It’s been a great week. There are all the loose ends to sort of tie together, but they are being tied. We had a great meeting on Saturday and settled on key dates to wrap things up and start testing, and it all feels doable. Knowing me, I’ll throw in some extra tasks (still more activists who could be written up and added to this iteration!!), but I’ll try not to be unreasonable. 

Last Saturday, Estefany and I attended the 11th Annual Columbia University Pow wow. Estefany met my kids, and I got to share a little pan-Indian culture with her. We put in a valiant effort to win the potato dance along side my sons, and we danced a twisty-turny two-step. Although there was nothing specific to the Wampanoag on display, going to pow wows always bring strong feelings of taking in strong medicine. The drumbeat always heals me and centers me, and I enjoy the flashbacks of spending summers on the pow wow circuit with my mother.  

Before the break I was able to correspond with Professor George Price a bit, and I’m looking forward to getting more of his input on the work as a whole. We started an interesting discussion about the threat of kidnapping faced by Wampanoag of mixed heritage who didn’t live within native communities. He also pointed me to a passage in his book, The Eastons: Five Generations of Human Rights Activism, 1748-1935 (about a prominent and exceptional mixed family of Wampanoag heritage from whom he depends), in which Hosea Easton considers the different attitudes that whites had towards Indians and Afro-Americans. In it H. Easton offers that whites had gotten what they wanted from the native community: land, and so they no longer considered them as a threat or even really existing, despite evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, it was their very bodies and labor of Afro-Americans that whites wanted and that was a perpetual location for exploitation holding a continued emotional/political/economic charge. This has me thinking about how the Wampanoag, mixed and otherwise, denied this role as innocuous or irrelevant subdued wards, and made their presence and intentions known through, among other things, their activism. 

It feels like the course end is suddenly closing in fast. We’ve done so much in the past weeks, and most of the team even anticipated trucking along through the break—but, surprise, people needed an actual break. The amount that has been done so far is so impressive and we have so much to be proud of—at this point we just need to tie it all up into a shareable experience so people can really see and feel that effort. 

“Just” I say— but, yet it is a “just.” Just be honest with ourselves about what is doable, where we are, and where we can get. I feel positive about what we can still accomplish, but I am looking forward to sharing space with the team so we can get aligned and feel each others energy as we start to bring the project to shareable life. Everyone has been asked to take a look at their own work streams and consider places they can simplify and consolidate so we can discuss what places to streamline while getting us as close to our vision as we can. 

As for me personally, before the break, in the days just before the break I closed out the research portion of the project and briefly shifted my focus to my other classes to make sure everything was in a good position for my return (I was on a family trip that made it impossible to work). Now that we are back, I am devoting as much time as I can to writing the remaining front end copy (finished the glossary today!—anticipate the front end copy done this week), and supporting on outreach (specifically social content). These are all within my wheelhouse, so I currently feel good about getting myself in the position to finetune our presentation materials in a timely manner—family and other courses-permitting.     

 This week has been a mix of housekeeping and keeping the ball rolling. With two team meetings and two 1-1 meetings, a lot of important work was realized.

A Little Team Reflection

After a fruitful team workshop (we learned more about our working styles and what we value and can offer in a team environment) and project retro (we discussed what is working well and not so well) we feel even more aligned as a team. It was good to hear people talk about their needs and styles in their own words, some being new insights while others we may have noticed in practice already. The retro helped us figure out that none of us have really been using our project management software because it just felt like yet another app to adjust to and navigate. Many team members had devised tracking systems in places they are more familiar, and as a team we decided to move to an overall checklist to help us mark major milestones, rather than tracking each minute step as a team. We’ll review it fully with the team on Wednesday, but Elizabeth and I were pleased to see that we have pretty much hit our goals give or take a few days. Some processes have changed since the plan was formulated, pushing certain things out a little, but the crux of the work is on track. 

Keeping the Ball Rolling

In the last week I was able to enter several events and new activists, getting me closer to finishing up with my research goals by the end of this week. There’s still quite a bit to write up, but I feel good about having a finite list of things to check off. It’s definitely doable, and it will definitely require a real push. 

Meeting with Estefany to discus social was very helpful. We were able to discuss content themes for posting and figure out what kinds of templates would suit our needs. She will be pulling language from the project proposal and our outreach plan to create some key messaging that we can apply to our communications. I’ll be pulling some inspo and helping brainstorm specific posts that fit under our themes. This is fully in my wheelhouse, so I feel confident that I can fit this in with the research I need to do. 

I also had a good check in with Elizabeth who took on a major chunk of research in the last weeks. She was so fully invested in the conversation and it was exciting to hear her perspective on what happened in Mashpee in 1833. We helped each other realign our approach to documenting our research, making sure to center our Wampanoag audience, keeping everything accessible and easy to knit together. 

The front end design is coming together nicely, and when Estefany shared her latest updates, I think we all felt the project moving that much closer to being realized. 

This week has all about fine tuning and information gathering. Putting my head down and diving into the research, I was able to get more entries prepped and into the database. I’ve discovered that, although it makes sense to write up our activists first, this can lead to the unearthing of a number of new events to consider. Given the time we have, I am doing my best to track these events without feeling the need to account for them in this first expression of this project. 

Although I am aware of quite a bit of Mashpee history, a lot of the history I am learning that originates in other Wampanoag communities  is very much new to me. It’s been interesting getting a bird’s-eye view of how the communities interacted— that Wampanoags as far as the Pocasset in Fall River moved to Martha’s Vineyard and joined Aquinnah and Chappaquidick families, for example. I had always known of the Aquinnah and Mashpee connection, my own family has ancestors from both.  I’ve also learned so much about the interaction of  outsiders, including the Massachusetts anti-slavery community out of Boston,  with the Wampanoag. I’ve added that entire topic to the “for later” list…which has admittedly gotten a bit long. 

