and delight to welcome her here. The title of her talk, you can see there, through my eyes, Indigenous education, leadership, and empowerment. I hope it will give us a glimpse of your amazing story. Just by way of introduction, Lorenz is an educator and has worked for 25 years in the field of art, culture, and education. She's been the executive director of Tomaquag for a bit now, a few years. 25 plus. So she brings a wealth of experience from K through 12 education. She's taught at Brown. She's taught at URI. And she is a wonderful creator of culture, steward of culture, curator of culture from her positionality as an arrogant woman and as a leader in her field in 20, let's see, was it 2011? Sorry, I had to hear. But the National Medal, the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences National Medal winner in 2016, will see a wonderful picture of her with the former First Lady. So she is a proud daughter of Rhode Island, but also an international force in her own right. So we're really, really lucky to have her here. Please help me welcome Lorenz Spears. Makasini Pashao at Nahari Gansek, Natasui Lorenz Spears at English Art, Nin Nahari Gansek Nahansek, Kanupiam Aki Nahari Gansek, Wampanak, Pocasset, go on. So what I said to you in my language is hello, and that my traditional name is Makasini Pashao, which is a Makasin flower or the Lady Slipper. And that my ordinary name, I guess, is Lorenz Spears. Today, people are reclaiming that and naming people in their traditional names actually on their birth certificates in their own language. So that's part of social justice issues, but there was a time where that was not allowed. So you had to have a biblical name or an English name, and then you could use your traditional name sort of as the sigh. There's a very big wave in movement today to name people on their birth certificates in their traditional name. My first grandson is Minakisu Mikwin, which means strong feather in the Nahari Gansek language, and he is Nahari Gansek, Niantic Paiute, Shoshoni, and Washao, which are all indigenous peoples. The latter three are all indigenous peoples from Nevada, as my son and my Kayla Met being water protectors of that standing rock. So, but the point is that young people, not just them, but even generations before them now, have been reclaiming and naming in their own traditional names. And then I said to you, I got segue, that I am Nahari Gansek, Niantic, and then I welcomed you to the homelands of the Nahari Gansek, the Wampanoag, and I started naming off Wampanoag bands, peoples. And so it's really important. Part of the work that I do is to force people to think about decolonizing their institutions. I happened to serve on the New England Museum Association Board and one of the big things that I pushed about two years ago, I was asked to be on a panel about decolonizing museums. And you're on this like keynote panel and they did this beautiful PowerPoint presentation all about historical postcards from the Cape, because that's where we were located. They never once mentioned the Wampanoag people or any other indigenous people from Massachusetts at all in the whole thing. And so I did what I do, because I'm an educator, so when it was my turn to talk, I stopped what I was going to say and started with recognizing the first peoples. And turns out they blew up social media because of it and everybody was tweeting and posting and going crazy. But it was something that they needed to hear. Then the next year, which was this past year, they called me up and asked me one to be on their board, but two would I be the person that would do an opening words about the indigenous people. And I told them I would, however, being who I am, I pushed. I said, but in the future, you need to invite the indigenous people from that place, not just use any indigenous person over and over and over again to recognize whose homeland you're on. And so we're working on it. So when you're thinking about the work that I do on leadership and education and empowerment, it's really that, because really to me, that example is all three of those things. I was being a leader by pushing something that people weren't really ready for. I was educating them as to why they needed to do it. And I was empowering native voice and putting us in the room. Unfortunately, a lot of times people like myself, we end up being the only in a room. And if we're fearful, which plenty of times we have been and myself included to not wanna speak up and be the only one, then no one ever hears you.  And maybe over time, they'll start to hear and respect and recognize what could be done and to make this a more positive experience for people. So I briefly mentioned that I'm a mom as I mentioned Ridge, but I actually have three children. A 25 year old who's married to a lovely Mayan young woman and a 23 year old who brought me my first grandbaby. And my Kayla is his partner. And then my youngest is 18 and she's a student at the University of Rhode Island in Pre-Vet. And so everything that I do, in my opinion, is for the children, not just my singular children, but children in general.  It really was because of my mom and my family in general and my cultural identity, but my mom was the key person. Without her, I don't think I'd have two degrees in education at all. If you wanna talk about statistics, my mom was a young mom that dropped out of high school, had me at 17. My father was in the Air Force. They went flying across the country to Fairchild Air Force Base where I was born at Sacred Heart Hospital because he was in the Air Force, but they were both what I call young and dumb.  You know, we just don't know what we don't know and at the time you think you're brilliant while you're doing all the things you're doing. So they did what they did. They had no familial support clear across the country. So of course that didn't work out and they got divorced in two years and moved back home, both of them at different points in time. So my mom pretty much raised me as a single mom. My mom got remarried when I was closer to like a tween and my sister's 13 years younger than me and because of that, I became who I am today because my mom was a single mom. I got dragged everywhere she went. I didn't think of it as dragged at the time because I thought it was fun. She was the, they had this, I can't think of the word right now, this tour where you would tour around the state of Rhode Island and you would learn about these historic sites and they had a fancy word for what they called this program but like a folk arts tour or folk site tour or something like that. And she would be on the bus and she would tell them all about this site and that site, the Great Swamp Memorial, the King Philip's Rock, the this place and that place across the state.  