Majel Peters is an enrolled tribal member and continues in her mother Ramona’s footsteps in preserving the culture and heritage of our Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and Nation. We want to highlight and share her work, which includes two websites filled with Wampanoag-Related Cultural Heritage, for all to appreciate and learn from.
Her two websites, "More Than Surviving - Wampanoag Political Agency, Ingenuity, and Persistence in the Antebellum Era" and the “Whale Chat”, are a compilation of digitized material collections of Wampanoag-related cultural heritage. These projects were done as part of her continuing education towards her Masters Degree in the Digital Humanities program at the CUNY Graduate Center.
"More Than Surviving - Wampanoag Political Agency, Ingenuity, and Persistence in the Antebellum Era" highlights Wampanoag resilience and political action, particularly during the antebellum period. Peters and her team focus on Wampanoag agency, showcasing how the community has navigated through, and actively participated in, pivotal historical moments, from advocating for Indigenous rights to supporting abolitionism. Their work brings to life Wampanoag cultural values of interconnectedness, not only by documenting political activities from the 1830s–1850s but also by challenging colonial and patriarchal narratives that have historically erased or misrepresented Indigenous peoples.
Through the use of interactive maps, timelines, and primary source material, the project illustrates the Wampanoag's active engagement in the key social and political issues of their time, underscoring the continuity of Wampanoag cultural presence.
“Whale Chat” was developed to investigate and document the intermingling of academic and cultural history and memory practices and convenes several points in time as a way of maintaining, building, and activating the vibrancy of historical knowledge.
An excerpt of the conversation between Ramona Peters and Dr. Jason Mancini is at the heart of the project. The original recording was made on August 17, 2013, at the Mashpee Indian Tribal Museum. Peters and Mancini were collaborating on the gathering of exhibit materials for whaling exhibits they were independently developing.
The recording offers a richly informative and entertaining demonstration of the method by which our histories inherently exist on multiple planes. Peters’ and Mancini’s conversation demonstrates how our shared knowledge and experience of it permeates time and place—it exists all at once. As we listen, they weave together their own associations across all points in time inspired by the other’s knowledge. They leap backward and forward in time and from place to place to create complex patterns of interconnectivity.
