Image: Gaia. Still Here. 2018. Mural. 32 Custom House St., Providence, Rhode Island. Photo by Geri Augusto.

Land is the crux of the question of sovereignty in the Americas, but other types of sovereignty, including those of the person and of the imagination [1] have always been important. Both the indigenous population and the captive Africans imported to work for the European settlers were entangled in the ways that settler colonialism reshaped the land and its uses, and sought to redefine what being human on that land meant. The passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, for example, with its emphasis on individual “allotments,” saw the displacement of Native American communities, who were forced to assimilate to Western conceptions of land, waterways, and ways of life. Their sovereignty gave way to settlers’ claims to land, and "survivance" became an important mode of existence and resistance for Native Americans. The Dawes Roll also redefined the relations of enslaved and free African-descended communities to the lands in “the West” on which they, too, had labored. This gallery reclaims aspects of indigenous experiences erased by settler-colonialism, redefining narratives of oppression with those of expression -- sovereignty that is visual, material and imaginative--and also reworks how we might think about the relationship of enslaved black people to American lands, if we did so eschewing "settler logics."[2]

[1] Lamming, G. Sovereignty of the Imagination. Philipsburg, St. Martin: House of Nehesi, 2009.

and Richard, J. “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors.” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (April 01, 2011): 465-486.

[2] Cordis, S. (May 01, 2019). Settler Unfreedoms. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 43, 2, 9-23.

Artist's Statement: This project has compelled me to look back at my childhood penchant for maps and better understand them, but also to realize the parallels that exist within the imaginer-colonizer-explorer mindset. Maps are selective in the narratives they tell and the ones they choose to obliterate. All the maps used in this project are of the same land, yet had such vastly different audiences, purposes, and sources of power. Those by settler-colonialists demarcating the same region over centuries show their two-dimensionality when existing alone; they are a product of history, but silence the history of the land.

Experimenting with a kind of prismatic effect in this piece, on both an aesthetic and conceptual level, I use different layer orders, placement, edge-softenings and opacities in the same document to bring to prominence different borders, landmarks, and focal points. I downloaded dozens of maps of the Rhode Island and New England area, among others: centuries-old ethnographic maps of indigenous territories, treaties, and languages; maps intentionally designed by indigenous people to show how land inherently comes with ways of life, culture, and earned, spiritual and intimate knowledge of the landscape;[1] and contemporary google maps of the Providence area.

Through channeling and critiquing the impulses that shaped the formation of colonialist maps, The Kingdom of Rhode Island seeks to present a counter narrative to the historical and modern-day mappings that have shaped our relationship with the land.

[1] “Native-Land.ca | Our home and native land” Native Land. 2020. Retrieved December 14, 2020. https://native-land.ca/.

Artist's Statement. My assemblage of seeds/pods/grains/dried leaves/shells and objets trouvés on fiber and cloth, encapsulates the botanical knowledge and agro-forestry skills of the captive Africans (overwhelmingly) and Native Americans enslaved on plantations and estates in the Americas, as well as in maroon communities, and encodes a material expression of their memory and histories.

Key to the Assemblage

Rice & indigo (top left). Slave-grown in: South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Carolina Sea Islands (Gullah territory). Rice also in Mexico; indigo in Martinique. Indigo-dyed cotton cloth by Ann Chinn.

In field rows, L-R (top middle): Sorghum, okra, congo/cow/blackeyed peas (originally from Africa); maize/corn(Native American), pumpkin. In shell dishes: Black and yellow benne/sesame seed (originally from Africa). Callaloo/amaranth (indigenous to Americas), Guinea-hen/galinha de angola feather. Cultivated and raised by self-liberated Africans and Afro-descendants in: maroon settlements and towns (Jamaica, Surinam), quilombos and mocambos (Brazil), palenques (throughout Latin America). Black Nigerian cotton cloth and blue Yoruba aso oke cloth from collection of the artist.

Sugar & coffee (top right). Slave-grown in: Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Antigua, Martinique and other Caribbean islands; Brazil, Mexico. Sugar also in Louisiana and Florida. Traditional Jamaican cotton cloth for clothing of enslaved women from collection of the artist.

Zimbo/ buzio. (middle border line) shell currency in the Kongo kingdom, and also symbol of 1798 Brazilian slave revolt) and Brazilian capoeirista figurine

Tobacco & cotton (bottom left). Slave-grown in: Virginia (tobacco) and throughout all the U.S. South, as well as Brazil and Colombia. Malian bògòlanfini (mudcloth) from collection of Karen Allen Baxter.

Cacao, coffee, sugar & mandioca/cassava (middle bottom). Pau brasilis (red dyewood tree). Slave-grown or harvested in: Brazil. Burlap coffee bag.

Cloves, vanilla bean, coconut (bottom right). Slave-grown in: Swahili Emirates of East Africa (Zanzibar, Lamu, Pemba), Mauritius, Madagascar and other Indian Ocean islands. Banana fiber paper.