Besides that, my grandparents, Eleanor and Ferris Dove, my grandmother actually is the oldest living Narragansett who lives in Rhode Island. She's 100, there's one, a relative of hers, a cousin who's 101 but she lives out in Oregon. And they owned and operated Dovecrest Indian Restaurant and they were really trailblazers in their own right. My grandparents, my grandfather was the first in his family to go to college and went to Bacone Indian Bacone College out in Oklahoma. He was the first East Coast tribal person to go to that school and it was funded by the Daughters of the American Revolution. He got a scholarship to go. He was the first ever indigenous person to become a town moderator and a tax assessor for the town of Exeter. He was the first to be a postmaster in the state of Rhode Island, the first indigenous person. Also, he did a lot of first plus. He served on tribal council for our tribal community. He was the warchief which is the role what you think of as, who is it now? My brain went on a blank, Tillerson, Secretary of State. They keep changing, I can't keep up. I almost went back to Condoleezza Rice, believe it or not. My mind was somewhere else. The point is that he did a lot of firsts in his lifetime and I was exposed to all that in the restaurant where us grandkids kind of grew up running around. You learned so many things, but you learned how to publicly present to guests that came to the restaurant about why was raccoon pot pie on the menu? Why could you have elk or venison or Cahog chowder, obviously. Those are all indigenous foods to hear. We would be talking about indigenous foods and why they're important, what's in this landscape and why we hunt, fish and gather still today because the narrative has always been the vanishing Indian and we're no longer here. If it's not 1600 or even 1800, we're just gone. We were always kind of combating that narrative in the work that we did in the restaurant that my grandparents owned, but in the mid to late 60s, I was born in 1966 so I don't really remember this part, but Tomaquag Museum actually merged with and partnered with Dovecrest. It was originally founded in Tomaquag Valley, which is how it got its name. We've rebranded and just say Tomaquag Museum. The legal name is Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum when it was founded in 1958. That's the brilliant name they came up with. In the branding world of the modern times, that does not work well because it goes Tomaquag Indian. Ooh, that all of a sudden went really loud. Tomaquag Indian, which there's no such thing because people think that's the name of a tribe, which it's not, and then Memorial Museum sounds like we're all dead. So we've gotten rid of the two middle words and at some point we'll go through the legal wrangle of getting rid of it formally, but for now on our branding, our lovely branding, it just says Tomaquag Museum. And I literally grew up in this museum, believe it or not. My earliest memory, I'm around five. We went with Princess Redwing, who was one of the co-founders of the museum and acted as the museum educator and curator to do all kinds of programs. When I say we, I'm talking about my myriad of cousins. I don't know, maybe 20 of us at various times. And we kind of grew up just doing this public education because it was part of our culture. The elder said, hey, come down here and do this dance. We do the friendship dance or the welcome dance or my cousin Gary, we have great, we found great images in our archive of this. He was doing the hunters dance and Chief Stronghorse, who's just turned 98 last week, was actually the one that was the elder teaching the younger people how to do this particular dance. And my cousin, that's how you learned. No one went to a class to learn how to do the dance. You followed the elder that was doing it and he gave you pointers and you moved on and you learned the dance. And so all of our lives, we were doing this kind of work, if you will.  How I honed the skills that I have is I went to school to be an educator and you learn how to publicly present through that and you learned how to scaffold down and build depth to what you're talking about in ways that you don't necessarily learn by just living it. So I'll give you an example. My cousin Gary, I'll use him as my example again. About maybe three years ago, he was in a complete lather. I probably shouldn't say this since I'm being recorded, but nonetheless, because he was going into one of his sons, his youngest son's classroom, but he's contractor. That's his job every day. He's got a slew of kids and he's not doing public education all the time. So they had asked him to go in the classroom and give a presentation and we just happened to bump into each other. So I said, oh, well, tell him about Graham and grandfather and Delcrest. Oh, tell him about the powwow August meeting. And then of course, as we were talking, then he got relieved because all of a sudden he's like, oh, okay, I can bring in your regalia, talk about when you wear it and why you wear it and what each thing means. And all of a sudden he had the expression to share to the class. Just because you're indigenous doesn't mean you know how to be an indigenous educator because that's a whole different skill set that you have to learn how to do. And so I literally grew up in this museum. However, when I was your age and in college, if you'd asked me, I'd be the executive director of this museum, I would have laughed at you. It was a very grassroots volunteer run museum and while Delcrest was still in existence till 1984 from the 60s to the 80s, it was working together symbiotically. It was this little tiny museum with a restaurant and a gift shop from the for-profit arm and the non-profit museum was just working together. So when a school group came to the museum, they toured the museum, they went over to the restaurant and my grandmother gave them succotash or Johnny cake samples. So it was kind of collegial that way. When the restaurant was gone, the poor museum was left on a literally a postage stamp sized piece of property. It had not even one legitimate parking spot and no real landscape in which to do the program. So the museum kind of floundered for a bit. I served on the board, but while I was serving on the board I was getting degrees in education. I became a public school teacher in the Newport Public School System, which I loved. I worked with underserved and underrepresented kids, which I loved. I've always been a passionate educator. I think kids are important. I think youth are important. I think college students are important. I think everybody's important, but I love to see when people are aspiring to get there, I want to do everything I can to get people where they want to go. But I left that public school. Why? Because in my opinion, the local public school for where I lived was not serving my children correctly. In my opinion, they entered school all happy, go lucky to go to school. And in a very, very short time, they were being undermined and demeaned and felt less than, very quickly. Part of that is when you're boys and you have long hair, that's against the norm. So there's that kind of negativity. There was one woman in the office, she always called them a girl. After day one you should have figured out you're not a girl and move on from it. But some people use that as, what do they call it, microaggressions that they put on people. Everybody in the school wasn't bad. Some people, there's lots of great people that were trying to do their best for my children. But I was watching my eldest in particular kind of going inside himself and losing it by second grade. And so I was a teacher and probably a pretty arrogant by this statement. But I was like, I could do a better job than this. So I decided I would take a leave of absence from my public school job and I would teach my own kids. But I was a public school teacher, I knew myself. If I was home in my house, I'd be eating bonbons and running around in my pajamas for half the day and not getting much done. I'm like, I don't know if you're that kind of person. I'm a get up and go kind of person.  But I need the routine of jumping up and getting out and going to do and then bing, bing, boom, you do until you drop and then go back home, right? But home is like relaxed. So I was like, if I home school, we won't accomplish anything. So I'm the kind of person that I dreamed up this idea, I'll just open a school. How hard is that, right? Hard.  