Native American Heritage Month: Celebrating Traditions, Languages, Stories, and Visibility

The presentation, formatted as a conversation between Leeming and Jenny Jun-lei Kravitz, director of institutional equity, marked Native American Heritage Month, observed each year in November. Kravitz said that Native American Heritage Month is a time to celebrate the traditions, languages, and stories of Native Americans, which also includes indigenous Hawaiians and Alaskans and Native peoples of affiliated islands. 

Leeming and Kravitz used the occasion to emphasize that such people are still very much among us. Leeming led the presentation with a slide showing a collage of Native place names on signs around the state: Wachusett, Massachusetts, Natick, and others. As a child growing up in Massachusetts, he said, he had no idea what those names meant, and his own early education reinforced the misconception that Native populations had long since vanished from New England. “We visited Plimoth Plantation; we participated in culturally insensitive Thanksgiving celebrations; we made drawings of turkeys and Pilgrim hats,” he recalled—and the underlying message was that Native culture in New England was a relic of the past. 

As an adult, Leeming has studied Native people of the Americas, particularly as their cultures intersected with the arrival of Europeans on this continent. Through some of his research, he said, he was able to trace the roots of the notion that Indigenous people vanished 100 years ago or more: A series of 19th-century histories of Massachusetts towns all seemed to tell much the same story—that the “last remaining” Natives had disappeared, dying out sometime over the previous years. That simply wasn’t true, said Leeming: “They had not disappeared, but they had become invisible.” Because Indigenous people dressed like others around them and no longer conformed to stereotypical images involving feather headdresses and long braids, many assumed that they were gone.  

“Native American Heritage Month,” said Leeming, “is an opportunity to retire the myth of Native disappearance.”

Kravitz noted that the month is also an occasion to support visibility and advocacy. She told the audience about the Massachusetts Indigenous Legislative Agenda and suggested that those interested in being allies and raising their own awareness connect with two organizations: United American Indians of North America (UAINE) and North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB).

Leeming concluded with a photo showing dozens of members of the Wampanoag community who are involved in a project to learn their ancestral tongue, which until recently was on the verge of extinction. Linguists at MIT, led by Wampanoag tribal member Jessie Little Doe Baird, worked to reconstruct and revive the language; Leeming pointed to a child in the photo, noting that she is the first native speaker of Wampanoag in approximately 150 years. As Native American Heritage Month reminds us, Native people in New England, far from being a relic of the past, are very much part of our region’s present.