9/5/08: Pequots provide more than same old history

Interactive museums are great, and we in central Connecticut have access to some great ones. I’ve written about Old Sturbridge Village and Mystic Seaport, each of which tell stories familiar to most Americans who sat through two or three years of mandatory American history.

If you want to hear the story of the less-heard voices of the historically disenfranchised in Connecticut, there’s another place to go: the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.

If you’re expecting something with the power of the Holocaust museum, you’ll likely be disappointed. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum does include accounts of diseases, economic and environmental changes and war brought on by contact with English settlers, but it incorporates these into its displays on the daily lives of Pequots rather than making the difficulties the focus of the museum.

The resulting experience is less traumatic, and maybe less memorable, but this is to its credit. What could have been a nightmare account of atrocities committed against the Pequot becomes an effective retelling of familiar stories from another perspective, one in which the Pequot are people with full lives, an economy and system of governance, a spiritual path and a place in colonial history, rather than victims.

"It’s all covered," said David Holahan, museum spokesman. "The exhibits give information on diseases and the impact of Europeans, but they also show eastern tribes’ cultures, spiritual and sociopolitical lives."

The museum is no less able to succeed in its aims — to educate visitors on the lives of eastern native peoples — for its balance and quotidian focus.

The museum doesn’t have the staffing of Old Sturbridge Village, where people walk around in character as colonial villagers, but it does a good job of making up for it. Throughout the museum are Pequot figures performing daily tasks and rituals, being healed or hefting spears, defending their village against attack or fishing. You’re not allowed to touch them, of course, but the figures are so lifelike that I found myself staring at one of the men serving as lookout in a canoe in the main atrium for about two minutes, waiting for him to breathe.

The largest display is of a Pequot village, where visitors can walk around with an audio tour guide and learn more about whichever scenes most interest them. The tour often goes beyond describing the scenes portrayed, too, offering to tell you more about agriculture in the village, or more about the spiritual practices of the Pequot or more about learning to hunt, "then and now."

Often the "more information" is a surprisingly impromptu interview of a modern Mashantucket Pequot tribal member. One mother tells of her son’s first hunting expedition with an older Native American — they didn’t catch anything — and another tribal member talks about the efforts of one man to get federal recognition for the tribe in the 1970s and 1980s. All the "ums" and "ahs" are included, making listening to the tribal members on the audio tour seem as good as a conversation.

The museum contains more traditional displays of textiles and artworks, as well, and several films that flesh out the information provided by wall displays or readings. But it’s the interactive details that help the museum to reach beyond the dry accounts of a history book — one that may or may not have included detailed accounts of Pequot life, anyway — and create actual experiences for visitors.