 and we've heard it in the non-native community enough for just any one of the topics we're going to cover, because we have to cover our event, some of the relationship specifics, lots of changes, what the publicization is, and legal, MoMo Jump Promontation, I'm the director of the Vermont National Archives Association, and this is my partner, Elie Steele, from Rich Champlain Baratay, using these directorate collections in exhibit, and we've been working together on the heritage celebration, which used to have a very different name, but we've been working together on it for 12 years now, so Elie's is going to get us started. So the Maritime Museum initiated a project working with the indigenous community, and I'm honestly thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure of what the idea originated in both groups at once, but I was working at the Maritime Museum and only occasionally, but the Champlain Baratay Centennial in 2009 was looming on the horizon, and everybody in the cultural institutions and in the world of education and history were looking years ahead to how they were going to celebrate the arrival of the French explorer, and it occurred to some of us, and there were people here, and perhaps it would have been good idea to talk about Lake Champlain's first navigators, 10,000 years worth of culture, that seemed to be swept under the water. So, we arranged, the museum has done a replica building of different boats representing periods of history, so we arranged it for an avanaki canoe maker to harvest bark and do a living demonstration contemporary, but using the size and shape, best of our knowledge of what one of the canoes in Champlain's expedition would have been, and Frederick Weissman, a culture bearer, who was both academic and indigenous, had done a great deal of work with his students and also with members of the avanaki community, and so in 2007, two years in advance of the official Champlain Fargo Centennial, we teamed up, the bark canoe was built in public view during six weeks of living demonstrations and culminated with a wonderful gathering that was made in Campeland, representing the era of that first contact and the canoe was ceremonially launched and we had such a good time, we built again in 2008 when Quebec was celebrating the arrival of Champlain and in 2009 when the Champlain Valley in Vermont and New York were partnered to observe the bark centennial, so that was the catalyst. Okay, so we covered a lot about how this all started, so when it started in 2007, there were no recognized avanaki tribes in the state or in all of New England, okay? So we were here, but we didn't legally exist, so we couldn't even call ourselves avanaki, so the event was originally called the Native American Encampment Weekend and it was pretty well stuck in the past, but you can see in some pictures and it's changed a lot and evolved over the years. In the beginning, the stakeholders were the avanaki community in the museum, but it was really the museum that was driving the ship and through lots of years of working together every year revaluating everything we were doing and the whole process, the avanaki community slowly becoming more and more involved and what ended up happening, which we're gonna talk about more, was eventually in 2001 and 2012, four avanaki tribes received recognition and we were able to change how the event was portrayed because suddenly before avanaki tribes and many avanaki people were getting more involved. All right, I'm navigating backwards so we can go forward, here we are. So this represents the first three years of the Native American Encampments at the Maritime Museum. The bar community was launched during the first of those years and you can see Fred Wiseman in the center interpreting the historic recreations based on as much primary source evidence and archeological evidence as possible to reconstruct what kinds of clothing, ceremonial artifacts, armaments, and items of daily living would have been used by the indigenous people in the contact era. Many people in the different avanaki communities had been pursuing their own research and recreations for many, many years and it was a matter of bringing them all together in one place from all parts of the state and even out of state. And one of the things that was easy during the Quadrucentennial but became difficult in the year after when we looked at each other and we said, well, this has been fun for three years. Are we gonna keep going? And the consensus was, yes, we're gonna keep going but what do we call it? Because legally, we couldn't ask avanaki crafts people to identify themselves as avanaki crafts people because the Indian arts and crafts law. And I believe that's in our obstacle slide so we'll just come up with that. I just want to point something out on this picture, okay? This is me down here in this corner wearing my buckskin dress. So back in those days, even though I was a culture bearer, I knew my history, knew my culture was had done extensive research, written articles and presented programs internationally. Really the only way I could present and do programs about my culture was wearing traditional regalia. This would, me standing here back then without a PhD wouldn't have been possible in that era. And also down