Brown University history professor Mack Scott grew up Indigenous in Rhode Island. He moved to the Narragansett reservation in Charlestown in middle school, where he was steeped in his culture. But prior to that he lived in Providence, where he said this identity was less present in his own life.
“I was considered a city Indian, which means that we would go to the pow wow, but a lot of the storytelling and cultural practices, we weren’t involved in,” he said.
He said that in the city, as a person who is both indigenous and Black, people mistook him for Cape Verdean or Dominican because his Indigenous culture and identity were less visible. He attributes this, in part, to the history of the enslavement of Native people in Rhode Island and Southern New England, which he said was a purposeful erasure of both Indigenous and Black identity.
“The intent is to erase my ancestry. People did not keep the records. People did not record the names,” said Scott. “People change things back and forth… on purpose to kind of create a situation where people like me don’t have a significant history and have not been a significant part of the American saga.”…