About the Institute

Ancient Stories, New Neighbors: Decolonizing Indigenous Homelands and 17th-century New England

A Two-Week NEH Summer Institute for Teachers

July 24 - August 6, 2022

Application Deadline: March 1, 2022

Ancient Stories, New Neighbors: Decolonizing Indigenous Homelands and 17th-century New England brings together innovative thought leaders from the nation’s classrooms, dig sites, archives, and museums in the place Mayflower’s arrival accelerated a series of events that permanently changed an already-existing, complex network of Indigenous communities, each with its own rich cultural traditions, politics and aspirations. Ancient Stories, New Neighbors will use Mourt’s Relation, a 1622 English pamphlet detailing the early years of Plymouth Colony, as a case study in decolonizing historical narratives and recentering Indigenous voices by employing a range of related primary sources including archaeology, landscape, material culture, oral history, and written documents. The institute will reveal how an Indigenous-colonial regional landscape was built and evolved through collaboration and conflict in the 1600s.

This institute is rooted in the growing practice of “decolonization,” a process in which cultural institutions work to accurately reflect the diversity and voices of the people within their collections and communities. According to Lorén Spears (Narragansett), Director of the Tomaquag Museum: “the process of decolonization of institutional programs…. supports education and breaks the mythology that these nations and peoples are ‘gone’ or ‘vanished.’ It also opens up dialogue to understanding the history of the land you are on, the process of settler colonialism and how we begin to unpack this history and heal from the historical trauma.” A museum’s decolonization practice can range from sharing authority and collaborating with tribal communities to privileging Indigenous perspectives and combating cultural erasure by expanding the documentation and interpretation of history beyond a dominant cultural group. PPM defines "decolonization" as: a process of reading, observing, listening, writing, and teaching history that expands our shared knowledge and understanding beyond traditional, settler-colonial narratives and perspectives. This process is central to PPM’s current strategic plan, which includes both a commitment to complex history and an institutional name change from Plimoth Plantation to Plimoth Patuxet Museums in order to better represent all the people who lived and worked on this land in the 17th century.

Ancient Stories, New Neighbors challenges decades of scholarship in which the histories of Indigenous communities like Patuxet and colonial communities like Plymouth Colony were told in isolation and primarily from male colonial viewpoints. This dated view leads to an assumption of little cross-cultural interaction between communities after the First Thanksgiving (1621) and the assumption that Indigenous people have not and still do not play an active role in shaping the American experience. Now, new perspectives, research, and analysis of a range of source material from archaeologists, historians, and cultural leaders is revealing a far more sophisticated, complex, and multicultural New England landscape that extends over 12,000 years - including the arrival of English colonists in the 1620s.

These groundbreaking insights are rapidly changing the way we think about and engage with the difficult realities of our nation’s colonial past. They remind us that history is far from static, and even stories as familiar as the arrival of Mayflower, the Pilgrims’ landing on Plymouth Rock, and the First Thanksgiving have more to teach us. Ancient Stories, New Neighbors will bring together leading scholars and cultural leaders from across the humanities to help educators better understand these complex histories and incorporate new ideas about community, leadership, and civics into their classrooms. The holistic Institute curriculum supports related language arts, social studies, and fine arts in a STEAM approach to learning, notably through artifact/document analysis and the study of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Abenaki, Pequot, and other local indigenous cultures.

Plimoth Patuxet Museums is situated on the original grounds of the Wampanoag community of Patuxet and 17th-century Plymouth Colony. Significant archaeology digs have been conducted on the Museum’s grounds and across the region, and the Museum’s unique collections tell critical yet unheard stories about the complex nature of Indigenous-colonial relationships in the 17th century. The Museum’s four living history exhibits combine traditional scholarship with oral history and historical archaeology to bring the histories of these communities to life. In addition to significant collections and knowledgeable staff, Plimoth Patuxet fosters relationships with local tribal leadership, as well as with the nation’s leading scholars in Indigenous Studies and colonial history.