in the lower right hand corner is Vera which in this lighting has been helpful for you to see but what she is doing is creating a twined textile. Method of using vegetable fibers locally harvested to create both useful objects like baskets and fishnets and carrying bags and also clothing. I just want you to know she's an extraordinary artist. Thank you. So when we started this, could you put this slide? Yes. Okay, so when we started in 2007, the Abadaki community had their own set goals. We needed to increase the disability of our community. People didn't know we existed and we needed to change that. And we were trying to educate the public so they would know more about us. For many of the reasons everybody is discussing at this event and a lot of that's going on right now diversity, inclusion, equity, but those words weren't being said as of years ago. And the museum's goals were to ensure that our programs and exhibitions would reflect more balanced view of history when I arrived in Maritime Museum 20 years ago in one of the classroom areas was a timeline and it had this much space for 10,000 years of indigenous history every year. This much space for the military era. And this much space for the commercial era and this much space for recreational. Obviously not to scale. Yeah, we could do better. And so from the outset of the partnership, one of the things that we were very clear about was that the Abadaki people were the tellers of their own history and story and culture. We were providing the location and we were providing the context of it's a museum presenting history and culture to the community. But they were presenting the history and culture. So what happened was after the event every year we would have, you would review the event what went right, what went wrong, what can you prove and we started having these courageous conversations that sometimes really started in a difficult way because it's difficult to speak truth power, right? So some of those conversations might start with a long talk. I always, it's Vera, and we'd start talking and I was like, hey, you know, remember when such and such happened and maybe thinking about doing it that way. And something that was really amazing that doesn't usually happen is that she listened and the museum listened and we were able to evolve our process. And so now our current goals have, our goals have all come together. So we're, the Abadaki community is now working with the museum to create exhibits, develop programming, we're working on educational programs together. And you can see actually this image is of the Schoolhouse Gallery and we have an annual Abadaki exhibit in there and there's been a permanent Abadaki exhibit in there since the Clarkson Tenille. So we're looking at how the event changed and I would say line one is the big change that there are four recognized tribes and when the petitions for trial recognition will be incurred by the Vermont legislature, one of the pieces of information that I would say to provide in testimony was how difficult it was to present accurately a view of the region's history and culture when you couldn't utter the word Abadaki and you couldn't invite your presenters to identify themselves by their own cultural name. It was an absurdity that was being overlooked ignored, bypassed, or whatever and now it was articulated in a context in which it could be heard and changed and the transformation of the event, the year after both two years of recognition, the first year was Elnu and, Elnion, I'm walking on Elnion, thank you. And the second year was Kausa and the Siskoi and with those four recognized tribes in place, we were able to remain in the event of Abadaki and the artists were able to identify themselves and we went from having a handful of presenters doing demonstrations as present day living artists. It shifted and the event doubled in the breadth of what we were able to present because people didn't have to say, oh, we're representing our ancestors hundreds of years ago. They were saying, this is me, this is what I do. And the energy of the event, the complexity and beauty of what we were able to present to the community was transformed. So we're gonna be talking on the next slide about what I'm gonna say is gonna jump between this slide and the next slide about recognition. So why does anybody need to be recognized, right? Almost anybody, when you introduce yourself and somebody says, oh, you know, what are you, you might say you're a colleague, everybody accepts you're a colleague, right? Or whatever it is you are, but when Native American or the Abadaki people of this region would say that, people would question us and not believe us because what happened a year before the Vermont joined the union, basically it was declared that we didn't exist anymore. So we never signed any treaties with the United States government, so we didn't legally exist. And we had to petition for recognition to the state to be able to legally exist. So while Eloise was petitioning on the need for the arts organization for us to have recognition, I was also testifying in front of the commission for Native American Affairs and in front of the legislature about the need for Abadaki artists to have recognition because there's this really important law called