New directions featured in prominently in a monumental exhibition
"Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea" Curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes Mystic Seaport Museum - Stillman Building
April 20, 2024, through April 19, 2023
Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea is a new major exhibition opening this spring at Mystic Seaport Museum and will center maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African American 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.
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