Dianna Hunt
ICT
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — The historic whalebone and sperm whale teeth have been replaced with contemporary artwork and ceramic designs, but the centuries-old ties of northeastern Indigenous people to whaling endure in the images of a new exhibit.
The exhibit, “Breach: Logbook 24/Scrimshaw,” by Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard, bridges the centuries that link the Shinnecock, Wampanoag and other coastal Native people to the development of the region’s maritime industry.
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The title draws its name, in part, from the giant leap that whales make in flinging themselves high above the water.
“It is the whale as it breaches through the surface,” Leonard told ICT as she worked to install the exhibit in early June. “I thought about ‘breach’ as it relates to rising out of the waters, and I thought of the whale as our relative.”
But the name also acknowledges other meanings of the word, including the breaches of contract that many tribal nations have endured and that left the Shinnecock people unrecognized for years on their ancestral lands.
“‘Breach’ isn’t just one definition — it’s many definitions,” Leonard said.
The exhibit, which will run through Nov. 3 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, is a continuation of a series of “Logbook” exhibits that Leonard created starting in 2014. The exhibits use research from historic logbooks and Leonard’s artwork to explore the interconnection between the Indigenous coastal communities, whaling and the maritime environment.
The New Bedford exhibit incorporates the shipping logs for visual and historical context while also including twisted harpoons believed to have been bent by whales fighting to escape their fate. They also include pottery representations of fish traps and other maritime equipment, and painted, ceramic whale teeth that evoke the scrimshaw teeth that were often presented as gifts by long-ago whalers.
The exhibit also includes a special pot created by artist Ramona Peters, a Mashpee Wampanoag elder who served as a cultural advisor to the New Bedford exhibit. Peters’ grandfather was a renowned whaler in the 1800s, and the pottery vase was already in the museum’s collection.
“We are coastal people,” Peters told ICT. “There were large numbers of our people on those ships. For me, the most powerful thing about the whole story is that they all came back home — they went to Europe, they were in Australia and Hawai’i and Alaska and South America. They saw all sorts of things and all sorts of governments … and they came home.
“That just makes me feel the love they have for this land,” she said.
The exhibit is part of an effort by the 121-year-old museum – long devoted to the history of whaling and the shipping industry that was centered in the New Bedford area – to broaden its reach to Native communities in the region.
“Through our collaboration with Courtney M. Leonard and her ongoing series ‘BREACH,’ we aim to highlight relationships Native coastal communities have with marine mammals in relation to our collections, and underscore how issues of environmental and social injustice disproportionately impact Indigenous communities, especially along coasts,” Naomi Slipp, the Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Endowed Chair for the Chief Curator, said in a statement.
A sister exhibit on scrimshaw runs alongside, with historic pieces presenting a contrast to the modern works in the next room. The scrimshaw exhibit runs through Nov. 11.
‘Life’s work’
The “Breach” exhibit is among the largest to date for Leonard, who has been described as “one of the strongest emerging voices in the field of ceramics today.”
A multimedia artist who largely works with clay, as well as a filmmaker, Leonard grew up on Long Island, New York, where the Shinnecock people have lived for thousands of years. Her works often focus on Native identity and water, which has been essential for the Shinnecocks.
She is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, holds a bachelor’s degree from Alfred University’s New York College of Ceramics and has a master’s in ceramics from the Rhode Island School for Design. She also spent time aboard the historic Charles W. Morgan whaling ship in Mystic, Connecticut, and served as the Rasmuson Artist in Residence at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and in an International Indigenous Artist Exchange in New Zealand.
While in New Zealand in 2014, she worked with an acclaimed ceramic artist who gave her a small sperm whale tooth that she has worn ever since on a necklace.
“For me, this is my life’s work,” she said.
She has also taught at a number of facilities, including IAIA and the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently an assistant professor of art and art history at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where she lives with her husband, artist Frank Buffalo Hyde, who is Onondaga.
Leonard’s works are in the permanent collections of more than a dozen museums, including the Heard Museum, the Arizona State University Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Autry Museum, the Denver Art Museum and the Hood Museum of Art.
Leonard said her special interest in whales developed after the carcass of a 60-foot, 50-ton finback whale washed ashore in 2005 on Southampton Beach near the Shinnecock Reservation, where she was recovering from an accident.
The Shinnecock Tribe was largely denied access to the whale, but Leonard went to see for herself and took her rolls of clay.
“It was the first time in my life I had an opportunity to be with a whale,” she said. “I just sat there and coiled a whale tale. Sometimes you don’t have answers. Sometimes it’s important to just be present and observe.”
Scientists eventually concluded the whale was likely struck by a ship, and it was buried in the dunes nearby. The Shinnecocks held special ceremonies to pray for the whale’s spirit.
The “Breach” exhibits started that year, with the first, “Breach: Log 14,” opening at the IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts with an exploration of “historical ties to water and whale,” according to the museum’s website.
She followed with subsequent “Breach” exhibits at the Waltons Fine Art Center at the University of the Ozarks in Arkansas in 2015; at Arizona State University’s Art Museum in 2016; at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2017; and at the Tansey Contemporary gallery in Denver in 2018.
The Shinnecocks have a long history with whaling, and are credited with helping develop the whaling industry, along with the Wampanoag people and others as early as the mid-1600s. The Native people were considered expert fishermen and master whalers, and many ships were operated by largely Indigenous crews, though many of the crew members were forced into labor or coerced.
The Shinnecock Indian Nation was federally recognized in 2010, and many of its nearly 1,600 citizens live on the reservation at Shinnecock Neck, a peninsula that juts into Shinnecock Bay off Long Island, according to the tribal website.
