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MAYFLOWER HISTORY, PART 1

For Indigenous People, a Different Kind of Mayflower Story

‘You can’t create a colony without creating people who are colonized’

By Josephine de La Bruyere Nov 12, 2020

PROVINCETOWN — On Nov. 11, 1620, 130-odd sea-weary Brits stepped off the Mayflower and onto Provincetown’s sandy shores — into a new world, barely inhabited and ripe with possibility. Then they traveled south and west, to Plymouth; met the Wampanoag tribe, a well-meaning if not particularly sophisticated people; learned from them to cultivate the land; struck up a generous alliance; became the best of friends. So was born Plymouth Colony, and American history. Right?

“Bullshit,” said Paula Peters, a Wampanoag historian and former Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council member.

EXHIBITIONS

Mimi Gross Reframes the Mayflower Story

Her PAAM installation depicts the Pilgrims’ arrival from the Wampanoags’ point of view

By Susan Rand Brown Oct 1, 2020

“It’s historical; it’s interactive; you walk through it,” Mimi Gross says. She is describing how museum-goers will experience The Arrival, 1620, her site-specific installation that is opening on Friday, Oct. 2, at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Theatrical staging leads viewers through scenes representing the first contact between the indigenous people who farmed the Outer Cape for eons and the Pilgrims who were escaping religious persecution — and carrying muskets.

Mimi Gross stands with some of the plywood figures of Wampanoag women that will be part of her PAAM installation, Arrival, 1620. (Photo Breon Dunigan)

“You’ll walk through the gallery, passing the figures, and then, there’s the Mayflower, crashing from the wall,” Gross says. “The Wampanoag people were planting, cooking, and fishing, standing around, when, suddenly — this shock.”

Gross, the daughter of sculptor Chaim Gross and Renee Gross, was a young girl when her family bought their hilltop home in Provincetown’s West End, which was built by painter George Elmer Browne, founder of the West End School of Art. Its spacious, windowed studio is now Mimi’s seasonal retreat. She spoke as the numerous life-size figures that she first sketched, made into maquettes, then shaped in plywood, and painted in her exuberant style were readied for their installation at PAAM, where Gross first exhibited a painting at age 16.

A precocious artist while still a student at Bard College, Gross was invited to show in Provincetown’s legendary Sun Gallery, a mecca for painters working in a loosely gestural, figurative style. Considered risqué in its time, the Sun was censored by local officials for the nudes it included in an exhibit.

“I loved the people who showed there,” Gross says. “I was just a teenager, and happy to be participating. It was the first gallery where I showed, in Provincetown or anywhere.” Red Grooms also showed at the Sun. They married, traveled together, and have a daughter, Saskia Grooms. Collaborators from 1960 to 1976, Gross and Grooms famously created Ruckus Manhattan, a circus-like installation dramatizing the hubbub of the times.

A Wampanoag fighter created for Mimi Gross’s installation, Arrival, 1620. (Photo courtesy Mimi Gross)

At age 80, Gross has a résumé that lists filmmaker, sculptor, painter, and educator, as well as set and costume designer for the Douglas Dunn dance troupe, for which Gross continues to explore movement and rhythm. She also creates low-relief group portraits that read as dimensional paintings. The Arrival, she says, is her most technically advanced, multi-dimensional piece.

Gross is also a habitué of Herring Cove Beach. For as long as she can recall, she sketched there, with her father and with friends. “I recently did a lot of dimensional pieces, made of wood, based on those beach sketches,” she says. They were shown at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the exhibit “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland.” Gross arranged her almost two dozen multi-racial figures in congenial groups that filled 36 square feet.

“Pieces for The Arrival are more sculptural,” Gross says. Some figures are five feet high and four feet wide. Attached to a base, they appear even taller and are painted on both sides. “These are a lot more varied than the work I did for the Coney Island show,” she says.

The journey leading to The Arrival began three years ago, when Breon Dunigan, sculptor and member of PAAM’s exhibition committee, met Gross at Herring Cove. “It was late September, and Mimi was swimming,” Dunigan says. “I knew who she was. We have friends in common, but I didn’t really know her work.” Gross invited Dunigan to visit her studio that very afternoon.

Dunigan was immediately smitten. She proposed a show of Gross’s work to PAAM, its exact nature undetermined. As 2020 loomed, Christine McCarthy, PAAM’s CEO, was looking for an exhibition marking the arrival of the Mayflower.

A young Pilgrim with musket and ammo. (Photo courtesy Mimi Gross)

“It was totally up to Mimi,” Dunigan says of the Mayflower idea. “I didn’t want her to do anything she wasn’t comfortable with. But I did think it would be amazing, and I was right.” Dunigan laughs. When it was time to collect the artwork from Gross’s Manhattan studio, she drove a large van to the city with her son, Liam Bailey, during a rainstorm. They assisted with wrapping the delicate cargo and transported it to the Cape.

