Imagine coming upon a colorful, round medallion on the sidewalk of your neighborhood park. The marker announces “You are in Native Space.” You use your phone to scan the QR code in the center of the medallion’s sun-like symbol and load a location-aware web app inviting you to “listen.” You put on your headphones and move through the park, immersed in an ever-changing tapestry of sounds that respond to your location: field recordings of human and more-than-human life, powwow drums and music, and a collage of voices describing diverse experiences with and visions of this place over the last 10,000 years.
Created in collaboration with Massachusett elder Elizabeth Solomon, “Native Spaces” is a digital platform for sharing artful, place-based audio narratives of Indigenous survival, resistance, and resurgence in Eastern Massachusetts. Salem is the location of the project’s first chapter and will showcase varied perspectives – both Indigenous and non-Native – on the historic “deed” that, in the colonists’ minds, legitimized their half-century-long occupation of Massachusett land.
On October 11, 2024 – the 338th anniversary of the deed signing, the project will launch at Salem City Hall and the website go live at https://findnative.space.
The “Native Space” medallion is based on a design created for the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag by Lakota graphic designer Sadie Red Wing from tribal artifacts found in Harvard’s Peabody Museum. The color palette references significant aspects of Massachusett culture: yellow for the morning sun, blue for the waters, green for the earth, and purple for the quahog shell wampum used by many Eastern Woodlands peoples for diplomacy, ceremony, and exchange.
Credit
Sarah Kanouse and Elizabeth Solomon, “Native Spaces,” location-based audio platform, 2024-ongoing.