the Indian Arts and Crafts Law of 1990. And according to that law, so anything as Native American means anywhere, you have to belong to a recognized tribe. Your art has to be labeled. It has to be your name, your tribal affiliation and your tribal ID number on it. Okay, no other artist from any other community has to do that. So it was illegal for us to just say this is Abadaki art or Native American art. So we couldn't even get for your market value for our art. And it was very difficult for us to be able to do presentations and not say that you're from that culture. You'd have to be like, I'm descended from that culture. So that's the reason we needed to know for recognition. And then in 2011 and in 2012, we had these wonderful celebrations. In 2011, they'll new, they'll he again were recognized. And then over here in 2012, the Kawasaki and Sistoy tribes were also recognized. So suddenly there are four recognized Abadaki tribes in the state, but guess what? That's not all the Abadaki tribes there are. We still have Abadaki tribes that do not have recognition in many unaffiliated families. And I'm sorry, this will push us into over time, but it's really necessary for everybody to know it's a really important social justice issue that arts leaders throughout New England need to be aware of to be able to stick your foot in that door and pry it open for Native American people to be inclusionary. So in any case, with the beginning of recognition, we were able to start the Vermont Abadaki Art Association, which was our way of promoting our art initially. But then we realized people didn't know enough about our culture to really want our art. And so we had to start educating the public about that. And we started, we put initially together a website-style directory of who our artists were. And we started working more with the museum. So we changed the name of the event, Native American Accommodation to Abadaki Heritage Weekend. And we started working on a lot more initiatives together. So we were asked as part of this presentation to summarize. So we looked back through the records from those different years, had a real trip down memory lane and tried to condense it for you into a few manageable bullet points. The obstacles, and we've mentioned them in the Tribes Act recognition, the Indian Arts and Crafts Law of 1990 was making it impossible for Abadaki artists to, for example, have a website with their materials on it. The Native American Nomenclature was obscuring the living culture. The finances of gaining support for this event in the ways that cultural institutions usually do, when you couldn't call it what it really is and market it as a living culture event. People were confused between a lesbian, a historical pageant, but we did this for the cause, we don't need to go to that again. And maybe it was a pow wow, well no, it's not a pow wow actually, it's something rather different. And we ourselves had to navigate the control and authority for how decisions were going to be made, who, hearing about it, would apply to participate and exhibit. And again, because the museum felt very strongly right from the outset that the Abadaki people were the ones who were in charge of their own history and culture. They are the experts. They should be the ones making those decisions. We shouldn't be answering the phone and saying, oh yeah, you wanna show your turquoise and silver jewelry from the Southwest? Come on down. We didn't want that responsibility. So again, with the creation of the Abadaki Artists Association a jury in process was put in place and artists were recognized as apprentice level, journeyman level and master level. And we actually included recognition of artists at those levels as part of this event because it brought everyone together from all over the state and from outside the state and people, artists being recognized were in front of both the naked and the non-native community. So it was a very powerful event. So we just got the notice we have two minutes left. So we're gonna move on to impact decolonization through the arts. Decolonization work is not easy work. It really requires people working together being open minded, having difficult conversations and art is an easy way to open the doors. It's not intimidating to people. So we've been able to use exhibits and education programs to basically educate the public. This image shows the exhibit that grew out of three years of conversations. We started with a simple invitational exhibit but by gathering the information, the repetitions for recognition and the conversations that came about with years of time together and trust together and explaining things to one another. The theme of wearing our heritage of what the regalia clothing means in the living culture as opposed to merely being a reflection of the past. That was a topic that became very fruitful and we were invited to bring that exhibit to multiple venues, five different venues in three human states. So that ended up being a good portion of the work that I ended up doing. So after having done programs all over New England for 20 plus years, I started reaching out to all the different places that I had been to as a teaching artist and I started coordinating the traveling exhibit which included a lot of gallery