Funding Provided by Wonder Nation a Mashantucket Pequot Tribal entity.

(rhythmic drum music) (people chanting) - From across the great waters we traveled to a tiny island in the sea.

We were welcomed into the home of our host.

We joined hands in two circles and we said prayers of thanks.

Face to face, we made a bond, for in their eyes we could see ourselves.

Then we joined into one circle, one body.

We looked up to our Creator and gave thanks that we were able to come together.

The descendants of a mighty people who were torn apart 365 years ago.

(people chanting) I've always felt connected for sure.

It means the world to me.

I'm able to reconnect with a part of myself that my granny and those before me didn't get to do because of the climate that they lived in Bermuda.

- Ooh, eye opening because as growing up, young, as we all were in St.

David's, we knew we were somebody, but we didn't know who we were.

- I guess the most surprising piece for many people is the basic understanding that slavery was rampant in New England.

And the historic teaching of slavery being something of the South has been defied by reality in the experience of Pequot people since the first colonizers came up Long Island Sound.

- When we think about slavery in early America and the American colonies, we think about Virginia 1619, of course.

But even before, you had colonists land in New England you had several decades of Europeans and English seafarers, explorers, merchants trolling up and down the New England coastline.

- So in those days, our people would be snatched two or three at a time and forced to be navigators.

A very short time later our people were directly enslaved.

- Yeah, what's surprising in a way is that when English colonists come in 1620 to Plymouth and 1630 to Boston, they are riding on the coattails of a century of Spanish colonization during which a lot of Native Americans had been enslaved.

Like, we're talking in the tens of thousands.

And English colonists are aware of this.

They have a category of Indigenous servitude that they implicitly bring with them to New England.

They think they're gonna do colonization differently and they basically say so very straightforwardly, but when push comes to shove, they turn to Indigenous people in the region as servants and eventually as outright slaves.

But the key is the Pequot War in 1636, 1637.

The Pequot Nation is this really sizable, powerful nation in what's now Connecticut.

Massachusetts colonists are looking to expand into that region, take over the trade from the Dutch, so they wage this all-out war against the Pequot.

It's actually really an intentionally genocidal war.

They're trying to exterminate the Pequots.

They hunt down into the swamps, into the forest, any survivors they can find, mostly women and children, and sell them into slavery and servitude.

- Those relatives were joined by another wave of enslaved Native people after King Philip's War 40 or so years later.

And all of the relatives that we have in Bermuda now descend from those two groups.

- So in 2011, I went to Bermuda, went to the National Archives, which is in the basement of this big governmental building, hung up my jacket and my bag in the locker, went to the front desk and said, "Hi, I'm here to research if there's any evidence of Pequots being shipped to Bermuda in the 17th century."

And the archivist just stopped and she looked at me and she said, "I'm Pequot."

- So yeah, we just always knew, Indians.

It was not even a big thing.

It's just like we're Indians or amongst other things, obviously we're African.

I mean, obviously with Black people you can only go so far because when they put you in the books, they don't say Karla Ingemann, they would just say “Black woman”, you know?

So we do lose a lot of our history that way.

But there are records and there's lots of them and usually it will be about how lazy we were.

They don't have anything positive that Black people or Native people would have done.

How are you gonna keep "supremacy" that way?

- Bermuda is a small archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

We're pretty close to New York and the Carolinas.

1609 when we had our first English colonists, they came via the Sea Venture.

So the Sea Venture was one of the flagships to go to Jamestown, the colony, but they veered off because of a hurricane, so it landed in Bermuda.

- By 1612, they were able to build a new ship, the Deliverance.

When they went to Virginia, they found that people were starving, dying of disease, and so, they knew what was in Bermuda.

So they came back, gathered supplies, and went back and helped those people that was there.

So that's the first time we saved America.

(laughs) - So then in 1612, we had our first actual colonists come on and create the Bermuda Company.

And then from then it became what we know as Bermuda.