I'm a little bit stubborn. I didn't really realize that until later. Looking back, I was definitely stubborn. And I just decided there were other people that had mentioned we should open a native school. We should open a native school. And we were at conferences and things and it just kept coming up. And so I was like, I'm gonna open a native school. So I did. In 2002, I took the leave of absence. In 2003, we opened Nuituan School. And so of course now I had the board of Tomaquag Museum because I like to skip steps. If I was just by myself over here, I needed to create a non-profit. Without that, I could jump right into, once I was under an umbrella of Tomaquag Museum, I already had the non-profit status and I could skip some steps. And I opened a school that was K to eight. And it focused on native history, culture, the arts, the environment, and we'll together all the modern curriculum requirements that are necessary for an elementary slash middle school. And we ran that school from 2003 to 2010. I will say in hindsight, there were some mistakes. The mistakes had nothing to do with education, which was my bailiwick. All on the business side of it were the mistakes because we didn't build a strong enough financial foundation to weather the economic downturn and the floods of 2010. And they were like the end of Nuituan School. So if someone else in the tribal community wanted to do it again, I would say definitely look at that structure. We had some things that were against us in the year that we were trying to open. The several years, there was a moratorium on charter schools, so we couldn't go that route. It wasn't that we didn't want to, it wasn't available. So the only route was to be a private school of some sort. And so that caused the financial structure to be difficult because we were targeting the most underserved community in the state. And so therefore, they didn't necessarily have the means to pay large dollars. So we scholarshiped a lot of kids and got grants and donors and things like that to help us out. And it helped us grow to the point that we were at in 2010, but everybody was hitting the fan in so many different ways. We actually had donors that would call up and be like, I know I promised you a full scholarship for a child, but I lost everything in the stock market. I can't do it anymore. Like, no, they didn't do it, that would abruptly. But it was that kind of idea. But with that, the board and myself, we thought about it really long and hard. And a lot of nonprofits went under in 2010. And we literally could have as well, again, back to my own stubbornness. We just fought through it, went without a lot of stuff. And we decided that, you know what we would do? Is we would strengthen the parent organization. Because it really hadn't been strengthened to the level it needed to be. Because even through 2010, the museum was still a volunteer run organization. It had this big program, the school for seven years, that had paid staff. But the museum itself didn't really have paid staff. On occasion, they'd be a grant program with a little bit of work being done, but mostly it was no staff. So in 2010, the board and myself, we decided we would change that. So today we have staff. I'm the executive director. We have an assistant director. We have the Indigenous Empowerment Network Coordinator. We have a marketing person. We have an archivist slash collections person. And we have a retail person. Most of our staff is still part-time. We're trying to chug our way to full-time staff to change that. Because we do work like we're full-time staff. I'm the only one that's full-time. We really, as a team, work like we're full-time staff and get things done in ways that are unreasonable, the amount of work that we do in the time that we have. But everybody that's there is very passionate about the work that they do and the work of the museum. So I wanted to show you some pictures and things that are related to the museum. But before I do, because I said a lot just then, if there's a question or two before I continue on, I'm happy to pause for a moment. Yes? No, actually I didn't. I did have people that tell me we couldn't. I had lots of people that told me I couldn't do it. There was no way in the world I could do it. So when someone tells you that, just ignore them. Think of me and say, I'm going to be stubborn. People told me all the time it was impossible for me to open a school. But know what I did? I love a list. I was at a conference. I was actually at an education conference. And I tend to be a multitasking kind of person. I was listening to whatever they were saying and taking notes. But over here I was writing a list of all the things I must need to do to make a school. So I started off checking off those things on the list. But as you check them off, you would find out more information. So you'd add new things to the list. And I ran around. And I just talked to people. I needed a lawyer. I was doing something someplace. And I talked to them. Oh, I was on a tour at another museum. And in the group, I was at Hafenrafer Museum, which by the way is the oldest indigenous museum in the nation. I was at Hafenrafer Museum. And there was this cluster group. I think we might have been at a conference if we were visiting as a group. And turns out, people in my group, one of the guys was a lawyer. I'm like, I need a lawyer. Can you help us? Because you have to file legal papers to become a school. And there's all kinds of little nitty gritty things. You have to run around to the Secretary of State's office and this place and that place. And it's all to do. And when you go to one place, they give you another five or six things on your list that you need to do. But again, back to my stubbornness, they're like, oh yeah, you need to write a curriculum. They didn't know who they were talking to. So I just wrote a curriculum because that's the way I am. I had other people that read it over and gave me ideas and filled out things that you kind of, no one does it really well like this. But I cranked out a lot. And I used a lot of resources to kind of see what you should have. The biggest area that I struggled with is I got kicked back from the State of Rhode Island Department of Ed on the physical education portion of it. That has got a lot of legalities around it. So that we had to rewrite. But the rest got approved on the first. So it was really good. So if you're passionate about something, just got to keep plowing ahead. Our very first graduates, they're graduating from college. They're having families now. They're doing different kinds of things. They're artists and cultural performers. They're doing a ton of different things. So I wanted to show you just a few. Yes. What was the primary language in the school? So the primary language was English, because we've been colonized, unfortunately. However, we did incorporate Narragansett language into the curriculum. So we did it in everyday ways. So every morning, we had an opening circle where they greeted each other and said Ascubi Quassan or Wunikisuck or Scudisquamson, which are all ways to say good day, good morning, hello, kinds of things. They'd say how part of the passing around, they'd say San Kunai. So I'd say Ascubi Quassan, Jeremy, San Kunai. He'd answer me back, Wunikisuck, Nux Nunei. And then he'd pass that along to the next group.  