Marblehead marked Indigenous Peoples Day weekend with more than one event to celebrate the holiday.
On Saturday, Native American storyteller Anne Jennison entertained and educated young and old with her “Songs & Stories of the Woodland” in Abbot Hall’s auditorium.
“A total of 30 folks with a few kids [attended],” Marblehead Cultural Council Chairman Anthony Silva said on Sunday night. “She was wonderful.
Meanwhile, on Monday afternoon, folks were fanned out on the Jeremiah Lee Mansion Gardens as The Nettukkusqk Singers, a group of Wampanoag and Nipmuc Native Americans, sang traditional songs.
The group’s members wrote most, if not all, the songs that they performed: “Dreams of Seven Gneration,” “Mending the Hoop,” “The Netukkusqk Anthem” among others. It’s the third year in a row that the local museum hosted an Indigenous Peoples Day event.
“It falls in line with the work that we’ve recently been doing,” Marblehead Museum Executive Director Lauren McCormack said. “It’s a matter of raising everybody up to the same level and putting some effort into learning about everyone who has made Marblehead their home at one time or another.”
Marblehead was one of the commonwealth’s first communities to adopt Indigenous Peoples Day as an official holiday – with Marblehead Town Meeting having passed a 2019 article making it so.
“It say that the town’s compassionate and empathetic,”Jacqueline Moorehead, one of Monday’s singers, said. “And that Marblehead has respect for history.”