- And I'm thinking about my Bermuda elder, Brinky Tucker right now, because a point that he makes over and over is that the ugliest details of what has happened to our people, we only know because folks wrote them down.

And so, there's no running from the truth when it all comes essentially from a big colonization diary.

- So one of the things that I am always surprised about is when you get into the archive, yes, you do see evidence of Native American slavery, but you also find ways that that presence is buffered, or obscured, or erased in certain ways, too.

Sometimes instead of the language of slavery, the language of servitude is used.

And I think generations of historians were like, "Oh, there were Native American servants in households and no big deal, right?"

But there's also other more pernicious forces at work too in which the racial identity of Native Americans was morphed into other more bland racial terminologies like “mulatto” or just “slave”.

And in 1698, the colony had a census.

And in the census itself, there's two categories.

There's white and there's Black, and that's it.

There's no room in that official census for Indigenous people.

Amazingly, when you get into probate records and inventories of estates and plantations, suddenly all these Indigenous people begin appearing.

So somehow the records themselves are part of the problem as well as the way that historians have either traced or not traced these histories.

- So there is a gap and there are gaps in the records because it wasn't about money.

Basically, if it wasn't about money, why would you write about it?

They don't care about the people.

When people were getting taxed, they had to write down everything in their house.

They would have like two spoons, a cow, uh Indian Tom.

So that's how we would know there were people who were property.

But yep, it's there.

There is definite evidence they were here There's no doubt about it.

They were here and they've become absorbed and they look like this now.

- [Dominique] A lot of the enslaved Indigenous persons actually ended up in St.

David's and in the east of the island.

You had a bunch of different people on St.

David's, you had Indigenous enslaved individuals, African enslaved individuals, Irish, Scottish, the English colonists, all on this tiny little island called St.

David's.

And from there, they were able to create such a unique upbringing, culture and tradition that was separate and different from the rest of Bermuda.

That's not to say that there were no Indigenous enslaved people in the rest of the islands of Bermuda.

There were, but it's just St.

David's had its isolation for a much longer period than the rest of the island did.

- Yes.

St.

David's was always like the Cinderella of Bermuda, even in my day.

They've always been looked down on, always.

It was always, they were always picked on.

And in terms of my own family, as I told you, we're mixed of a lot of stuff.

My father's side of the family, they were too white to go to the Black school and too Black to go to the white school.

So they sent them all to St.

David's where the others "we don't know what you are" had to go.

- Yeah, everybody calls me “Aunt Ronnie”.

Because I'm the oldest really.

I'm a, you know, older mother, I guess.

I was born 1943, so I'm in my 83rd year.

And born in St.

David's was the most marvelous, marvelous place that you ever want to live, yeah.

When we were coming up, the wholes of St.

David's was your family.

Tears come to my eyes sometimes thinking back growing up on St.

David's and how wonderful it is.

It was because it's changed so much now.

Well, in St.

David's, we knew that we were Native American, had part Native American heritage.

We knew that, it was like drilled into us in a way, but you were never to talk about it.

I don't know why.

And then I'd say to my mother and I'd say, "Mom, you know, people always call us Mohawk."

And she says, "Don't be so ridiculous.

We're not Indians.

We're not, you know," but, we were.

- Back in the day when you had the colonists and the Indigenous enslaved persons, a lot of them from the Pequot War, they were very strong-headed, so they didn't want to farm.

They didn't want to do what the master told them to do.

So they would fight, they would rebel.

So they would call, they would say that they remind them of the Mohawks.

And somehow that stayed through time.

So we believed that we were actually of Mohawk descent, but we weren't.

- The barbarity of colonizing-era life, it's hard for anybody in the modern day to even comprehend.

Not only did they send them there, but then through forced schooling and through language erasure, the colonizing forces in Bermuda taught all of those relatives that they were Mohawk.

To steal people from their place and their people is one thing.

