Felandus Thames, “Wail on Whalers, a Portrait of Amos Haskins” (2024) (all photos Aly Thomas/Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)MYSTIC, Conn. — A momentous exhibition at the Mystic Seaport Museum honors the ancestral knowledge and creative innovation that flow from Black and Indigenous communities’ sacred relationship to waterways. Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea takes visitors on a journey through centuries of interrelated Black and Indigenous traditions of seafaring and artmaking, revealing oft-ignored histories. Entwined is housed in Stillman, a Greek Revival-style New England building on the museum’s 19-acre campus. In the lobby at the entrance, sunshine pours in from a window overlooking the Mystic River — itself a waterway stewarded by generations of Black and Indigenous peoples of the “Dawnland” (New England). There, a video and introductory texts frame the exhibition as a collaborative endeavor between the museum and community members, as well as a celebration of the still-thriving cultures of peoples indigenous to Africa and North America. Maritime narratives of ancestral and descendant voices are at the core of the curatorial team’s interpretation of the visual and material culture on display. Installation view of Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (photo by Joe Michael, courtesy Mystic Seaport Museum)At the center of the first gallery is “Mishoon/Aklo” (2023), a stunning canoe created as a collaboration between four artists: Sika Foyer (Togo), Alvin Ashiatey (Ghana), Hartman Deetz (Mashpee Wampanoag), and Gary Carter Jr (Mashantucket Pequot). Carved from tree trunks with fire and water, “dugout” canoes are a shared tradition from Pequot territories to African shores, where they are used to navigate rivers and oceans, sustaining communities through fishing and maintaining connections. Nearby is the oldest object on view, an Aboriginal cooking pot from 500 BCE made from shell-tempering technology utilized in global Indigenous and African ceramics, another example of ancestral science that sustains everyday life.After walking through two galleries of maritime material culture made by skilled Black and Indigenous craftspeople, visitors arrive at an unlikely space evoking historic domestic dwellings. The external structure is modeled after a traditional Wampanoag wetu, a dome-shaped home made from local materials like cedar saplings. Though it is presented here at ground level, the interior of the wetu is designed to look and feel like the attic of a colonial-era New England home, where enslaved Africans and Indigenous indentured workers were often forced to live. The dimly lit display evokes the captivity and loneliness of the attic, while the fragmented pieces of a sacred historic bundle on display allude to the space as a site for privacy and spiritual practice. The “Nkisi Bundle” (18th century) is a spirited assemblage of cowrie shells, beads, buttons, fabric scraps, and other objects utilized as a vessel to connect Africans to their ancestors. The likely owner, enslaved man Cardardo Wanton, would have prayed with his nkisi bundle in private to protect him, hiding it underneath an attic floorboard in the meantime. Minkisi, the plural of nkisi, are vessels instilled with energy and ancestral spirit in West and Central African traditions. As sacred assemblages, they promote spiritual harmony on the African continent and in diasporic rituals. Installation view of Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (photo by Joe Michael, courtesy Mystic Seaport Museum)Leaving the intimacy of the provisional attic, the gallery opens up to a wide display of contemporary art. The Indigenous fashion on view is resplendent: “The Rainbow Regalia” (2016) of Sherenté Mishitashin Harris (Narragansett), Two-Spirit activist and champion powwow dancer, is colorful and vibrant, with intricate beadwork, shimmering fringe, and designs that honor the Fancy Shawl tradition. Nearby, “Maushop’s Earrings” and “Squant’s Gorget Necklace” were created from Quahog shells in 2023 by Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag) as a delightful ode to Maushop and Squant, the powerful duo in Wampanoag folklore known for shaping the coastline and protecting their people. James-Perry’s “Constellation Wampum Belt” (2023) is made from shells woven into the shape of the Bear constellation, symbolizing the connection between the earth and the sky. It sits at the contemporary end of a millennia-old tradition in which coastal Indigenous communities in New England and elsewhere in the North create purple and white beaded bodily adornments from Quahog shells. Other contemporary beaded and woven works celebrate the beauty and resilience of Black and Indigenous lifeways. Felandus Thames’s “Wail on Whalers, a Portrait of Amos Haskins” (2024) is a stunning beaded portrait honoring fugitive slaves who joined the whaling industry. In the 19th century, Amos Haskins (Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head) achieved captain status in the whaling industry, where he worked with a diverse crowd of sailors, including escaped enslaved people and other people of color. He married an African-American woman, Elizabeth P. Farmer, in 1844 and raised mixed-race children with her. Tragically, he was lost at sea in 1861, but his legacy lives on as an example of the 19th-century whaling industry, where Black and Indigenous peoples found kinship and financial autonomy. Adjacent is Nafis M. White’s “TideLine” (2023–24), a wall sculpture made from colorful hair woven into different forms, such as braids, twists, and knots that cascade and coil across the work like tidal currents. The work’s medium line includes “hair, embodied knowledge, ancestral recall, audacity of survival, Swarovski crystals, the artist’s sequined gowns, hair baubles, gold gilded oyster shells, bobby pins” — a delightful framing of her artistic practice that mirrors the themes of the exhibition, as hair is an ancestral, sacred, creative process in both Black and Indigenous communities. Entwined takes us in countless directions across hundreds of years of Black-Indigenous survival under colonialism and slavery. We witness the visual and material culture through which Africans, Natives, and their descendants adorn themselves and express their cultural traditions, feed their bodies and spirits, and thrive. That this exhibition takes place in Connecticut and centers Dawnland (New England) narratives is incredibly special. The state likely conjures images of White, wealthy businessmen who work on Wall Street and live in suburban Southern Connecticut mansions. Indigeneity has often been rendered invisible in Connecticut, even as the state hosts the world’s largest museum of Native American history and culture, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, less than a 30-minute drive from the Mystic Seaport Museum and from which several works were loaned. Entwined is a profound statement: Black and Indigenous histories matter here, too. Globally and locally, their traditions are sacred, everlasting, and entwined. Unrecorded maker, Aboriginal cooking pot (c. 500 BCE) (photo Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic)Installation view of Nafis M. White, “TideLine,” (2023–24) (photo Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic) View of Mystic River from window in exhibition building (photo Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic)Installation view of Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (photo by Joe Michael, courtesy Mystic Seaport Museum)Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea continues at the Mystic Seaport Museum (75 Greenmanville Avenue, Mystic, Connecticut) through April 19, 2026. It was curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes in conjunction with an exhibition advisory committee of Black and Indigenous elders, teachers, and community members.