talks. Gallery talks are an amazing way to reach the public in an informal way at their level and answer all of their difficult questions once again. So all of our wearing our heritage opened a lot of venues. It brought a lot of media attention to the work we were doing. This was at the Flynn Tarrant Gallery on Main Street in Burlington. So it was a highly visible and highly respected art venue. Okay, we're over to pass this, sorry. Okay, so which ends up, so on our last note, the last final impact is starting a teacher training course that is being offered through the Maritime Museum and for teachers all throughout New England through Castleton University. So now Abenet Eculturist which started in the past doing living history has now come into college classrooms and museums. Last slide. Okay, this is gonna be actually our prompts for our discussion. So we have bullet points up here for some of the talking points we were talking about in the whole recolonization process and things that people need to keep in mind. And those are all working together. So if anybody has a question, so you can open up with questions, but the most important thing whenever you wanna work with the Native American community is once you get that idea, immediately go to them and bring them into the process. Don't plan out your whole event in a week before an event and say, hey, or don't start a petition and then be like, hey, we started this petition. Can you sign it? And, you know, but everybody else in the arts community is already signed it. You need to come to the Native community immediately. In any case, questions? Yeah, actually, great job that you guys are joining me to try, but I have a few questions. Why did you choose to go to get federally recognition even though we all know that development does not respect any trees? Just what happened with South Dakota. So why would you go to the government that basically, at one point, took away everything that was about you? Then you go back to them for them to recognize what is the, because saying this, because there's a reason why you say this. I mean, many tribes are not going that far. There is, there's a law that's called Aborigines' Rights. It was done in 2016 and literally protects your rights as indigenous people, everything. But which, if you go to ask the government for federally recognition, basically they have to say, in everything, for example, you could not name your heart unless you were a native American. That, even that term, we should not use the term so I won't be playing a native American, we're not native Americans, we're not indigenous, we're not Indians, we're not, not like that. But, again, I'm not in your shoes, so I'm pretty sure the path you have to walk, I can see some trees from it, so maybe in your case it worked. But just keep in mind what you're doing if we federally recognize that was my idea. Well, he brought up a lot of very valid and difficult points, so I'm gonna try and go one by one through them. First of all, we didn't apply for federal recognition. We do not have federal recognition, it costs so much money, we couldn't even consider that. Okay, what we did do was we applied for state recognition, okay? And there were a multitude of reasons for it, which are two, really, that would be a very long seminar to talk about, but I'm gonna have to boil it down to a few points and we can continue talking about this one-on-one afterwards. So, some of the big points were, once again, the Indian Arts and Crafts Law. If you're in a compounded violation of the Indian Arts and Crafts Law, for every item you sell, your violation can be fined $25,000, so if you just felt a little beaded bad, you can be fined $25,000 and possibly spend years in jail. Now, for the arts organization that was selling your thing, possibly, in their museum gift shop, they would be fined much, much more, okay? The other thing is our children were not eligible to apply for any college scholarships or anything like that. We weren't eligible for any kind of minority grants, even loans for minority businesses and things like that, and there's a much more extensive reason that there's so much I can't go into, but also, many aspects, just even of our own spirituality in the United States, you're supposed to have spiritual freedom, right, freedom of religion, but in the United States, plain fact is most Native American people are at least made in any Native American people do not have that because you don't have federal recognition. So, for instance, there are laws regarding feather, the usage of feathers within ceremony and stuff, but if you don't have federal recognition, you're not allowed to use them. After we got state recognition, we were able to, we're one of the few tribes that can use feathers within our spiritual ceremonies. You mentioned aboriginal rights. Without any type of recognition, you have zero aboriginal rights. Even with state recognition, okay, we have no aboriginal hunting and fishing rates. We're not protected under the UN Declaration indigenous rights also. There are constant violations of that. If anybody wants a copy of that, I have it on my computer and we can pop it from a USB from one computer to another, or you can email me. You have a few more questions in there. I would love to, but