Un-Monument/De-Monument/Re-Monument Initiative 2025

Opening Reception

ARTIST STATEMENT:

"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.