The finished pieces went to PAAM, and others, in various stages of completion, went to Gross’s hilltop workspace. Gross’s skill in portrait painting, and the historical research underpinning the installation, is everywhere evident: figures are individualized, assigned a personality. Dark-skinned Wampanoag men are painted in reds and yellows. Garments and accessories are never purely functional: a love of pattern and bright color is reflected in feathered headdresses, shields, and neck ornaments. Women till the land, their hair neatly braided and deerskin dresses fringed. A black-hatted Pilgrim, in knickers and buckled shoes, carries a musket. His smile is tentative, as if asking what comes next.

McCarthy made her own pilgrimage to Gross’s studio. “Mimi’s narrative is crafted through the lens of supporting the Wampanoag people, challenging the history books, and bringing a new awareness to something that happened 400 years ago,” McCarthy says. “Each figure has its own personality, and seeing them in real life, as opposed to digital images, is astounding. The message delivered through the installation will go way beyond the actual artwork.”

The daughter of an immigrant artist who made a home in Provincetown, Gross provides a complex, contemporary interpretation of the Outer Cape’s — and the country’s — foundational history. “These peaceful people had been living here for thousands of years, and along came others looking for their own freedom, who couldn’t have cared less about those here already,” Gross says, giving voice to a narrative, through dimension, color, and gesture, of a people whose descendants continue to be silenced.

A model of the site-specific installation, Arrival, 1620, opening at PAAM on Friday. (Photo courtesy Mimi Gross)

Culture Clash

The event: “Mimi Gross: The Arrival, 1620,” a site-specific installation

The time: Friday, Oct. 2, through Nov. 29; Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; time-slot reservations required at paam.org

The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.

The cost: $12.50; members free

Reporting for this article was supported by a grant from the Provincetown Cultural Council, a local agency supported by the Mass. Cultural Council.

EASTHAM 400

Commemoration Evolution

Shallop replica still setting its course for Provincetown and Rock Harbor

By Ed Maroney May 7, 2020

EASTHAM — As a gallery of works by the Eastham Painters Guild rolls by on the screen, your eyes are held by those of Aspinet, the Nauset sachem who befriended the Separatists — now we call them Pilgrims — who washed ashore here four centuries ago. In his portrait by Jody Shyllberg, Aspinet is thoughtful and a bit rueful.

That’s not a bad perspective with which to view the Guild’s commemoration of the event, “Picture Perfect: 400 Years of Eastham,” available at easthampaintersguild.com as part of the Eastham 400 commemoration of the first encounter of the newcomers with the resident population.

The virtual exhibit of paintings by Guild members is one example of how the Eastham 400 Committee is coping with the challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic. The thoughtful planning that went into the roster of events has encountered the rueful awareness that changes are needed.

Eastham Painters Guild member Jody Shyllberg’s painting, Nauset Sachem Aspinet (Photo courtesy Jody Shyllberg)

The art exhibit has moved online and will run through the summer rather than just for one month. The 10-minute sunset presentations of Eastham’s history at First Encounter Beach every evening starting on Memorial Day weekend will be recorded for later viewing or live-streaming. The Cape Cod Genealogy Society’s canceled March 29 event at the library may return as a virtual event.

The Elizabeth Tilley shallop, a replica of the vessel that brought the Pilgrims to their first encounter with the Nauset in Eastham, is still on track to visit Provincetown and Rock Harbor in July. In an update after the commemoration committee’s April 27 meeting, chair Jim Russo wrote that his group and the Pilgrim John Howland Society are “both very aware that there are a multitude of circumstances that can change our plans at the last minute.”

On the other hand, some events seem to be enhanced by the current situation. Vice chair Tom Ryan told the committee that a group of young adults is still interested in hosting a couple of open houses to highlight the historic personages interred in the Cove Burying Ground. After all, he noted drolly, “they’re usually buried six feet from each other.”

Cape Cod National Seashore Volunteer Coordinator Sue Moynihan had less optimistic news. “We have lost some significant funding,” she said. Eastern National, which run stores at parks, “has had a tremendous financial loss and curtailed donations to the park.” The Wampanoag Day planned for Labor Day weekend has been postponed, and the August appearance of the Cape Symphony Orchestra is not certain.

“Because we are nested under the federal and state governments,” Moynihan said, “a number of these decisions will not be ours to make.”

The Eastham Historical Society, which has been planning a full summer of exhibits, talks, and other events, met this week to discuss options. Last week, the society’s Patty Donohoe told the committee the centerpiece this year is a display of Native American artifacts “all found in Eastham over at the Salt Pond. They’re up to 9,000 years old.” Eastham Public Library Director Debra DeJonker-Berry suggested that archaeologist Dan Zoto could offer a virtual tour of the exhibit and answer questions in a Zoom session.