we can talk also, actually. Oh, okay. Actually, thanks. Is there anyone else? Just a minute. Anyone else? So, I'm just wondering about the initial, my understanding of the reasoning for the Indian Arts Act was to protect native makers, so that non-native people couldn't get away with presenting work and selling it as such. But it sounds like it's a lot more complicated than that. Yeah, the Indian Arts and Crafts Law of 1990 is very complicated. It once originally started to protect American artists. It's nicknamed the Tom Tom Law, you may sometimes hear it referred to in that way, because basically what was happening is Native American-style art, like dream catchers and drums, were being manufactured overseas and brought in and being sold as Native Americans. So it was initially done to protect Native artists, but what ended up happening was artists like ourselves who come from generations to generations of artists, right? And culture bearers, where this stuff has been, these arts have been passed down in our families, we couldn't legally sell our stuff without having recognition. We saw the weaving I was doing in one of the early slides, that tradition goes back thousands and thousands of years and it can be found in Vermont's archeology. So that's how we are connected to the land, but I could not legally sell my art as Native American-based. I can sell it as a craft, let's say a craft, so I could say it's Native American-style art. For organizations hoping to craft language around landing measurements, what are some of the best practices? Oh, thank you for asking that question. Okay, I'm gonna overlap into a separate project right now because this is connected to that. So I'm working on my thesis project right now, which is an avid IT education website, which is gonna have many resources, study guides, videos, and all sorts of material that has been vetted by a committee of people because my feeling is that no one person is an expert in everything, right? And we wanted to be representational of our people. So one of the things we are developing is a video about land acknowledgement, but most important things about land acknowledgement are that you bring attention to the people, the land, and the people that are connected to the land first. Before you say welcome to my event, before you speak, before any of that. So that's key, so you might wanna say before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that we are standing on the ANSI, here's an avanatua. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that we're standing on the ANSI and the avanatua territory of the avanatua people who have lived in and back and up since time immemorial. And if you would like to add more to that, add more to that. If you can invite a culture bearer to be a part of that, to do a welcome, it's always great when those landed elephants start in the language. So people hear the indigenous language of the land before they hear the business of the conference. You mentioned when you were talking about the colleges, you were talking about the education at colleges. Can you talk a little more about that? Do you want to start? Yeah, it's a conjunction with the alabaca project in order to help bring the depth of information into more than a 20 minute to half an hour scroll through an exhibit gallery. We applied to Vermont Humanities Council and they awarded us funds for programs in libraries and also for a professional development program for teachers. And so that was three years ago. We did our first one day teacher training and immediately filled it with people from one end of the state to the other and nearby Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, the person who came from Israel. And the participants feedback at the end was this needs to be more than one day, we need more. There's just so much information and cultural history here. And so the following year, the Maritime Museum had begun introducing to develop professional development for teachers and to work with Castleton University so that instead of just being a certificate that you attended X number of hours that teachers can have in their portfolio, those who chose to could apply and actually get a graduate credit for the hours. And so that part of the initiative goes through Castleton University. We're now in the third year of presenting. It has grown each year, the feedback from the teachers and from the indigenous presenters have been taken into account in deciding how we will best serve the needs of the teachers to adhere to the newest protocols in terms of the students doing individualized learning plans and the teachers not only feeling more comfortable with the resources that are available to them, Mira and the other presenters give very up to date and personal life experience information that amplifies the meaning of the written resources and we are in a position now to recommend much more up to date contemporary and decolonized learning materials and teachers are really eager and it's not just for teachers, I have to say it is available as an adult education experience. So we have had presenters from parks and libraries and the director of religious education, people from many different backgrounds who feel that this will better help them to integrate this teaching