Curated by Mary Amanda McNeil
About our curator
Mary Amanda McNeil (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. Her research, teaching, and public history work sit at the intersections of Black studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; social history; and geography, with especial attention to the Northeast. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, McNeil is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and lives in Dorchester.
The Rez and The Hood celebrates local practices of Black and Indigenous placekeeping, stewardship, and institution-building. Across four events, panelists from across the Commonwealth will reflect upon their lives’ work while attending to broader thematic questions such as: What has happened to us spatially? How have we created life-affirming geographies in the midst of settler colonial and anti-Black dispossession & displacement? What are our visions for the future?
About
Entangled Histories in The City
with Dr. Kyle T. Mays
In recent years, organizers, scholars, public history practitioners, and digital publics have emphasized the intertwined nature of Black and Indigenous histories, presents, and futures. Dr. Kyle T. Mays and Dr. Mary Amanda McNeil have a conversation about Black and Indigenous relational geographies in the city.
Land Stewardship & Community Land Trusts
with Boston Food Forest Coalition (BFFC) & Native Land Conservancy (NLC)
Despite policies which have sought to dispossess Indigenous people of their homelands and foreclose the possibilities of Black ecologies from flourishing, community members and tribal citizens have developed structures to maintain caretaking relationships with the places that they call home. One key strategy has been the development of community land trusts, a model which emerged in tandem with the liberation movements of the long 1960s. Representatives from the Native Land Conservancy and the Boston Food Forest Coalition share a bit about their respective organizations and visions of what land stewardship entails.
Food Justice and Food Sovereignty
with the Food Project & Pequoig Farm
Black, Indigenous, and Communities of Color have long recognized that vibrant foodways are central to community wellness. Food justice and food sovereignty work moves alongside and beyond models concerned with individual physical health outcomes; it is equally and necessarily concerned with collective/community health models, ecological justice, tribal sovereignty, and community self-determination. Representatives from The Food Project and Pequoig Farm shared a bit about their work in pursuit of thriving futures.
The recording for this conversation is not available.
Institution Building and Place-Keeping
A key dimension of such resistant geographical practice has historically been institution-building. Black and Indigenous geographers such as Katherine McKittrick and Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) have attended to the ways in which settler colonial and anti-Black regimes have sought to render communities “ungeographic” and “placeless,” and the ways communities have responded through acts of “respatializing” and “re/mapping.” Representatives from NAICOB and the Royall House and Slave Quarters have a conversation about institution building, place-keeping, and Black and Indigenous futures in Boston.