Contact: European traders and colonists appeared in this area during the early 1600s. They brought deadly diseases and a systematic approach to using warfare and duplicitous negotiations over land to decimate and displace the Massachuseuk.

Impact: Between 1619 and his death by smallpox in 1633, the Massachuseuk sachem, Chickataubut, endured endless attacks by the wotawquenange, or cutthroat English that included the ancestors of Mayor Josiah Quincy, namesake of Quincy Market. This area was once a place where Boston's early slave auctions fed the trans-atlantic slave trade with Native American and African Peoples!

Ways of My Ancestors - Imagery: Lighting the Path to Awareness, is a newly envisioned piece of my ongoing Ways of My Ancestors - We Are Still Here, Native American photography series. In this series, I document the contemporary existence of the descendants of the Indigenous inhabitants of New England and the ways in which we preserve our culture and heritage despite centuries of efforts to, as stated by Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography, "extirpate these savages" from the population of the United States (1).

This photography series not only engages with and adds to the current conversation surrounding public art and Boston's commemorative landscape, it also offers a perspective of this region from the opposing viewpoint of the Native American peoples of New England.

As we traverse the city of Boston, many of us do not realize that street names and locations that we encounter, such as Mattapan, Neponset, Shawmut, and Saugus, derive from bands of Native American peoples whose descendants are still here and their traditional ways of thinking.

This project is funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-monument initiative (@artsinboston), supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation (@mellonfoundation).