Augmenting Manissean Public Memory, Sense of Place, and Belonging on Block Island

FAIN: MD-290223-23

University of Rhode Island (Kingston, RI 02881-1967)
Amelia Moore (Project Director: June 2022 to present)

Development of an AR walking tour and on-line map exploring the African American and Indigenous history of Block Island.

This project requests Discovery funds to support the testing of augmented reality (AR) content and technologies to enhance the public understanding and experience of African American and Indigenous life and history on Block Island, Rhode Island, also known as the island of Manisses to the region''s Indigenous peoples. This marginalized history has been almost totally erased from the island, and the small population of African American and Indigenous people that retains ties to the island is almost totally unknown. This project will build creative AR stories that re-narrate Manissean history around the island and online through a series of community co-creation workshops with Manissean family members, regional Indigenous cultural representatives, digital and visual media experts, and regional and local historians and social scientists.

Associated Products

Place, Memory, and Relationality: Black and Indigenous Land- and Waterscapes in the Northeast (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Place, Memory, and Relationality: Black and Indigenous Land- and Waterscapes in the Northeast
Author: Amelia Moore
Author: Maryann Mathews
Author: Akeia Gomes
Author: Silvermoon LaRose
Author: Jason Mancini
Author: Daniel Schniedewind
Abstract: This panel engages the conference’s theme by foregrounding how Black and Indigenous communities in the northeast have long maintained sustaining relationships with place and human and more-than-human kin. It is guided by three primary questions: 1) How do these legacies endure in the present? 2) How are they remembered? and 3) How do they speak to urgent contemporary matters of social and environmental justice? Panelists will gesture toward the potential for collaborative, community-grounded research itself to serve as an important practice of repair in the face of the colonial displacement and erasure, the aftermath of racial slavery, and multidimensional ecological precarity. How does centering the often entangled experiences of Indigenous and Black communities in the northeast recast popular regional accounts of the place and interrupt prevailing modes of belonging? Presentation #1: “Reckoning with Manisses.” Amelia Moore (University of Rhode Island) and Maryann Mathews (Manissean Tribal Council) Presentation #2: “Reclaiming Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea: Black and Dawnland Indigenous Maritime Histories.” Akeia de Barros Gomes (Mystic Seaport Museum) Presentation #3: “’The Narraganset Chief’: A Native View on the Politics and Legacy of Tribal Dispossession in Rhode Island.” Silvermoon LaRose (Narragansett; Tomaquag Museum) and Jason Mancini (CT Humanities; Akomawt Educational Initiative) Presentation #4: “Black Landscape-Making in the Twentieth-Century Hudson Valley.” Daniel Schniedewind (Dickinson College)
Date: 4/13/2024
Conference Name: NEAA

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