into their lives and their work and their communities. I also wanted to add to that that the museum doesn't develop any of the content. It's solely developed by the Abedepi community, okay? And once again, no one person is an expert in anything, right? So I'm one of the lead organizers for the class but we have two official instructors and then we have other guest speakers that come in and the idea is that the guest speakers that are coming in are coming and speaking to their expertise. For instance, Chief Don Stevens will come in and he'll teach about wall and wall of protocols, right? We have Melody Walker-Brough who's a historian and she teaches the introductory history portions. I can teach the education portions. Lena, who's here in the front row, she's a full-brained scholar, studying sustainability and development right now, working on her dissertation in Abedepi, food sovereignty and food security. She, her undergraduate work is in environmental science. She's teaching the correlations between science and ethno-science and the idea is that we teach teachers how to bring Abedepi culture into all content areas. So we're no longer just stuck and relegated in this historical place but we're present in all content areas. So my question is, how do you talk about the visibility of Abedepi because I'm sure that there's invisibility, right? There are people who have been lost and families who have been lost, but they need to be playing. How do you do that revelation work? Slowly and it's cheerfully. There's a lot of, there are many different initiatives going on all at the same time but not necessarily as a piece of this work. Bringing faceless family members back into current being. So for instance, last year, BPR contacted me for Women's History Month and I did a short piece basically dedicated to the grandmothers that we no longer remember. Just generally talking about some of the things that they did. We have another piece that's coming forward about Abedepi women. It's not out yet. Our exhibit work in the All About Exhibit, we had talked about as a traveling exhibit. We have what we call the Wall of Honor that paid tribute to a lot of family members who were long gone that kept family cultures going through wars, through eugenics, through all sorts of hard times, things we can't even talk about here. If I could say, one of the ways in which the museum can help participate in this process is that every year since 2007, I will get the phone calls. I hear you're having an Abedepi heritage or an American heritage from a person earlier years that you're having an Abedepi heritage event. I would, if the appropriate for me to bring my grandchildren, we have Abedepi blood and I've never found a way to tell them. Oh yeah. And I'll say, yes. So you come, you talk to them, meet the people who are in the community. That's the reclamation word. Yeah, it's because it's art's work. It really is. It really absolutely is in terms of stories, in terms of what is it that you know, history, Evans, that is just in the family lore. So many of our families, it's like being an Abedepi is such a deep dark secret. Everybody was taught to hide it. So here's one of those moments, okay, this is for my father's childhood. He's 84 years old, so this is going back in time. So he's a child of the Eugenics era, okay. He was taught never to tell anybody who's native. He taught that to me. When I came out as a teacher or teaching native studies and stuff, he was like, what are you doing? Don't tell people. But I grew up with stories like this one. So he's sitting at the dinner table with his family. They have some neighbors over and he has a lot of brothers and sisters. They're all sort of sitting there and his sister, Dolly, basically just lurks out, she's Indian. Back in those days, they used the word Indian, right? Nobody said Native American or you didn't say, it was just Indian. And that is basically a product of colonization, right? Because that's what everybody was taught. But in any case, this is gonna sound harsh, but this is what happened back in those days. Her father basically kind of whacked her. You didn't say those things in public because there were awful things that could happen to you. Vermont had the Klu Klux Klan. And guess who, they were after? They were after us, our kids. To this day, they get bullied in school. It's not something about the past, but with the reclamation work, part of that is coming and doing these talks and never letting my relatives that do not have recognition be left behind, right? We still have this Indian arts and crafts law thing. We still have this Indian arts and crafts law thing we have to deal with, right? So we have the heritage celebration, but we will invite people to be guest speakers, right? During, when we do exhibit work, for all of us, we invited people to be part of that exhibit that didn't have recognition. We have to always remember our cousins and our extended family. And we asked arts organizations to do the same. So maybe you can't sell something in a gift shop because somebody doesn't have legal recognition, but you can invite them to be a guest speaker. You can invite them to sing. You can invite them to do storytelling. You can invite them to share their stories. And I think we're out of time.