We sang the welcome song, which is a traditional song in our community. However, just before we opened Nuituan School, I was at a tribal function. And the person that used to always sing it was not there, was not available for whatever reason. And nobody knew the words. And my brother-in-law was usually one of the fill-in people, neither one of the ones that had sang it, a chief strong horse. And then my brother-in-law, they almost always were the ones that sang it at these formal tribal functions and no one knew the words when they weren't there. And so I decided I would have Thon come into the school, teach it to all the kids in the school, and we would sing it every single morning so that there'd be generations of kids that would know that song. Not only that, we did things like writing assignments. So NukaSaki, NukaSaki, Huan, Hwaminal is Mother Earth, Mother Earth, Who Do You Love? Nohwamin, Maui Mosque, Black Bear. I love Black Bear. So it's like a spin on Brown Bear, Brown Bear from Eric Carl, but it's in Narragansett. And so they're learning all these different color words. They're learning all these different animal words. They're learning how to say I love you or what you love. And we would do those kinds of pattern books in Narragansett. We'd count in Narragansett. We'd do lots of songs in Narragansett. Here's one I'll sing for you. Not promising, it sounds good. I've got a little bit of a scratchy throat today. See if you can guess it. Cha-mush, cha-mush, cha-mush, ka-mush, na-ma-ni-nuki-mu-sipe. We can tam-wee, we can tam-wee, ka-di-yuk-ana-kwa-mu-wank. Cha-mush, cha-mush, cha-mush, ka-mush, na-ma-ni-nuki-mu-sipe. We can tam-wee, we can tam-wee, ka-di-yuk-ana-kwa-mu-wank. Anybody? Ro-ro-ro-ro, your boat, exactly. So, you know, but the thing is, you know when you're teaching a language, and basically we're refugees in our own homeland, and we've been stripped of our language in lots of ways, so we're re-teaching it as though it's a second language, even though it's our primary language. So, to do that, how do we teach kids language? We sing to them. We say things and sing song-y ways, because that helps to entrench it in your mind. So that's what we did in the school. We used lots of ways that did repetitive things that reinforced language. Some of the kids that are coming up that have gone to Nuituan School and or were connected to the Tamaquag Museum and or participated in the Narragansett Tribes Language Program, which I served on as well, are really becoming phenomenal speakers. So, we have had interrupted language in our community due to colonization. However, as one elder said, so long as one person is speaking one word, our language continues. And we've done better than that. Our elders have passed down language through songs, through greetings, through simple dialogue for years and years and years. Even in our archive, we have records of language classes going on from the 30s maybe forward. They may have been there before that. We just don't have records in our archive, but we do have them at Tamaquag Museum. So, we continue to do that. But we also had kids that weren't Narragansett. So, using technology, ha ha ha, cassette tapes. We had language like Lakota language and we had a girl that was Tuscarora Iroquois Six Nations and we had some of those languages on tapes and CDs. And so, they could listen to them if they had another culture. And some of them were Narragansett on one side and Lakota on the other. So, they have that opportunity to do that. So, I'm gonna, I have a lot of pictures but I'm gonna flip fast. I just wanted you to see different things because so, I kinda give you the long or short story of how I came to be the leader that I am at Tamaquag Museum and some of our goals. But, one of the things that I wanna recognize is people like Princess Red Wing, my grandparents and my mother, many other tribal people like Ella Cicatal. They were leaders before me and their leadership and their guidance and their cultural knowledge that they passed on to me, it's just my job as a Narragansett person to pass it on to the next generation. I just had, through modern American means, let's say, the ability to know how to educate, to be able to open a school or to work in a museum. So, I have a strategy that gives me an opportunity to do it on a wider level rather than a specifically familial or clan level. I can do it more broadly. And so, some of these programs are gonna show you that. I have to show off here. So, this is the first lady. We literally shocked ourselves. In 2016, when, actually, 15, when I got a phone call from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse saying he nominated us for this medal, he'd been in the wings of what Tamaquag Museum's been doing for a long time and had been sending staffers to a lot of the things that we were doing. And this is very rigorous. I actually have other much bigger nonprofits calling us up and asking us, how did you win that? And what do we need to do to do it? And the short answer of that is you have to be very impactful. We're a small place, but we're very impactful. Not just to the native community, but to the larger community as well. And so, Christian, who's over there on the left, actually was the first student that graduated from Nuituan School. He also graduated from Haskell Indian Nations University and now is going back for his master's. Some of these same kids were told they couldn't go to college. That's something that we combat. We have a lot of times that we're told we can't achieve something based on what people perceive about our communities and about our kids. One of the things is that we're often, I might sound very talkative, and I am, but our community as a whole tends to be very reserved. I learned when I was with that single mom how to be very outgoing because of the things that we were doing, but that's not a norm of our community as a whole. And when you add on the historical trauma of distrust that's there, it really puts up the barriers. And literally it's passed on to people without us really even noticing that it's happening. And our kids are very, very quiet and often very observant and not necessarily participatory and in the public education that's used against us at a very young age. Christian is phenomenal and he was selected to come. The Institute of Museum and Library Services selected you've got to nominate three people that you were impactful, tell their story of what you did to impact their lives and they had to write something as well and then IMLS actually selected it. So it was pretty amazing. The big thing that we've done, I think that made it so that we won that national medal. See, we're in the middle of nowhere, Exeter. We're down so rural of a road, if you don't, if you listen to your GPS and you're not careful, you could be on a dirt road. That's how far out in the boonies we are. However, when I started Nuituan School and then carried over into the museum we do a ton of partnerships. I feel that you empower people through partnerships. We use and leverage our network to empower indigenous peoples and I'm gonna show you, these are just flips of various partnerships. I'll spotlight a few along the way. So our various partnerships produce books, films, curriculum, opportunities for native communities. So the Rhythm and Roots Festival, which happens to be in Charlestown every year, that's part of our indigenous empowerment network. It provides opportunity for native artists and educators to be hired to perform at that event, storytelling, the opening ceremonies. Last year we had the Groovalados, which is a funk R&B band out of the Mashby Wampanoag. They're a Grammy nominated, amazing band. They've never had an indigenous band there. So in our partnership we work together to do that. Last year we've been building it up. This year will be our fifth year in the partnership. Those are all things, because people think if you have a chance, I mean I know we're clearly on the other side of the universe right now, but if you can get over to Kingston, Rhode Island to the University of Rhode Island before March 1st, we have our Native American Art Show there right now. And again, that's one of our other partnerships. And to give native artists other opportunities to be seen in