Elizabeth took on the research and write-up of one of the key events for our database. I intentionally stepped away from that event, The Mashpee “Revolt”, because I had some awareness of the events—although I’ve learned so much more working on this project. I also met with Estefany to collaborate on the visual identity which we are aiming to lock in this week. Again, coming from a design background, I intentionally stepped away from fully owning that process in an effort to push outside of my comfort zone, and to  practice true collaboration. In the end, this project is impacting me on multiple levels—giving me new historical perspective, helping me better understand the development of a DH project, and helping me stretch my wings into new areas of expertise. I expect to be reaping the benefits of this process for a long time to come. 

This week has been interesting—ups and downs and all arounds. I was able to dig into the research more and started to uncover some idiosyncrasies in the types of events that can be captured. Some of the petitions signed by Wampanoag activists, for example, were part of larger campaigns that spanned the state and sometimes country (Ex. Against the annexation of Florida and Texas). In these instances more than one Wampanoag community may have participated and so that needed to be reflected on the map. That has implications for the structure of the database, data entry, and formatting. We were able to diagram out a few scenarios and determined potential solutions to help streamline the research, notations, and data structure. It’s been interesting watching the shape of things evolve and needing to make adjustments as we go along—learning is fully activated.

On the “up” side I was able to uncover evidence of Wampanoag ancestry of an important historic figure who I had strongly suspected of being of our community. After hunting through genealogy archives, petitions, and various New England historic society documents I had a major breakthrough. I am now 99% sure that Mary J. “Polly” Johnson, a prominent member of New Bedford society, active member in the anti-slavery movement, participant in the Underground Railroad and host to Frederick Douglass when he first arrived to freedom is in fact Wampanoag likely on both sides of her parentage. Due to various spellings of her parents names (Isaac vs. Isaiah Anna vs. Hannah) her connection to her parents and siblings is somewhat obscured in the records. Her brothers went on to marry into the Wampanoag community in Aquinnah (Martha’s Vineyard) and one even went into business with another prominent Wampanoag family (the Cuffes). So that just knocked my socks off…and made me incredibly angry. I, again, had to face just how pervasive the erasure of our presence has been and see so much work laid out before me to contribute to our reinstatement in public history.

It only reinforces the importance of this work, and I continue to be incredible thankful for the resourceful brilliant team helping to get this project off the ground.

We’re trucking along with lots of great things in the works. Each teammate has been able to make impressive progress on the various moving parts. Elizabeth nailed down our timeline tech and shared various lay-outs with us, with one very closely mirroring the original wireframes right out of the box. Some extra styling once the visual identity is nailed down and it will tie in nicely with the rest of the site. Estefany has started the visual approach was also able to give our outreach plan shape and start building out what has become a really robust contact list.

We have a database structure thanks to Zelda. They walked us through the basics of database vocabulary and functionality and gave great pointers on naming systems to ensure everything is unique and easy to read. This was especially useful to me as I get familiar with the process of transferring my research into something that speaks to the work that everyone else is doing. 

I’ve been focusing on ramping up the research process using the templates I created to guide with our first activist, Absalom Boston of Nantucket, and his participation in the desegregation of Nantucket schools and ensuring equal access to education of all children in Massachusetts. The more I dug in the sources the more I came across leads on other activists and events. It’s a struggle at times to stay on task and not chase down the new information, but I’m doing my best to just note those paths for future reference and stay on task. I realize, more than ever, that this site will be “alive” with edits rolling in as the net gets cast wider and awareness of the texture of that era emerges even more. I  am feeling good that  the data for our first two entries is captured, and, along with the team’s incredible work, it’s clear we are well on our way to bringing MTS to life.

This week has been very fruitful. We’ve been settling more framework questions, but also starting to move into the actual gathering, and creating that will get us to the final expression of the project.

Ramona Peters joined our last team meeting. Ramona, who has graciously agreed to collaborate with us on the project, is a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal member who served as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and now focuses on the work of the Native Land Conservancy, an organization she founded 10 years ago focused on putting as much Wampanoag land in trust. Ramona is considered a Firekeeper—a keeper of traditions within the tribe and also has extensive experience managing the complicated relationship between scholarship, institutional frameworks, and Indigenous world views. Her initial feedback on our project framework and wireframes included an important reminder that our language must be as accessible as possible to truly make the project successful. Overall, her encouragement and excitement about the work served as an important reminder that this project will be of longer term use and service. 

For my part, I worked to fine tune some aspects of the project flow in Click Up that the team created together, created templates to guide research capture, wrote a budget to account for the $200 available via CUNY, gathered design inspiration to inform Estefany’s work on the visual identity, and started researching our activists. While visiting the National Park Service’s outpost in New Bedford on Sunday, I, by chance, encountered a mention of Mary J. “Polly” Johnson’s heritage as mixed Native and Black. Based on her place of birth and maiden name I feel confident she is Wampanoag, but will need to do a little digging to verify this. Besides being well respected abolitionists and confectioners (!), she and her husband hosted Frederick Douglas when he first captured his freedom. This discovery amplified my excitement about what else may be brought into the light through the work we are doing.  

Regarding data management, I am thankful for Zelda’s expertise and longview. Their design has captured some of the key questions we have: who has access, how do we ensure perpetual availability and usability of the data, and what tools in particular are needed to make that happen. Data management conversations are the most likely to remind you of the precarious legs that DH projects can stand on, and to be honest, I have been considering in what ways to bring these stories, this data, into the real world to make it perhaps more accessible for some but also tied to a lived experience.