To purposefully prevent them from reconnecting or even understanding who they are is a different level of inhumanity.

- I've heard a lot from my family members and their experiences in St.

David's.

So because St.

David's was so isolated from the rest of Bermuda, a lot of people thought that we were dumb, dirty, backwater type of people.

You know, we didn't have electricity.

There were no roads on the island.

There were no cars.

So it was literally just one dirt road.

And then the roads that are actually there now only came from the U.S.

base.

So a lot of people thought we were primitive.

We were still fishing off of the land, still farming the way that we have been farming for, you know, years.

There were no shops, pharmacies, or anything like that.

And because of the amount of people that were on, the different cultures, I should say, the different ethnicities, a lot of St.

David's people look different from the rest of Bermuda.

So a lot of them would have green or blue eyes, red hair, high cheekbones and pointy noses.

So a lot of them would just think that we're just mutts, to be honest.

Like, that's what they thought St.

David's people were.

When the U.S.

base came and St.

David's was actually linked with the rest of Bermuda, a lot of people, you know, didn't like the way that we looked necessarily.

My mama tells the story of when she moved across the bridge and went to school, a lot of them would pull on her hair and her braids and things like that.

So that's kind of the viewpoint that Bermuda still to this day has on St.

David's and its people.

- Oh, eye opening because as growing up, young, as we all were on St.

David's, we knew we were somebody, but we didn't know who we were as young children because, you know, you're playing and you hear stories.

But as you got older, you find out it's like, "Hey, I'm somebody.

We're from St.

David's."

Very proud to be a St.

David's Islander, very proud.

But like my daughter said, they will call you names, but, you know, you're children, OK, well, fine, that's who we are.

But as we got older and start to get educated, we are somebody.

I get very emotional, I'm sorry.

As a child growing up, my hair, "Oh, you got good hair, so you're not normal.

You know, we don't want to play with you."

But my mom always said, "You are somebody.

Don't let anybody disrespect you."

And it was five girls and four boys.

And so, we had to know where we came from.

I'm sorry.

(laughs) - Well, we began to talk about on a broad community level, our connections to Bermuda and people there in the early 1990s.

- So back in the '90s, you had a lot of our elders that actually started to do genealogical research and family history research and things of that nature, going to the archives to see what was there.

And a lot of it actually points to tribes in New England.

So that started this mass thing of I want to learn more about who we are and where the oral histories actually meet facts.

You had a group of persons who went out to the Pequot tribe and that whole area.

So they were just, you know, walking along, trying to find, you know, this place, where's this at?

And somebody, you know, along the street saw them.

That was actually David Weeden, who's the son of Tall Oak.

- It was so hot that day.

And so, I was on my way over to make a delivery to restock some of the inventory.

It was like 90 degrees.

I saw a couple of individuals that were elders and I told myself, you know, they're elders if they're walking, on my way back, I'll pick them up.

I went over and did what I had to, made my delivery, and then on the way back, they had made it, you know, a little further.

They weren't running as elders.

The ride, it was an interesting conversation.

I told them that my father would be really interested.

His name's Tall Oak and that he does a lot of research and he would really be fascinated with the story.

- That's like a one- in-a-million thing.

Like, you're telling me you just stumbled upon somebody on the side of the road?

- Like I said, Creator puts us where we're supposed to be any given moment and everything felt right that day.

And, you know, it was a good day.

My dad was a historian, so he's a keeper of knowledge for local, regional tribes.

My dad went over there and spent a lot of time in the archives and they started doing a powwow and a reconnection ceremony.

My dad was part of that first one.

- [Michael] It's the kind of thing that you don't know is missing until it comes.

- [Karla] And we went, we took our kids and it's like, "Let's go see the Indians."

Before we knew about ourselves.

We go and we're like, "Why are all these Bermudians up there?

Where are the Indians?"

And we were like, "This is fake."

And then afterwards they started talking like, "Oh, they have American accents.

Oh, this is our people.

They look just like our cousins."

