As Akeia de Barros Gomes walks through an exhibit at Mystic Seaport Museum, she points out fishing decoys and displays of maritime navigational skills. There are also traditional Indigenous and African masks, and spiritual figures from both sides of the Atlantic.
The new exhibit, called “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea,” calls on visitors to think about history, water and spirituality in new ways, de Barros Gomes said.
"Walking through the exhibition space, you get the sense that time is cyclical, not linear,” she said. “And that everything cycles and has a birth, a life, a death and a rebirth, as do our histories."
At Mystic Seaport, the country’s largest maritime museum, you can walk through a 19th century coastal village and climb aboard a wooden whaling ship. But, for decades, most Black and Indigenous maritime histories were missing.
“Entwined” aims to change that – by presenting those histories through Native American and Black perspectives.
The exhibit explores ties between New England waterways and Indigenous and African maritime history. The museum’s curators collaborated with local Native and Black communities. To be sure the story was as authentic as possible, museum representatives spent nearly two years meeting with community members.
As she created the exhibit, de Barros Gomes said her goal was centering Black and Indigenous perspectives and telling the history of New England — or Dawnland, the Indigenous term for the region.
“What would the history of the Dawnland — or New England — be, if it were always told through Black and Indigenous voices and if those were the authoritative voices telling the history?” she said. “What would be the focus? What would be the context? What would become suddenly not so important in that history?”
Working with community members helps to “make sure that that story is being told the way the ancestors would want it told,” she said.
Talking, building trust — and healing
Museums across the U.S. have long exhibited Native artifacts without meaningful collaboration with Indigenous communities, so they’ve had a fraught relationship, said “Entwined” designer Steven Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.
"Our story should never be told without us,” he said. “And we hold that very, very close to our heart.”
Peters works with SmokeSygnals, an Indigenous creative production company. He explained that museums usually follow a process “where you have an object, you have an artifact, and then you figure out what you’re going to tell that goes along with that artifact. So ... the object always comes first.”
But when creating “Entwined,” Peters and de Barros Gomes turned that process around. Their goal was to build trust and shape a new narrative.
"Our process is: What’s the story that we want to tell?” Peters said. “And then we’ll go and find the pieces that fit in.”
First, though, museum officials wanted buy-in from Native and Black communities.
So they gathered with community members — and listened.
"It had to be both African and Indigenous communities that were saying, ‘Here’s the story that we want to tell,’” Peters said.
Before loaning any objects, community members wanted assurances that the exhibition would include not only hard history, but also stories of strength and resilience.
"There was a lot of healing that had to take place,” Peters said. “So that the communities became comfortable sharing within those spaces.”
Community members didn’t just share stories; they also contributed items for the exhibit. “Entwined” features loaned “belongings,” or objects, from Indigenous and African communities, as well as various museums. One display shows a set of wampum beads that were found across the Mystic River at the site of the Pequot Massacre of 1637.
The land where the Mystic Seaport stands is significant — it's located on Indigenous ancestral homelands.
This isn’t the first time that Mystic Seaport has worked with outside advisors, said Elysa Engelman, the museum’s director of research and scholarship. But it is the first time an outside committee was responsible for the content.
The committee "really was the voice of the exhibit,” she said.
Anika Lopes was a member of the advisory committee.
“Just to be at a roundtable and everyone at the table was Black and Indigenous, I can’t describe how healing and connected that I felt,” she said.
Lopes traces her ancestry to enslaved Africans and members of the Niantic Indian tribe.
"It reminds me always of your foundation, foundation, foundation,” she said. “Like, who is at the table and who are you involving in the discussions from the very beginning is so important.”
That inclusivity is making an impression on museum visitors like Susie Gagne.
"I’m appreciative of the language,” she said. “It was for the most part written in like, ‘we’ and ‘I’ perspectives; written by people in the groups that it’s about.”
Inside the exhibit: a canoe, hut and art
Inside the gallery, de Barros Gomes looks at a brightly painted dugout canoe that was commissioned for “Entwined.” Native American and West African artists used a centuries-old technique common to both cultures.
"Despite the separation of the Atlantic, dugout canoes were made in the exact same way,” she said. “They were burned out with fire, rather than being dug out with tools.”
There are fewer written explanations on the walls than visitors might expect. That's because Indigenous and Black history has been handed down orally for generations.
Instead, trained guides are at the exhibit to help and answer visitors' questions. Training to become a guide was extensive, almost like a college course, Dean Hantzopoulos said.
"These are stories that were entrusted to us and we were given permission to tell these stories,” Hantzopoulos said.
Continuing through the exhibit, de Barros Gomes walks through two smaller, darkened rooms. The spaces represent periods of historical interruption: slavery, dispossession and cultural genocide. First, she steps into an attic with ship carvings and spiritual objects of enslaved Africans. Next, she walks through an Indigenous hut — called a Wetu — with a first edition Eliot Bible translated into the Algonquin language.
Then, she entered a light, bright contemporary space with a large collection of art by living Native American and Black artists. There are colorful paintings, sculpture and traditional clothing.
"Art that really speaks to contemporary artists reclaiming their ancestry and their ancestral stories,” de Barros Gomes said.
For too long, others told America’s maritime history, she said. “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea” seeks to shift the tide.
"Yes, for the last 500 years, colonialism, slavery and dispossession have been a major factor in our histories,” she said. “But if you think about African and Indigenous Dawnland — or New England — maritime histories, they go back over 12,000 years.”
If you go
"Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea" is at Mystic Seaport Museum. The exhibition runs through spring 2026.
Editor’s note: Mystic Seaport Museum is a funder of Connecticut Public. Read Connecticut Public's editorial independence policy here.