Russo suggested that the society hold some of its talks on the Schoolhouse Museum’s lawn, with proper seating separation. This summer, he said, people may see a grid on the Windmill Green demarcating seating areas for concerts.

The 400 committee will meet again via Zoom on May 18.

THE YEAR-ROUNDER

We Need a New Compact

The Pilgrims had the right idea; it’s time to update it

By Dennis Minsky Apr 23, 2020

Exactly 400 years ago this coming November, the good ship Mayflower sailed into Provincetown Harbor and anchored (a fact infuriatingly underreported in our national media). There were 102 souls on board. A year later, after a long, harsh winter, 45 of those souls were gone: that’s a mortality rate of 44 percent.

The Pilgrims were no angels — just ask a Wampanoag — but they were tough, resilient, self-reliant, and courageous. They also banded together and helped one another (remember the Mayflower Compact, signed in our harbor?), although the terms of their assistance could be harsh — just ask Hester Prynne. They also had an abiding faith in God, and a guiding belief that they were meant to be here and they were meant to succeed, that this continent was theirs for the taking.

In the face of the current pandemic, we have some things we can learn from them, and some we cannot. Their resiliency and self-reliance is inspirational; there was very little wailing and moaning, and no self-pity. We should aim for that quality.

Their belief in a beneficent Almighty might be harder to copy. Even among those of us who believe in a Creative Force, there is a significant fraction who do not see that force as one that can intervene on the level of a nation, let alone an individual. The deity system that makes most sense to many might be the pantheistic Greek model: numerous gods “up there,” amusing themselves by tossing various challenges down to Earth to see what we poor mortals will do.

The evidence for this dominates the history of the human race to this day. It is difficult for many of us to find solace in religion, although many still do. I envy them.

The other component of their belief system that is fast eroding is that the Earth was placed here for the sole purpose of supporting human enterprise and expansion. Many, of course, do believe this — Manifest Destiny is alive and well. But more progressive thinking is that we are not the rightful inheritors of the bounty of the Earth, not the overall self-appointed stewards of this planet; rather, we are creatures desperately dependent on its sustaining elements, even as we are destroying them.

Many of the most threatening challenges to our survival, including the current pandemic, have roots in the incursions that humans have made into the natural environment. We must learn to make amends, make peace with the Earth, learn to live within natural systems — and we must do so in a hurry. That means no more going to the outdoor market to buy a wild pangolin in a cage and have it butchered for dinner on the spot; but it also means no more sitting in your car outside Stop & Shop with your engine mindlessly idling.

Progressive thinking also addresses the Pilgrims’ concept of community with some important updates. We are each of us a Stranger and a Saint, an insider somewhere and an outsider everywhere else; we each of us deserve the regard of the community-at-large regardless of our nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, or belief system. We are, to borrow a phrase, all God’s children.

Many of us think putting children at our southern border in cages is inherently evil, even though there are devout churchgoers who see nothing wrong with this. Most of us think health care and access to education and useful and gainful employment and so many of society’s benefits should be more equally distributed. The situation is so much more pressing in this time of emergency. We are all in this together, we are told.

In the midst of this pandemic, we need a new Compact.

PROVINCETOWN 400

Select Board Looks for Help With Pilgrims’ Park, Wampanoag Memorial

Architect will make menu of options; indigenous memorial specialist sought

By Paul Benson Oct 24, 2019

PROVINCETOWN — The select board is looking to break the logjam on two projects related to the Provincetown 400 commemorations.

The board voted on Oct. 15 to hire a landscape architect to help improve the Pilgrims’ First Landing Park, inside the rotary at the far end of Commercial Street, near the spot where the Pilgrims are supposed to have first set foot in America.

They also voted to get quotes from a half-dozen specialists on indigenous memorials — consultants who are versed in the complexities of how cities can best honor indigenous people and create public art. In both cases, it is hoped that consultants can provide an informed assessment of options and a proper breakdown of costs.

On the Pilgrims’ First Landing Park, the dept. of public works and the public landscape committee are now reading from the same page. They had offered two different plans, but they now have presented a joint memo outlining a first phase that could be complete by spring 2020, following by phase two. Rich Waldo of the DPW and members of the committee described their respective roles and their hopes for the landscape architect’s help.

Their current focus is on clearing the weed-infested rosa rugosa and trimming trees to open up sight lines to the water and clear space for more appealing plantings in the spring. The committee also proposed working with the historical commission on language for new signs. The landscape consultant will be charged with rearranging the seating areas and pedestrian walkways and considering signs and memorial placements.

