Exploring Dual Native and African Ancestry

The Smithsonian traveling exhibition "IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas" will open Saturday, Oct. 8, at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center.

The exhibition explores the history and complex lives of people of dual African American and Native American ancestry. It tells stories of cultural integration and diffusion through themes of community, creative resistance and lifestyles, as well as the struggle to define and preserve identity.

According to the exhibition’s website, this double heritage is truly indivisible.

“Over centuries, African Americans and Native Americans created shared histories, communities, families, and ways of life. Prejudice, laws, and twists of history have often divided them from others, yet African-Native American people were united in the struggle against slavery and dispossession, and then for self-determination and freedom.”

"IndiVisible" was produced by the National Museum of the American Indian in collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). It will remain at Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center through Dec. 30.

Also on Saturday, "They Never Took Our Drums," a soul-funk-jazz-poem in one act by Mwalim (Morgan James Peters, Mashpee Wampanoag) will feature "Mwalim & the Groovalottos." The performance will open the exhibition.

On Oct. 15, at 2 p.m., the museum will present the first of four showings of "American Red and Black," a documentary by Alicia Woods that reflects on the issues of Native and African heritage. 

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