other places. People think we only wanna show our work at a pow-wow. That's just, that's like you saying you only wanna show your artwork at an art festival. And that's it. So we work really hard to try to give opportunities for native artists to be seen in different kinds of galleries and different kinds of shows. We partner with US Fish and Wildlife. We created an indigenous garden with them and we created curriculum to go with that indigenous garden plus did teacher training and public programs for them around uses of those plants. Additionally, edibles for art purposes, for tools, you name it. If you haven't seen it, we did a partnership with, does that point? I don't know, the very bottom, the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities Road Tour. If you go to roadtour.org, I think we're tour number 35. We finished it up and launched it this past fall. It has 10 tours within our first people's road tour. You can go to all the places virtually or you literally could drive around Rhode Island and go to the Great Swamp Memorial or go down to Miss Squamiket or Watch Hill and look at the statue of Nenegret. And in the tours, you learn about the history of the people. And one of the things back to my decolonizing, we push really hard, push, push, push. Please don't leave us in the past tense. So road tour, if you look at most of the tours, it's all about a certain time period in history. I didn't come out and say we wouldn't do it if they didn't, but I pushed really hard until they agreed with me. That our tour needed to come to the 21st century. And so it goes all the way from my antonomy and canonicals and Nenegret and throughout the generations of touchpoints of different people and places all the way to the Narragansett Food Sovereignty Initiative run by Dawn and Cassius Spears, which has just started three years ago. But it's an important vital piece of our work and our history. And so we try really hard to do that. And frankly, most people don't know indigenous people are right here in their own homelands. Unfortunately for us, we've been swallowed up by millions of people and it makes us invisible in our own homeland, plus the history of the way it's been represented makes us invisible as well. It's, you know, when you were detribalized, it took 100 years to prove that was an illegal action by the state of Rhode Island, but for 100 years, historians wrote we didn't exist. So it's hard to undo that. So you've gotta tackle your primary source documents as well in certain areas on whose viewpoint is this. So here's some of the other partnerships. There's so many, it's not funny. But this picture is actually of summer camp that we did. We did a steam summer camp with native youth doing everything from building traditional home structures to kayaking to making your own nets. We have pictures in the archive of them catching crabs one day while we were down in the salt marshes. So this is, it's putting them back in their traditional cultural ways to learn about the arts, the sciences, the culture in various ways, but also understand that they're 21st century kids and that they're gonna use technology too. Cause technology actually can be helpful back to language. A lot of the youth are using technology to make films. They're filming little kids having conversations and posting them online and things like that.  One of the ones that we did this year is we partnered with the Roger Williams Initiative, which includes the Rhode Island Foundation, the Secretary of State's office, Roger Williams National Memorial. And last fall we did a whirlwind of tours, something like 1,400 kids in a month where they could learn about the history of Rhode Island inside the state house, including First Peoples and going to the charter room and going to the library and seeing primary source documents that spoke to that history. And we're gonna actually continue that again this spring. This is just showing us at the Atrium Gallery. We do a lot of gallery partnerships. One of the ones that we did last year was the Hera Gallery and it was a social justice theme. So it was an intercultural exhibit. But one of our native artists got selected for the cover and her image, which was a portrait. And then as it came out of the head it turned into a fishtail and the title was Who Owns the Water? And so this was all about social justice issues. Our staff, and this just happens to be one of the staff. I don't know why we don't have a group picture but that seems to be a hard one for us to come by. So this is really important through the Indigenous Empowerment Network. We do a lot of support for native youth and native people in general. But and non-native through those same programs we also have non-native youth. So we have youth from local high schools interns under the IEN specific, that's native specific but we have interns from colleges all across the region that come to Tomaquag Museum and work in collections. We have someone working in archives. He's from a Massachusetts school. I can't think of which one right now. We have some that have worked in admissions or in retail depending on what they're studying and what their skill sets are. They do different things. We have lots of job core interns as well that do a lot of administrative. But these pictures are actually the IEN intern pictures showing the Indigenous Empowerment Network at work hiring and training Native American youth, if you will, youth in the broadest federal terminology. So it goes to like late 20s or so. These are student interns. The one on the bottom was actually a URI student. She was working in collections. This student is our Met student intern right now since he's been a Met student intern in education. He's created a fashion show, demonstration where they demonstrated different kinds of regalia where he narrated what every piece meant and what it was all about. So a lot of what I do, I feel like it's constantly educating and not just me but now my expanded staff is constantly educating people and giving them opportunities to learn more and deepen their knowledge. And this young lady, she did a ton of work in collections. We've had others that have done a myriad of different things. Anybody that writes good things, we have a blog. We've had Brown students and students from U Penn and a myriad of others that submit their things to our blog. If you're writing about a native topic and you think it's high quality work, then we might post it on our blog. Because the idea of the belongings blog, it was about that word is a double word, us all belonging as human beings together and the stuff in our collection. Back to decolonizing, we don't call it objects. We don't call it, I'll use objects, I can't think of the artifacts, we hate those words. That's like I've walked it right out. We like to call them cultural materials or cultural belongings because they connect to the people. We believe that everything in our collection has its own story to tell, we might know it and we might not know it, but it does have a story and it connects to people, the person who made it, how they were using it, why they were using it. If it had cultural, spiritual, familial significance, there's all kinds of stories wrapped in that and it makes it connected to the people and to me that's decolonizing because it's not just this thing over here that might look pretty to you, it's not just a thing. It has its own essence and story to tell and so we try to do all of those things. Just show you some pictures. Again, back to native youth at summer camps and programs but also the young people from one to the right that kind of looks like she's 12, she's actually in her 20s, was an educator and the one that's the taller one there because