The Mayflower Compact is supposed to have been signed near this spot, but the park is also home to a large group of paving stones and benches that commemorate individuals who lived in or loved Provincetown. Integrating these individual markers with a Pilgrim marker and an indigenous marker is a key design challenge the landscape architect will be addressing.

Select board member Lise King read a statement arguing for the importance of recognizing the indigenous people who were living here when the Pilgrims made landfall.

“We have a moral obligation to recognize the impact on those people, families, communities that were here at this time,” said King. “The park contains memorial granite plaques marking the passing of loved ones. We can’t have a bunch of memorial stones and no indigenous memorial stone.”

King proposed that phase one, ready by spring 2020, ought to have some kind of sign, marker, or language honoring native peoples, even if the installation of a more substantial memorial were not happening until phase two.

Later in the select board’s meeting, discussion turned to a request from King to solicit quotes to hire an indigenous public memorial specialist. Efforts to install a Wampanoag memorial at the Bas Relief park have broken down, partly because while the original site considered was at the Pilgrim Monument, which is on private land, an attempt to install that same design on public land raised questions about site location, artistic vision, procurement procedures, and historical justice that accumulated into a thicket of difficulties.

King reported to the board that other cities and towns have faced similar challenges around inclusive remembrance in a municipal context. She said that several nationally known Native American curators, anthropologists, and specialists in public art have begun contracting to help towns work through these subjects.

“It’s such a specific skill set,” said King. “There has to be a background in public art, in memorial building and public art, people who know how to work within the municipal process.”

After some discussion about whether the prior Wampanoag memorial efforts were truly stalled — “the parties who were participating are no longer communicating with us,” King confirmed — the select board voted unanimously to solicit quotes from experts in hopes of bringing their experience to Provincetown’s parks.

eastham currents

Commemorating the ‘first encounter’

By Jacob Greenberg Aug 16, 2019

EASTHAM — Some 16 months before the 400th anniversary, plans are well under way to commemorate the Dec. 8, 1620 “first encounter” between Native Americans and European pilgrims. Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of the celebration is an effort to bring the sailing “shallop” Elizabeth Tilley to Eastham for both display and tours.

The vessel, a replica of ones used to transport people and goods from larger ships to the coast in the 17th century, is owned by the Pilgrim John Howland Society of Plymouth. But questions regarding the cost and feasibility of towing and mooring the shallop were raised at a meeting of the town’s 400 Commemoration Committee on July 29.

While an appearance by the Elizabeth Tilley remains a possibility, a proposed bonfire has been definitively nixed by Eastham Fire Chief Kent Farrenkopf. The committee considered several alternatives, including a fire pit and a six-foot-tall burning pyramid, but no final decision was made.

The committee also discussed six programs to be held in conjunction with the Eastham Public Library. Three are designed for general audiences, focusing on the events leading up to the first encounter, the encounter itself, and the memorial commemorating the meeting. Three additional programs will be open to all but feature subject matter tailored for immigrants, young adults, and artists.

A letter had been sent to the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council seeking input for the event, but no response had been received. The 400 Commemoration Committee planned to follow up with a phone call.

Affordable housing lottery

A bump in affordable housing is one step closer to becoming a reality in Eastham. Completion of the Village at Nauset Green — “a brand-new family rental development” at 140 Brackett Road — isn’t scheduled until February 2020, but an initial batch of apartments will be made available this October. Hopeful tenants should submit a pre-application for the housing lottery to be held at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 5 at the Orleans-Eastham Elks Lodge, 10 McKoy Road, Eastham. Those selected will then be eligible for the full application and interview process.

Pre-applications must be sent by U.S. mail to Village at Nauset Green, P.O. Box 24855, Philadelphia, PA 19130 and must be received by Tuesday, Sept. 3 in order to qualify. Pick up a pre-application — in English, en español, or em português — at the Eastham Town Hall or at 140 Brackett Road, or download the forms online at villageatnausetgreen.com.

Survey on Eastham cable service

Do you have a strong opinion about your cable provider? Are there matters of local interest you wish were covered on television? Eastham’s Cable TV License Renewal Advisory Committee is all ears — electronically speaking. Take its online survey to give the powers that be your two cents on cable service in Eastham. The short questionnaire also asks how often you tune in to Lower Cape TV and what you’d like to see more of on your local access channels. Access the survey at surveymonkey.com/r/EasthamCable.

Windmill is open once more

As of Saturday, July 27, Cape Cod’s oldest and last working windmill is once again open to the public, although restoration of the exterior shingles will continue through the month of August. The town expects restoration to be fully completed in time for the annual Windmill Weekend — featuring a parade, craft show, and live music — on September 6-8. More information can be found at easthamwindmillweekend.org.