Reckoning With the Ethics of Public History

In May 1725, Chief Paugus and the Abenaki of Pequawket (present-day Fryeburg) defended their village against a colonial militia led by Captain John Lovewell. Longfellow’s poem, The Battle of Lovell’s Pond, exemplifies the manner in which colonial histories have mythologized and romanticized settler violence as heroic sacrifice, silencing Indigenous experiences and perspectives. 

Three hundred years later, Atlantic Black Box is engaging with local partners and with a public art collective made up of Wabanaki creatives in the context of WHERE2025 to examine the ways that Indigenous, Black, and settler stories are represented in or absent from the commemorative landscape of this place and to cultivate local capacity for reckoning with long-suppressed histories and skewed narratives.

Eager to support contemporary Wabanaki storytelling  surrounding  the fraught history of the Fryeburg area, Atlantic Black Box is hosting members of the arts collective Spinning Wampum for a residency near the former site of the Abenaki village of Pequawket from Wednesday, July 16 to Sunday, July 20. Our invitation for Spinning Wampum to engage individually and collectively with this layered place and the memories that it holds is envisioned as a time for rest, exploration, and creative practice. 

Spinning Wampum aims to create arts events that center Wabanaki experiences, stories, and perspectives to engage communities around the state with the Treaty of Casco Bay (1726-1727) and its place in the continuing story of the Dawnland. The events at Pequawket in 1725 form a significant thread in the telling of this story.

On Saturday, July 19, the WHERE team will gather with some members of Spinning Wampum and of a local place-based narratives research group working to address the harms of erasure and miseducation. As we convene to discuss ethics in public history while visiting sites of memory, we will be joined by a number of other researchers and community members from around the region who are also engaged in historical recovery efforts.