In the Algonquin language, the tribal name means “people of the stony shore,” according to the tribal website.
The Wampanoag Nation at one point included more than 65 villages in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, including Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Today, there are a number of Wampanoag communities across the region, with two federally recognized tribes. The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head was recognized in 1987 and the Mashpee Wampanoag won affirmation of their recognition in 2007.
The Wampanoag people, too, were known as expert whalers and seamen.
“This is Wampanoag homeland,” Leonard said, “and I want to be respectful of that.”
A family history
Peters, also known as Nosapocket, grew up on Cape Cod and now lives in the town of Mashpee.
An acclaimed artist, she works with clay and other natural materials to make ceramic vessels, drawing from traditional Wampanoag potters who added crushed shells to the locally sourced clay to help the pots survive hot temperatures.
“She uses and teaches the ways of the ancestors with a sense of awareness to collaborate with the elements of fire, water, earth and air,” according to details released by the New Bedford museum.
Her whaling roots come from her mother’s family. Her mother’s maternal grandfather, Albert Edward James, known as Edward, was a boatsteerer and later a ship builder. Her mother’s paternal great-grandfather, Solomon Attaquin, became a captain and owned his own ship with a mostly Native crew.
“Even through the turn of the century, there were men out in the whaling ships,” she said.
The whales in the early years were plentiful, coming close into Cape Cod waters. The community used the entire whale, including the meat to feed their families, whale oil, and the bones, teeth and baleen.
“We were a whale-eating people,” she said. “We didn’t go out to hunt them. They came here to Cape Cod. We used the whale oil as well.”
The colonial settlers, however, were largely just interested in the whale oil used for fuel and spermaceti, which was used in making candles. They also used the whale bones, a form of ivory, for making jewelry and scrimshaw, but the rest of the whale was discarded.
Peters feels particularly close to her late grandfather, and still uses a whalebone staff that he created.
“I feel very connected to this grandfather, and I have some things from his lifetime, a whalebone staff,” she told ICT. “He carved it, and I carved a little bit into it, and added some beadwork, too. I’ve taken it on my travels around the world. I use it as a grounding rod, to commune with the man.”
With whales now considered endangered and threatened by the busy shipping industry, Peters has mixed feelings about the history of whale hunting.
“I personally feel regret about hunting whales to that magnitude,” she said. “I feel his remorse about killing those whales. I can imagine the size of them, but he was a harpoonist, so his thrust was what took the whale down. The whole boat would feel the whale struggling for its life.”
She believes her grandfather shares that remorse.
“I could feel it in my body,” she said. “He did come to me in dreams, and I felt like I knew him personally.”
Her pot, “Ancestral Journey,” that is featured in the New Bedford exhibit, represents the ancient beginning, “emerging from the Whole to travel our separate journeys on a trail that inherently leads us forward together as One,” according to the museum.
Peters has served in several positions with her tribe, including as tribal historic preservation officer overseeing the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Museum. Her first exhibit for the museum was, “Mashpee Indian Whalers,” which explored the role of the Wampanoag people in the whaling industry. She created a world map to highlight the travels. The exhibit remained open for four years, closing in 2019.
“There are lots of stories, adventures,” she said. “They got caught by pirates. They were deserters. There were all sorts of things that happened. They got caught up in a war in Chile. There were all sorts of amazing stories, so we put those into the exhibit.”
Many of the whalers returned home to become tribal and business leaders, creating industries and jobs that brought wealth to the community.
“After the men got skilled in it, they were in demand, and they got paid high sums,” she said. “One built a hotel here in Mashpee. They survived and they had a high rank.”
Peters also served as the tribe’s coordinator for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, overseeing the return of ancestral remains and other issues stemming from the 1990 federal law.
In 2012, she founded the Native Land Conservancy, an Indigenous-led land conservation organization that works to help other tribes reclaim their land.
She has been an instructor or artist-in-residence at the Harvard Ceramics Studio, Worcester Art Museum, the Fuller Arts and Crafts Museum, Phillips Academy, Aquinnah Cultural Center, and has a number of galleries. She was among the winners in 2010 of the First Peoples Fund Community Spirit Award. Her works are held in public and private collections as far away as Japan and England.
Peters has a master’s degree in applied human and community development from the California School of Professional Psychology.
She agreed to serve as a culture bearer to work with the museum in setting up the “Breach” exhibit.
“[The whale] is such an incredible lifeform,” she said. “Today, we do ceremony when they beach. There are so many obstacles out in the oceans now — there are a lot of strandings, propeller hits. They die on the beach. Our medicine people go and make offerings.
“We can’t protect them. We can’t apologize. It’s so sad that the oceans are so busy and dangerous.”
Looking ahead
Leonard is continuing to develop the “Breach” series.
She recently completed “Breach: Logbook 24/Staccato,” which explores the life of a North Atlantic right whale named Staccato that was killed by a vessel strike in 1999. The whale’s remains are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The exhibit, at the University Museum of Contemporary Art, includes a rib bone from the whale showing a previously healed fracture caused by an earlier vessel strike. Staccato survived the previous strike but died after being struck in 1999.
The exhibit was open from Feb. 22 to May 10, and is set to reopen on Sept. 19 and run through Dec. 6.
Leonard is also set to give an artist’s talk at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in October.
She hopes the exhibits will share a lesson she learned while serving aboard the Charles W. Morgan whaling ship. A phrase commonly used on whale boats, “hold the line,” has deeper meaning in modern times, she said.
“This show has to do with holding the line,” she told ICT. “It’s a continuum … We feel deeply about our relatives, and the whale is a relative. This space is an acknowledgement of our time and history.”
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