THIS LAND, THIS LAND, THIS LAND BY Isabel Guarnieri ILLUSTRATION Leslie Benavides DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
As a small crowd of us huddle on the cold stone staircase, Lynsea Montanari—a Narragansett visual artist— opens the night with a song. To honor the space we are in, she explains. As Lynsea starts to sing, the atrium of Providence City Hall seems to deepen her bellows, amplifying how her voice rises and falls. Your spirit is watching over me, I know you are in the sky, she sings in Narragansett three times: for the past, the present, and the future. We were all gathered that evening, January 23, 2020, for the opening of an exhibit in the Gallery at Providence City Hall, entitled “All That You See Is(n’t) Yours.” The collaborative mixed-media installation features the work of two artists: Lynsea Montanari, a student at College Unbound from the Narragansett Tribe, and Anna Snyder, a white RISD alumna who spearheads projects at the intersection of public art and education in Providence. Their exhibit marks the inaugural ACT Public Art Residency, a partnership between Providence’s Department of Art, Culture, + Tourism (ACT) and the Providence City Archives. The project, according to the official press release, aims to “infuse artistic practices...into the operations of the city.” The residency is built for artists to work with and within the City Archives to craft a public art exhibition in response to a prompt. This year, the ACT’s prompt was “Colonial Providence,” understood to begin with the founding of Providence in 1636. State-sponsored narratives of Colonial Providence tend to center around the figure of Roger Williams and the importance of religious freedom, as Rhode Island was the first colony with a secular government. But this focus obscures the displacement and massacre of Indigenous tribes that preceded Providence’s founding. The official press release states that Lynsea and Anna’s exhibit “interrogat[es] the City’s complex colonial legacies.” But the artists’ pieces, infused with their own identities and interests, do far more than that—they raise questions about the silences in the archive and expose the tensions inherent to telling a story about Native displacement in the seat of city power. +++ When the ACT Public Art Residency program publicized a call for artists in late 2018, it caught Anna’s attention straight away. A graduate in printmaking from RISD, she recently went back to school to pursue a degree in History at the University of Rhode Island. She had just taken a whole semester’s worth of courses about the history of Colonial Rhode Island and knew that background would be invaluable in the archive. The Providence City Archives on the fifth floor of City Hall holds a collection of manuscripts, maps,
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blueprints, and images with an emphasis on the municipal government that span from its 1636 founding to the present, according to the city website. Something troubled Anna about the call, even made her hesitant to apply—the prompt made no mention of indigenous history, and required no engagement with Native voices. Realizing she was not in the position to channel that identity herself, Anna reached out to the Director of the Tomaquag Museum, Loren Spears, with whom she’d worked with in the past, to see if the Museum would partner with her during the residency. Spears redirected Anna to her niece, 24-year-old visual artist and Narragansett language activist Lynsea Montanari. Together, Anna and Lynsea faced a daunting task: use the City Archives, a source of historical knowledge shaped by the structures of power that continue to marginalize Narragansett and other Native peoples, to create an exhibit that would represent Colonial Providence in all of its violence and complexity. For six months, Anna spent about 15 to 20 hours a week in the City Archives, combing through town meeting minutes and city logs. She struggled to make sense of the dull records—not sure yet what narrative she was trying to tell. But again and again, Anna came across an obsession with borders and demarcating space—map after hand-drawn map scrawled with “Stephen Dexter’s land” or “Joseph Williams’ land.” She was stunned by the banality of these entries, the “violence made boring” that was concealed in layers of city bureaucracy. “It just looked like a city entry,” Anna told me. “But what it actually means is that someone is dying, or being removed from their source of food.” Suddenly, it all became clear. Lynsea and Anna agreed on an overarching theme to frame the exhibit: property, and the juxtaposition between Indigenous concepts of collective ownership and the colonial violence of land theft and appropriation. Lynsea approached the prompt quite differently. She brought her grandmother to the archives to help guide her research, but found it did not have the information she was looking for. Lynsea was most interested in how to represent not just a period of history, but a people—especially Indigenous women, children, and elders. Rather than what she called Anna’s search for “concretes,” or documents related to land and materials, Lynsea was looking for indigenous voices, which the City Archives lacked. “We have been so dehumanized throughout history,” Lynsea told me, stepping away from the gallery opening, “I felt that what I needed to share was stories.” The archive is not a neutral collection of historical records. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s seminal work “Silencing the Past” examines the power relations inherent in the production of historical knowledge, interrogating how monumental events like the Haitian
Revolution have been erased from popular history. According to Trouillot, every historical narrative contains a bundle of silences. This silencing occurs at four stages: the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narrative, and the making of what we call “history”—or what is granted “official” retrospective significance. And these silences build on each other. A historical narrative skews when certain voices or populations are excluded in the creation of archives. Entire histories can go unwritten, and for many, forgotten. What Lynsea encountered in the City Archives’ 40,000 cubic feet of records was a gaping hole, an absence that mirrors the silencing of Native history and voices in museums, school curricula, and history textbooks across the United States. To make up for the silence, Lynsea turned to other sources, conducting oral histories with her grandmother, who passed away while research for the exhibit was underway. Oral histories are a research method often employed by queer, Black and feminist scholars to move beyond the limits of the current archive and re-center personal narratives that have been marginalized from mainstream historical discourse. This in-family archive supplemented the research Lynsea’s family took on collectively using sources like religious texts, allowing her to explore themes like spirituality, family, and the concept of generations. +++ “All That You See Is(n’t) Yours” is divided in three sections across the second floor of City Hall. While the residency was shared, Lynsea and Anna created most pieces individually to explore distinct themes based on their archival sources; Anna relying on material from the white colonist archives, and Lynsea using her family and other research to delve into Native history and spirituality. The two collaborated on one piece, in which Lynsea painted a colorful watercolor of a birch forest over which Anna laid black-and-white colonial houses. The piece, “A Cluster of Colonial Houses,” visualizes settler colonists’ encroachment on Native land, but is also representative of larger clashes in the exhibit: white and Native, monochrome and color, archive and stories, nature and property. In one corner of the atrium hang Lynsea’s three portraits exploring Indigenous and colonist spirituality. Two are in vivid color and portray distinct interpretations of the Manitou, a spirit that inhabits all life. One of the paintings, entitled “Manitou,” depicts a face carved into a tree trunk, surrounded by a ring of pink and blue flowers. The painting recalls the historical practice of carving Manitou statues into trees and utensils, a way, according to the exhibit guide, “of
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