she's standing on a chair, was also an indigenous intern. What's interesting about the indigenous interns is they come in and they have often a lot of cultural knowledge and arts but they're learning how to pull it out of themselves, how to tell it to the public, how to be a public speaker, how to gain their voice as an advocate, how to find out what they're passionate about in relationship to their culture and their history and the arts and sciences. So this is us doing all kinds of things. We have a three sisters garden plus other crops. Last year we had some great help from the young farmers of Rhode Island. If you're into farming and like to help, come join us because the garden is much as we love it for educational purposes, we don't have enough staff to really man it all on our own. These are just more pictures of our staff doing various things. One of the things that's really important is we share a lot of traditional knowledge. So we have programs called Arts and Wellness that's specific to the native community and that's where we'll teach traditional arts like finger weaving, some of which I put on the table up front, beadwork, basketry, quill work. So we're doing a series of arts and wellness and it's going to be quill embroidery. We have a four week series that we were able to get funded. How that happens, like some people say, well, that's not fair. It's not open to the general public. But it is fair in the sense that one, we're empowering next generations of people to be skilled in these traditional arts and often these same people are then spotlighted in our exhibits that we have at different times. Sometimes it's a pop up, like after the series we'll just do a pop up at one of our events and everything will be shown. And sometimes they're already professional artists that are learning a new skill or deepening their knowledge of a skill. It's also empowering the artists because they become artist teachers. A lot of people that have in the native community that we work with, Tomahawk Museum was the first place that they were an artist teacher and then they were able to get other jobs now as they built their resume to teach in other places or they worked with youth at Tomahawk Museum and were now able to do after school programs at other places. We worked with Holly Ewald and had several native artists working in public schools in the urban areas. And those are the kinds of things that are empowering. So of course there's lots of documentation. This is a museum, so we've got an extensive archive. We've got lots of video and audio and physical documentation that happens. And then we have projects.  I'm a leader of a small nonprofit, but guess what? If you're a leader of a small nonprofit, you have to be good at everything including solving the problem when the sump pump dies. Now, I don't know how to fix a sump pump. I don't even know how to check where the sump pump works or doesn't work. I don't know anything about the fact that there's a whole flood full of water in the basement and whether I'm going to get electrocuted or not. But I do know how to pick up the phone and call Uncle Frosty, who happens to be my husband's uncle, who I know knows how to fix everything and see if he would come and just tell us whether what's going on. So he did and he wore the rubber boots and he figured out that the sump pump was dead and that, no, we weren't going to get electrocuted despite all the wire that was down on the ground because it wasn't plugged into anything. It just was this whole extension cord snake of mess that just knew we were all going to die. So as a leader, you have to problem solve. Sometimes it doesn't mean you actually have to solve the problem. You just need to know who to call. And when you work in a small nonprofit, you usually don't have deep pockets. So if you can get an Uncle Frosty to come and figure out like, do you need a plumber? Do you need an electrician? At that point, I didn't know what I needed. So I could have called the plumber. I could have called the electrician. And technically, I didn't need either one. I needed to go to Home Depot and buy a sump pump. And then I had to twist my husband's arm to go put it in. But we literally put together cases. Those are the pieces of the cases to our gift shop. Part of our indigenous empowerment network, we created a gift shop. We have over 35 local indigenous artists represented in our gift shop. We're supporting native artists. We're supporting Tomaquag Museum. But more importantly, when you come to the museum, you can get something that's authentically made by an indigenous person. And not something that's mass produced. It's all very unique and different, and it changes every day. I have this woman that knows our community, used to live out here. She's out in Montana now. She keeps calling me up to take the phone and do, what do you call it when you look at the phone? And it's FaceTime. And FaceTime through the gift shop so she can buy gifts for her family and friends from our museum, which is very nice that she wants to support our gift shop. But it can be a little tricky running around with the FaceTime. So again, back to empowering youth. Some non-native, some native youth. And we're always out and about networking with folks at the state house and with legislators. It's really important if you become a leader, especially, well, I think in general, you need to meet people and you need to connect with people. And that's probably the most awkward part of my job when I first had to do that. You feel really awkward walking into places where people, I don't know, in your own head, you think they're so professional and they know so much and they're, you know, it's politicians and this and that, but no, you have to remind yourself they're just people. And that's the reality of it. And they're curious about what you do and you're curious about how they can help you do what you do. And what are the things that they're interested in that impact what you do? So it's important to be connected to all the political people, especially with small nonprofits, I think. So we do a lot of that. Lots of volunteers. No nonprofit can function without all our amazing volunteers doing a myriad of things. We have volunteers that help us park. We have volunteers that help us do grants. We have volunteers that help us do like a million different things. Silver Moon, who's our assistant director, I think she's the best at the volunteers. I'm good at getting volunteers. I'm not always good at directing them to get the most out of them. And she tends to be very good at that and very detailed oriented. So this is me out doing programs. We were actually at a woman's wilderness. That's misspelled. It's got an extra R in there. Oh, at Alton Jones. So we do programming from elders to kids. We're at schools. The fun part is I get to do a little bit of everything. In a small nonprofit, you do that. It can be overwhelming because instead of being in my office writing a grant or doing other kinds of administrative stuff that's necessary, I'm also running around doing other things. But I think that's what keeps me excited about the job too because I enjoy being with kids and with people. And we train other people to do that kind of programming as well so that they know how to do group programs. All our staff learns how to give tours. And some tours, everyone has their niche. So different people can do different things. Truth be told, I created all the tours that we do. So they were all based on my skillsets. So then we continue to add other skillsets. Silver Moon LaRose is doing a job readiness and training workshop on Friday for a Native American Vocal Rehabilitation program. But she came into the museum world