- We were looking around and I was like, "Man, doesn't that look like so-and-so back from Shinnecock?

Doesn't that look like so-and-so from Mashpee?

Doesn't that look like so-and-so from Narragansett?"

- "You look like my granny.

You look like you're somebody."

They were telling me I look like somebody.

When she showed me this picture, I said, "Wow, that's me.”

She had hair like me.

She had my round face.

She had my nose.

- Dawn Spears taught me the corn husk doll-making.

Her husband, when he came and he looked at our fishing nets and he asked, "Well, who taught you this knot?"

It's just been handed down from generation to generation, like father to son.

And he said, "Well, we are the only tribe that makes this knot."

So someone from their tribe was brought here.

They came with their craft, their knowledge, how to do things.

- [Karla] And then when we met them, it was like, "Hey, family, nice to meet you."

It was like we had found our other part.

And they said that, too.

When they first met us, they were like, "Welcome home, we've been looking for you."

- [Michael] You know, whether it's the fishing nets that you spoke of with the Bermuda relatives or dances that reflect both the African and Native American ancestry that we saw for the first time when we interacted, and it just blew our minds to see that folks were not only representing all of who they were, but keeping every piece alive because it's one thing to say, and there are many Americans who can correctly say, "Well, I have a Native American ancestor."

What we are is not about race.

What we are is about culture, and these people have gone to great lengths to keep culture alive.

- [Dominique] May 24th is what it's originally called because it used to be held on the 24th of May every year, but it's now called Bermuda Day.

The whole day is basically to just encompass Bermuda's culture, its history and all of that, and just put a show on for the entire island.

So it's just a day to celebrate who we are as Bermudians.

We get majorette groups, dance troupes Gombey troupes.

(whistle blowing) (lively drum music) - So Gombey is West African terminology that has been identified as Gumba, which means rhythm drum.

- [Dominique] It's an amalgamation of a bunch of different enslaved groups that we had here on the island.

Back in the day, you know, we couldn't, as Black people in Bermuda, be ourselves, gather with our people.

So the Gombeys kind of sprung from that.

So you'll see that they wear this mask, so that covers their identity.

- [Irwin] I speak to my boys in terms of regalia.

They must have Native American influence in all of it.

So you will see types of tapestry, embroidery, designs that symbolize Native meaning.

- Covered from head to toe, no part of your body exposed.

That mask is also symbolic of feeling, expression.

So it's what you want to portray through that actual mask.

(lively drum music) So even the props that we're using, again, you'll find African and Native American.

You have a bow and arrow, and that is what they call sort of the lead Indian.

He is leading the line.

He is the head of the snake.

Everybody behind him has a tomahawk.

Those are your warriors.

Then in the line, you would also have some gentlemen that would have a spear.

Again, we're going back to now the African.

Now you have the leader.

Any leader holds a whip.

Now, that whip is symbolic of slavery and it is also meant to keep order.

He keeps the line in check.

He keeps the spectators in check.

There was a time where you would be whipped if you got too close to the line because we're also protecting our little ones.

- There are a number of different dances as you guys have seen.

You have your fast dance or freedom dance, and as the name suggests, it's a very explosive movement.

And it's kind of self-explanatory, right?

When the slaves were taught that they were set free, you could imagine the excitement and the celebrations that went and came along with it.

(lively drum music continues) It's a very interesting dynamic between the drummers ourselves as well as the dancers.

Yes, we do have practices and rehearsals, but a lot of it is based on the chemistry and in the moment.

(whistle blowing) - [Kid 1] It feels amazing.

And I want to just dance straight away.

- [Kid 2] It feels like it's a vibration all around the city.

- [Trae] I think it's one of those full-circle moments, because for so long, the term Bermudian, it's a tricky one, right?

Some would argue all there was nobody here.

Everyone that's here was brought here.

So what inherently is Bermudian?

It has taken a life of its own.

