Providence City Hall Archives Project

A Research + Public art residency

The Archives Project was a six-month research residency in the colonial records room of the Providence City Archives. I worked in collaboration with Narragansett Language revitalist Lynsea Montanari to mine 17th century town meeting records for evidence of shifting attitudes around property and land use in colonial Providence. The resulting research was used to generate a body of artwork exploring the cultural differences between Indigenous ideas of public or collective ownership and the English common law concept of private property. The artwork was intended to facilitate dialogue with Providence’s 1637 Town Charter between Roger Williams and the Narragansett Tribe, and was exhibited alongside the founding document’s new permanent display in City Hall.

This research project and accompanying artwork was originally conceived to be a celebration of colonial Providence: its exceptional founder, unique composition, and radical founding documents. I expected to be enchanted by our nascent city, Roger William’s obstinate insistence on the separation of church and state, and Providenc’s approach to civil equality (for some).

My time with the colonial documents in Providence City Archives told a different story. Instead of edifying discussions of a government by the people, I observed a nearly manic obsession with the privatization of land and goods. Property borders, identified landmarks, planned roadways, and mandatory fence construction filled the pages. Bounties for the heads of wolves and squirrels—private property destroyers, both—were carefully calculated. Damages for colonial crops destroyed by livestock (permitted to roam freely) were assessed, and the wronged (Anglo-Saxon) parties compensated, while the loss of Indigenous crops and foodstores to colonial livestock were routinely ignored.

My artwork seeks to explore the relentless advance of an English culture of private property into the Indigenous spaces of what we now call Rhode Island. The methods used to gain this land and its resources shifted over the colonial period, becoming increasingly violent with time. The composition of my work is meant to reflect this. Beginning with the seemingly magnanimous deed of Providence land to Williams by Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi, colonial-Indigenous relations devolved to the point of brutality. This brutality can be seen in the unforgivable violence perpetrated against unarmed Indigenous women, children and elders by the colonial militia of New England during King Philip’s War.

My artwork represents this oppressive shift in colonial policy. It attempts to remind the viewer that the founding and development of this state and nation, though in some ways radical and inspiring, was facilitated by an unrelenting campaign of deceit, theft and violence, a violence which is to this day apparent in American policy, both foreign and domestic. Today, as we celebrate colonial Providence, we must also acknowledge this history and our complicity in its invisibilization.