from that world. So she has the skillset for that. And so we just keep broadening what we can do and the kinds of consultancy work we can do for the public based on that. We have an amazing children's hour. It's intergenerational. We do a lot of programming that's intergenerational. So we have kids with their parents, grandparents, but kids of all ages from toddlers or babies to tweens that come. And I find that adults learn almost as much as the kids because it's all new to most people. And we also have times where we hire artists that are outside of our own staff, like Robert Peters, who's a professional artist and author. Again, creating opportunities for native artists to vend. Dawn Spears that's over there. She just started that. She's the producer of the Abbey Market in the Bar Harbor. Again, another one of those programs trying to build indigenous tourism in New England, which is not really visible. Tahmah Quag Museum and other native museums are the beginning of that. But we're really trying to push beyond that and have different kinds of native markets and things like that. We do lots of lectures and talks and invite people like Tolo to come in. We had a full house that day. This is an old view of our gift shop because it doesn't really look like that anymore. We have a lot more new cases and things like that. But nonetheless, back to our arts and wellness. This is another partnership. So we were out in, there's native landscapes that are spiritual and or scientific landscapes that document different parts of our history that are just here and that people don't know about. And we worked with the Hoppington Historical Society and Land Trust and this NERA program and the Narragansett Tribes Historic Preservation Office also worked on it. I'm trying to preserve it. The town of Hoppington actually, through the work that all of us did collectively, were able to acquire through their land trust, the lands to protect these historic landscapes. One of the landscapes that sticks in my mind was so amazing because when they did the math on it, the points hit the summer and winter equinoxes when they plot the mathematical equations for it. It's really amazing. Lots of programs that we do, special offsite kinds of events that happen every year. We have a big annual event that we've been really pushing the envelope on. Back to indigenous cultural tourism. Last year we had the Groovilados, not only at Rhythm and Roots, but at our event at Trinity Rep last year. And we had an inter-tribal dance troupe, Narragansett storytelling dance troupe and a Hawaiian ukulele singer and performer, with the idea of bringing indigenous art more to the forefront. So we do a lot of that. We also do Blue Stars Museums, which is giving free access to museums, to military families. And Smithsonian Day, which is another day that you can come to the museum for free. Not that we're super expensive on a good day. It's like $6 for adults, $5 for elders, and college students, and $3 for kids, and five and under are free. Some images of some of our events at the museum, games and things that we do, places that we go. So we do annual thanks-givings. At one point we've done upwards of six in a year, but right now we're doing three. We downsized those just a little bit based on our parking and seasonal needs. Because we have, our museum itself is fairly small, but we have an outbuilding that's a three seasons building. So we can kind of use it in the shoulder seasons and in the summer, but in the dead of winter, it's a bit tough. And so when we get to our new facility, which is one of our biggest things that we're working on, it'll be, we'll probably add some of them back. So this is the kinds of performances and storytelling that you can see at Tomaquag Museum at some of our offsite programs. Back to our indigenous empowerment, I'm showing some other pictures of people. There's some of the grants that we get. We do a lot of grant writing, lots of work around preservation of collections and recording oral histories, things on our blog. I'm website up, you're getting an award from Rhode Island Council on Humanities, but this is what I was trying to get to. So we're also working on new facility development. So when you lead an organization, not only do you have to do all the outward facing things that people see, the educational programs and all of that, and manage your staff and manage the programs and all of those kinds of things. You often have a big project in the background that you're working on as well. And so we're working on a new facility development and the hope is to eventually get to a new site. I don't know how we had that in there again. So, ah, bored. There's me getting an honorary doctorate from the University of Rhode Island in 2016. And so I'm gonna pause there. I just looked through a few extra pictures. See if you have some questions, I know we're running out of time. That was a lot of information. But that's kind of, thank you. So you're certainly welcome to ask a question and you're also welcome to come up and I tend to put things up there but the way this room was set up, I didn't quite make it conducive to passing stuff around so I just left it on the table. When we do our education programs, we bring what I'll call an educational kit but each educator makes their own because again, we're indigenous and we want things that are connected to us and our families so that when we're expressing them, we're not just talking about stuff. We're telling the stories. Like I can tell you who made what, I can tell you why it was made and who it was made for so it becomes more personal. It's back to that giving voice to the indigenous community and not making it abstract but making it very, very personal. Our whole museum educational model is a first person model. Our bylaws do not allow for anyone who is non-native to be a direct educator. You can work in education but you couldn't be the sole direct educator because the whole point is for you to come to this indigenous museum and hear a first person narrative. We have non-native people that are on staff. I think you saw the archivists as non-native but and we've had a myriad of non-native folks that in different positions but the positions that have to be native are the executive director by bylaws, the direct educators by bylaws and one of the co-chairs of the board has to be indigenous and 51% or more of the board has to be indigenous because you're not a native run institution if you don't have those things. It kind of loses the whole point. And so we made sure, I don't know, maybe eight or 10 years ago we reviewed our bylaws and a lot of things that were practiced weren't actually articulated clearly so we wanted to make sure that they were articulated clearly so that we would still be who we were 50 years from now, we're 60 years old but you always grow and change but we didn't want to lose the essence of who we were as an organization. Yes. Could you like do a trip that I think it's or in the end of those, I don't know if that's it but where people want to have it? Yes. So through New Beach One School we took, we partnered with Rhode Island College and the University of Rhode Island and we actually went to a place called Nam Cook. It is the John Chaffee Cringe Preserve. Today, there's a lot of history there, I can't even go there right now, as to why that would make me cringe but the historic name of it is Nam Cook and we went to the site of Nam Cook and Rhode Island College had all the archeological belongings from our communities. They're in their collection and so we went there and saw those and our kids brainstormed, like if you saw a pottery shard, well what does that tell you? So then they did this whole web, if there's a pottery shard there, someone's making pottery, maybe they're cooking with pots there and they went through this whole myriad so if they found a stone tool, well what were you doing with the stone tool if you found a piece of a weaving? Well what was that for? So they extrapolated all that out and actually did public presentation. There was another school that was part of it that just went from an environmental slant and we did this whole public presentation at URI. So the answer to that is yes, not as much as we might like to do that but there's other times and opportunities but it tends to be in smaller groupings of people if we have interns, whatever we're doing, whatever projects we're working on, those interns are part of. The whole point is to empower them and give them experiences to build their resumes and their life knowledge about themselves but also just in general to move forward in the world. One of our interns right now, he just was selected to be on the Rhode Island State Council's first ever team assembly and that's a big deal.  