Seeing where a little bit of this came from, seeing where, OK, a little bit of that come from, and oh, yes, I can see that that came from here.

That's what's important, I think.

And that's what ties in what it means to be Bermudian, seeing where things came from.

I was around at the very first reconnection powwow in St.

David's.

And from that came the link and the trips to the East Coast, to Connecticut, to, you know, to Cape Cod, to all those East Coast powwows, specifically the Wampanoag and Schemitzun, the Pequot powwows.

- [Dominique] So I am very excited to be going to the Pequot powwow this year.

Really want to keep the link strong between us and the Pequots, and the Mashpee Wampanoags, and the Narragansetts.

We just, we want to keep that link, you know?

We don't want it to die off.

- Hello.

- He's here, too.

- All right.

- Oh, when we first got here on the Tuesday, we got to the hotel and they had this big celebration, drums and banners and singing.

Never experienced that and it's been home ever since.

- Schemitzun is actually another of those English bastardizations of a word in our language, Schemitzun, which means three-day feast.

And so, for us, that three-day feast was the centerpiece of that social, cultural, and economic gathering.

And always, there were songs and dances shared between tribes who were neighbors.

(people chanting) (rhythmic drum music) - I mean, I've had the privilege of being in this position for almost 20 years now, and so, I've reconnected with our Bermudian relatives many, many times.

But every time I see them, it's just the same level of excitement.

Our children and their children have now grown up together and re-forming that bond that was broken centuries ago.

It's a beautiful connection.

- [David] I can't believe it's been 25 years.

The time goes by quickly.

You know, the reconnection's happening.

It's still ongoing.

There's still more to do.

And, you know, I just hope everyone embraces it.

- [Michael] There have to be other stories that we don't know how or when or where is the only question.

It isn't an if.

(rhythmic drum music) - [Irwin over PA] Then when the colonists came to our little island to control us, they forbid us to dance this culture, but in the dark shadows and behind the scenes, we taught our young ones to keep our tradition alive.

So today, in Bermuda, we have more freedom to dance and sing and pass on the traditions to the next generation.

Well we can thank the Creator for that!

(whistle blowing) (rhythmic drum music) This is a historic moment.

This is your people that was taken away from your homeland.

- [Lottie] Well, how can I explain it?

I'm just proud to be in that circle.

- Emotional isn't the word, but for me, I don't know, it's been peace.

Like, I kind of feel peaceful inside.

I don't know, like, I'm standing in among the land that my ancestors stood in and I just feel like, I don't know what the word is, to be honest.

I don't know if there's a word in the English dictionary for it, but I just keep thinking that myself and my family and my people, we are not supposed to be witnessing this and we're not supposed to be in this because those colonizers, the white colonizers who brought our people, stole our people from these lands to Bermuda, they tried to erase this.

They tried to erase our language, the thought of who we are, our connection, but they failed because here I am standing in regalia alongside my family, you know, who, I don't know, who like they wanted to know who they were so badly, they went back.

They traced who they were and here I am standing in this moment and in this spot for them essentially.

And it's just to stand in the powwow circle.

I'm on the grounds that my people once walked.

We don't know what spot exactly, but the trees, I don't know how long they've been here, but they witnessed the taking of our people.

You know, their blood, their sweat, their tears are on this land and to come back and walk barefoot on the grounds that they once did, it's peaceful.

I don't know.

It's emotional, but it's peace in the inside.

- [Announcer] Adult women's eastern traditional.

Good luck, ladies.

- [Dominique] So for us, too, like, we've been on this journey together, you know, we've been learning side by side and a lot of people aren't fortunate to have that, so I really appreciate, you know, having my mom beside me to see me in the circle and it makes us emotional, but we have each other to lean on and to learn from.

- You make me cry.

Oh.

(rhythmic drum music) Proud.

She's a wonderful daughter.

I can't ask for nothing better.

I am.

I am somebody.

I am.

And I'm proud to be who I am.

I am.