Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice

Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea

On view at Mystic Seaport Museum, "Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project centering maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African-descended worldviews and experiences.

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Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea

On view at Mystic Seaport Museum, "Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project centering maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African-descended worldviews and experiences.

On view at Mystic Seaport Museum, Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea is a new major exhibition centering maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African-descended worldviews and experiences. Unraveling the threads of existing maritime narratives for the history of the Dawnland (New England), Indigenous dispossession, and racialized slavery, this exhibition is rooted in voices and histories that have been silent or silenced. 

Kuhtah and Kalunga are the Pequot and Bantu words for the Atlantic Ocean. Kuhtah/Kalunga and its tributaries—with its cycles of ebb and flow, push and pull, and trauma and healing—forever connect the histories, cultures, peoples, and legacies of ancestral African societies and kingdoms to the Sovereign Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island, or North America. Like waterways, contact between Africans and the Indigenous Nations of the Dawnland attests to the power of African and Indigenous ancestors, the circularity of time, and fundamental cycles of death and rebirth. 

Entwined explores the enduring legacies, strength, and resilience of Sovereign Indigenous Nations and African-descended peoples of the Dawnland. Foregrounding ancestral and descendant voices, Entwined re-weaves a narrative of African and Indigenous maritime cultures whose histories are forever interwoven in the stories of freedom, sovereignty, and the sea.

Acknowledgments 

Entwined is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories (RNEH) project organized by the Simmons Center at Brown University, Williams College, and Mystic Seaport Museum and generously funded by the Just Futures Initiative of the Mellon Foundation.

Now on view at the Mystic Seaport Museum in the Stillman Building 
April 20, 2024, through April 19, 2026 
Curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes, PhD and the RNEH Exhibition Committee Members

2021–2022 RNEH Exhibition Committee

Richard “Soaring Bear ” Cowes, Brad Lopes, Dr. Frances Jones-Sneed, Heather Bruegl, Jason Mancini, Leah Hopkins, Lorén Spears, Cheryll Holley, Nikki Turpin, Debbie Khadroui 

2022–2023 RNEH Exhibition Committee

Brad Lopes, Lorén Spears, Pilar Jefferson, Cheryll Holley, Leah Hopkins, Jason Mancini, Penny Gamble-Williams, Doreen Wade, Anika Lopes 

Exhibit design and fabrication by SmokeSygnals.

Learn more about the exhibition

Press Coverage

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Connecticut Public Radio

A CT museum exhibit aims to tell stories of the sea through Indigenous and Black perspectives

“Wail on Whalers, a Portrait of Amos Haskins” by Felandus Thames, an “homage to escaped enslaved people who found autonomy in whaling,” is comprised of hairbeads strung on coated wire. The piece is part of the Mystic Seaport Museum's “Entwined” exhibition, which reimagines thousands of years of maritime history through Black and Indigenous worldviews and experiences.

"Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project organized by the Simmons Center at Brown University, Williams College, and Mystic Seaport Museum and generously funded by the Just Futures Initiative of the Mellon Foundation.
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Forbes

‘Freedom, Sovereignty, And The Sea’ At Mystic Seaport Museum

The Atlantic Ocean connects indigenous people along the coast of what is now New England and those in the western African nations of Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Kalunga, in the Bantu language widespread across Africa. Kuhtah in Pequot.

The depths of these connections are explored at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, CT–Pequot land–during “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea,” an exhibition breaking from the Museum’s tradition of telling maritime stories through a colonizer, shipbuilder, industrial, extractive perspective. Before starting any work, “Entwined” curator Akeia de Barros Gomes, Senior Curator of Maritime Social Histories at Mystic Seaport Museum and Simmons Center Visiting Scholar, assembled a committee of indigenous and African descended community members to discuss what they wanted to present and how.

"Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project organized by the Simmons Center at Brown University, Williams College, and Mystic Seaport Museum and generously funded by the Just Futures Initiative of the Mellon Foundation.
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NPR Morning Edition

Indigenous and Black people tell their seafaring stories at the Mystic Seaport Museum

Indigenous and Black people tell their own seafaring stories at Mystic Seaport Museum.

"Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project organized by the Simmons Center at Brown University, Williams College, and Mystic Seaport Museum and generously funded by the Just Futures Initiative of the Mellon Foundation.
Read Article