They pushed the envelope because state buildings don't like anything touchy so they pushed the envelope as youth to do the social justice show and it was very well received and did a really great job and now they're gonna be having other opportunities that are building on that so this is gonna be really great for this particular youth and it might feel like one person at a time well how impactful can that be but it's that ripple effect. Every person that we're impacting, every time you're uplifting someone and giving them an opportunity, not only are they doing something great for themselves but they're doing something great for the native community but they're also doing something great for the general public as well so it's a beautiful ripple effect of positivity and growth for everyone and I don't know if you've seen the Woven in Time film. We partnered with Mark Levitt who's this amazing filmmaker. He interviewed a lot of staff from Tomaquag Museum and from the native community in general and it's about the Salt Pond site. It was an archeological site that happened in Narragansett. It's a long story but you can let your fingers do the walking and do Woven in Time and if you can get a chance to watch that it's a really good film and it talks about one of those archeological sites. One of the big things you have to remember a lot of our villages are under the cities so they're hard to excavate so these ones that were off like the coastline that's another thing that they're doing they're doing deep water archeology. The University of Rhode Island I know is doing a lot of that work because there was a time when that was land. Lock Island wasn't an island you could just walk there and so because of that there's villages under the water like that people can do archeological work on and as an indigenous person we're all kind of torn. Part of us like the fact that people find that out because then they finally figure out what we already knew because they're always telling us what they think they know about us and we're always going, no, you're wrong and then they keep proving themselves wrong over and over again. I'll give one example, my favorite example. Narragansett people didn't eat corn. It was a whole period of time that archeologists and historians wrote we didn't eat corn because why? Archeology is a science and if they couldn't prove that we ate corn then therefore we didn't eat corn because they couldn't prove it. Salt Pond site proved that we ate corn in extreme abundance and for us as indigenous people we're like that is the most moronic thing I've ever heard in my life. Not only do we have corn pervasively in our lives in many of the dishes that we eat but we have ceremonies that are around corn. Corn is fertility and birthing ceremonies it's about fertility because corn makes the community survive if you will so it becomes the symbol of fertility for the whole community. We have corn planting ceremonies we have corn harvesting ceremonies like there's just so many ceremonies that are around corn that it was absolutely absurd to us that historians and archeologists and whomever were saying we didn't eat corn but that's the problem. Sometimes common sense gets totally lost in it and the reality is people don't believe oral history I don't know why but they don't believe oral history despite the fact that many researchers use oral history but then they document it and when it's written then it's real but what was said isn't real and there's a real conflict with that and I think in Woven in Time they talked about that the archeologists talked about that how the oral history and the scientific documentation finally wove together and proved what we were already saying was true and that's the thing that's maybe frustrating from an indigenous perspective but that's why in one way you like that this work is done to prove the truths but on the flip side we're not big fans of the whole digging it up part you know we want our ancestors to be left the way that they are and not be disturbed so there's just such a conflict there around archeological work for me Any other last questions before we finish up? I know we got kind of a little late start too when we did our move so well you're welcome to come up and take a peek, take a brochure you're welcome and


Stakeholders at a public hearing organised by the House Committee on Works, Environment, FEMMA and Justice are all endorsing the idea of using concrete cement for the construction of roads in a country as against asphalt. And this follows immense debate by stakeholders which concludes construction companies and the Federal Ministry of Works, FEMMA, amongst others. Details in this report. Chairman Kamutheon Works said the tone for the discussion as he hinged his argument on the importance of road infrastructure for the economic growth and development of the country. What is even more concerning is that in some ongoing projects, the work on site is not proportional to the funds allocated to them. There is no doubt that we will almost come together to chart a new cost for our country if we want to ameliorate the sufferings of the masses. That is why the issue of adopting concrete technology for road construction must be subjected to a thought process to ensure value for money. Hence, this public hearing has become a necessity. In their responses, most of the stakeholders seems to endorse concrete, as argued by representatives of the Ministry of Works and Director of Highway Construction and Rehabilitation, engineer Ade Damola Kuti. They say, apart from concrete roads being cheaper, it is also durable. In a later development, the House Committee on FEMMA had an interface with the Managing Director and members of the Board. He also emphasized the importance of good roads and the need for FEMMA to cover itself in glory. In his response, the Managing Director called for more sources of funding for the agency to deliver fully on its mandate. Please note that the successful implementation of this 14 legislative agenda and strategic action plan will have a far-reaching benefit for Nigerians. It will lead to improved road infrastructure, enhanced transportation connectivity and facilitate economic growth. Furthermore, the adoption of innovative technologies and practices will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of road maintainers. We believe that there is a lot to learn from road agencies from other countries. So to date, we have partnership with the San Rao, which is a South African national road agency. We have an MOU with them on road-related matters. We have a collaboration with the Namibian road authorities. Namibia currently has the best roads in Africa.