Norman Clement, who is a confederate member of the local Quinnipiac tribe and a member of the Penobscot nation, with Enedelia Cruz and her three kids. Lucy Gellman Photos.
We're taking the weekend off to do some reflection and head into December ready for another month of New Haven arts coverage. In the meantime, we've pulled some pieces from the recent and less recent archives. They're meant for pausing around this time of year—and what a year it has been—to think about both gratitude and about what it means to live in a country built on stolen land.
Connecticut sits on land that was once stewarded by the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugusset, Niantic, Quinnipiac, and other Algonquin speaking peoples. The state also participated in slavery through 1848. This year and in years past, we have tried to face and reckon with those double histories of oppression. Here are a few Arts Paper articles from this year and years past that do. We'll see you Monday.
In October of this year, organizer Norm Clement led a celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the New Haven Green, in what has become a multi-year push for greater recognition in New Haven and Connecticut. While the city’s Board of Alders has officially recognized the second Monday in October as Italian Heritage Day, the city’s public schools now recognize it as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
The aldermanic vote came earlier this year, after the city’s decision to remove the statue of Christopher Columbus in Wooster Square. When we first reported this story, an official monument committee had yet to decide who or what would replace him. They made that decision last week. Read the piece here.
In June, six Native artists gathered virtually for “Stories, Sovereignty, and Imagining Forward” on YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook Live. The panel was part of this year’s 25th annual theInternational Festival of Arts & Ideas, which went completely online in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read it here.
Earlier this year, New Haven photographer Kim Weston assembled 15,000 prayer bundles to honor the 15,000 Indigenous women and girls who have been reported missing and murdered between the U.S. and Canada in the last three decades. We caught up with her in February, at a pre-pandemic workshop at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville. Read it here.
No one has good Thanksgiving/Thanks-Taking recommendations like a local bookstore. In this piece from November 2019, People Get Ready co-owner Lauren Anderson writes: "Thanksgiving should be a time for reflection, contemplation, and connection. These selections are ones that we have found helpful when it comes to cultivating a historically situated and place-based sense of gratitude, especially for the generations that have come before, that have fought for justice, and that will continue long after we have gone."
Read it here.
Writer Rachel Sayet takes her teachers—and readers—to task as she explores Indigenous foodways and the Thanksgiving myth. Or as she begins: "I remember many an argument with history teachers growing up, trying to explain to them that Columbus did not discover 'America,' starting as early as the first grade." Read it here.
Chef Nadine Nelson Nelson, founder of Global Local Gourmet, talks about how cooking jerk turkey in her kitchen is an homage to her diasporic roots and to Black Thanksgiving traditions she’s observed since moving to the United States. Read it here.