NEH grants $444K to Tomaquag Museum for new home on URI campus in Kingston
The Tomaquag Museum is Rhode Island’s only museum that’s totally devoted to telling the story of Indigenous peoples from a first-person perspective. Thanks to a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, it’ll soon have a new home at the University of Rhode Island campus in Kingston. In a conversation with Morning Edition host Luis Hernandez, the museum’s executive director, Lorén Spears, said the new location will be more expansive and accessible.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TRANSCRIPT:Hernandez: Lorén, it’s such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much for the time.
Lorén Spears: Kutapatush. Thank you.
Hernandez: I want you to start by telling us a little bit about this grant. And again, it’s from the National Endowment for the Humanities. What will this new grant make possible?
Spears: So this new grant is really to help us start, you know, getting to the point of construction in our new museum project, along with other funding that we’ve received. It’s actually a challenge grant. It’s over $444,000, which we have to match two to one. … It’s literally to help us begin the construction of the new museum, which has lots of components to it – an education center with educational classrooms, the Indigenous Empowerment [Center], which includes a cafe so that folks can come to the museum and experience indigenous foods while they’re learning about indigenous culture, and our research, archive collections research center, and of course the museum exhibit gallery at large, as well as outdoor exhibition spaces.
Hernandez: Why the new location? What’s behind the move?
Spears: So it’s something that our museum board and staff have been working on quietly for a long time, because we’re in a very remote space in Exeter, on the Arcadia side of Exeter – and although extremely beautiful, not easy for people to find. And one of our biggest problems is, not only hard to find, but we’re also having problems with flooding there. This last storm was included in that, where bridges were closed that were leading people to us, on these rural back roads. And so that makes it really a challenge. So we are really looking forward to being in a more central space, easy for people, tourists and average Rhode Islanders alike, to find us, for schools and programs to have an easy place to park and not a hard place because our space is so tight. All of those things will come in really handy and plus we’ll be on RIPTA lines, and that makes it accessible for folks that don’t have public, that don’t have cars. You know, a lot of people living in urban environments like to use public transportation. I live in a rural space, so it’s hard to do, but sometimes we use it still.
Hernandez: Isn’t it true that the new location is actually kind of close to a scene of, if I’m not mistaken, the 1675 Great Swamp Massacre? Isn’t it nearby there?
Spears: It’s not too far away, you’re right. And you know, we, it’s going to be the anniversary, 350th anniversary next year of the Great Swamp Memorial, or the massacre itself, I should say, and the subsequent memorials. Our community – meaning the Narragansett community, which I’m a citizen of – we think that’s really important for those stories to be told and for people to remember, and to understand that that war, which Europeans dubbed King Philip’s War, really is the war for New England. It was to conquer this space and create this new place that we now call New England. And it went up to 1678 in northern New England before the finality of the war, and it was to break the sovereignty, if you will, of indigenous nations here.
Hernandez: I’ve always been fascinated by not only the history between, you know, obviously colonists and the indigenous people who are living here, but it’s how that history is told. And so obviously you get one perspective, which is what a lot of us have had in school. And then there’s the indigenous people’s perspective. And I’m wondering, how does the museum address that history? How do you tell that story?
Spears: Well, you know, our mission is always to tell that story from a first-person perspective. It’s to promote the dialogue around these conversations. It’s to allow people to hear and process and think and have conversations around what these perspectives are. And I often will say that history isn’t the linear line that people like to portray it as. It’s really a big circle that you could call a pie. And the center point of that pie is that point in time in history, and every single slice that you could make into that pie is all the varying perspectives of that point in time. And none are right and none are wrong. They’re just all of our viewpoints based on our experience, philosophy and our ideology and our politics, and everything else we know about ourselves that makes us who we are is fed into that perspective. And I think as learners, it’s really important to hear lots of different perspectives and to understand where people are coming from. … That’s why we do projects like “A Key into the [Language of] America” by Roger Williams, where we wrote footnotes from our perspective, based on what he was saying about our community, what we felt about what he was saying about our community. And I think it’s important for people to understand that in that project, we weren’t picking on Roger Williams per se, but we were saying he was coming from a certain viewpoint, a very, you know, Puritan, Christian viewpoint, that was not the same as our viewpoint, and which is why he often, even when he said nice things about us and our culture, he would in turn also call us negative things like heathen and infidels and things like that, because we didn’t have the same religious beliefs.
Luis Hernandez: You’ve been doing – again, the museum has been around now since 1958 doing educational programming all this time. Now that you’re going to have this new home, I’m wondering, do you find people showing more interest in the work? Are they more excited? What have been the trends over the years, by the way, in, in people coming and visiting and seeking that knowledge and information?
Spears: Well, I can remember when I first started being the executive director here, we thought when we hit a thousand people in a year that we touched, that was a lot. And now we’re hitting 20,000 people a year. You know, it’s a lot of people when you start cumulatively adding that together. And I know that the new museum will just add to that opportunity because we’ll be more centrally available, we’re on the bus line, we’re near the train station, we’re on the bike path. It’ll create so much more opportunity and access for people to visit the museum and more engagement through interior exhibit spaces, art galleries, as well as external exhibit spaces that we have planned in the landscape, including a mini village with art installations of a longhouse and a wetu and the dugout canoe. … We continue to expand and be able to continue to hire more and more staff. And that means we’re impacting, you know, the general community of people, but also the native community that are telling their first-person stories through this museum as educators.
Hernandez: So what are the next steps for this new space? When does the location open?
Spears: Oh, that’s always the million-dollar question. So we are working very diligently with the University of Rhode Island, who acts as the planning, zoning sort of boards of this process, since it is on URI land. And we’re hoping, fingers crossed, to break ground sometime this year, but there are still some behind-the-scenes regulatory things that we have to get through in order to actually get to a groundbreaking date. And so I won’t even try to venture a guess as to exactly when that is, but we will be sure to, you know, ring the bells and scream loudly and send out every form of media possible when we do know of a more firm date for groundbreaking.
Hernandez: Lauren, it’s been such a pleasure. I really appreciate the insight. Thank you so much.
Spears: You’re welcome. Kunoopeam.
Go to tomaquagmuseum.org for more information.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
The post NEH grants $444K to Tomaquag Museum for new home on URI campus in Kingston appeared first on TPR: The Public's Radio.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free