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Indigenous and Black people tell their own stories at the Mystic Seaport Museum
“Wail on Whalers, a Portrait of Amos Haskins” by Felandus Thames, an “homage to escaped enslaved people who found autonomy in whaling,” is comprised of hairbeads strung on coated wire. The piece is part of the “Entwined” exhibition, which reimagines thousands of years of maritime history through Black and Indigenous worldviews and experiences. (Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public)
Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public Radio
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Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public Radio
“Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea” at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut explores Indigenous and African ties to the waterways of New England. The exhibition calls on visitors to think about history, water and spirituality in new ways.
“Walking through the exhibition space you get the sense that time is cyclical, not linear. And that everything cycles and has a birth, a life, a death and a rebirth, as do our histories,” said curator Akeia de Barros Gomes.
There are loaned “belongings” — or objects — from Indigenous and African communities dating back 2500 years. They show maritime navigational skills and spiritual connections to the ocean on both sides of the Atlantic.
Senior Curator of Maritime Social Histories Akeia de Barros Gomes said a first step in creating the ‘Entwined’ exhibition was to ask local tribal and Black communities how they would tell their maritime history. “What came from that conversation was the ocean as a place of creation and rebirth,” she said.
Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public Radio
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Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public Radio
“Yes, for the last 500 years, colonialism, slavery and dispossession have been a major factor in our histories,” de Barros Gomes said. “But if you think about African and Indigenous Dawnland, or New England, maritime histories, they go back over 12,000 years.”
“Dawnland” is the Indigenous term for New England.
Mystic Seaport Museum was founded in 1929 to preserve America’s seafaring past. Visitors can walk through a 19th-century coastal village and climb aboard a wooden whaling ship. But for decades, most Black and Indigenous maritime histories were missing. Inside the gallery space, de Barros Gomes points to an ancient ceramic cooking pot that’s partly broken in pieces.
“We are going to continue to do the work until the vessel is whole and holds water once more.”
“Drums from All Directions” is a piece created by Sherenté Mishitashin Harris of the Narragansett tribe. It sits on display as part of the “Entwined” exhibition.
Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public
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Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public
The exhibition includes a brightly painted dugout canoe, traditional masks and jewelry, and a first edition Eliot Bible translated into the Algonquin language. There are also wampum beads found just across the river at the site of the Pequot Massacre of 1637.
Mystic Seaport Museum stands on Indigenous ancestral homelands, said designer Steven Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.
Believed to be the first translation of a Christian bible into an indigenous language is on display in the “Entwined” exhibition at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut.
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Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public
“There was a lot of healing that had to take place so that the communities became comfortable sharing within those spaces.”
Before loaning any materials, local tribes wanted to be sure that along with the hard history there would be stories of strength and resilience. Peters and de Barros Gomes spent nearly two years meeting with Native and Black community members from around New England to shape the narrative.
“It had to be both African and Indigenous communities that were saying, ‘Here’s the story that we want to tell,’” he said.
Director of Research and Scholarship Elysa Engelman said she hopes that visitors can gain a new perspective from the exhibition. “I think, like with reading, like with movies, one of the powers of museums is to transport you outside of your own experience.”
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This is not the first time Mystic Seaport has worked with outside advisers, says Elysa Engelman, the museum’s Director of Research and Scholarship, “but (it’s) the first time that we’ve had an outside committee that was responsible for the content and really was the voice of the exhibit.”
Advisor Anika Lopes traces her ancestry to enslaved Africans and members of the Niantic tribe.
“It reminds me always of your foundation, foundation, foundation,” she says. “Like, who is at the table and who are you involving in the discussions from the very beginning is so important.”
Anika Lopes is an Afro-Indigenous woman who was a member of the committee that helped to shape the narrative of ”Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea.” To create it, the curator and designer asked Indigenous and Black communities in New England (or the “Dawnland”) how their ancestors would have wanted their history and stories to be told? The exhibition runs through spring of 2026.
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Mark Mirko/Connecticut Public
Standing outside the gallery, visitor Susie Gagne said ‘Entwined’ makes Mystic Seaport better. She appreciated the language of the exhibition.
“It was for the most part written in like, ‘we’ and ‘I’ perspectives; written by people in the groups that it’s about. And obviously there are historical atrocities associated with Mystic alongside all of the good historical connotations.”
Back inside, de Barros Gomes walked through two smaller darkened rooms. First, an attic space with ship carvings and spiritual objects of enslaved Africans. Next, an Indigenous hut called a Wetu. And finally, into a light, bright contemporary space with a large collection of art by current Native American and Black artists. There are paintings, sculpture, and traditional clothing.
“Art that really speaks to contemporary artists reclaiming their ancestry and their ancestral stories,” said de Barros Gomes.
For too long, others told America’s maritime history, she said. ‘Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea’ shifts the tide.
Additional work by Jana Tauschinski
Oil and gas tanker location and destination data are from Kpler. The map shows the latest position for vessels with an active AIS signal on April 19–20, filtered by minimum capacity thresholds: crude tankers of at least 50,000 deadweight tonnage (DWT); oil product tankers of at least 55,000 DWT; oil/chemical tankers of at least 40,000 DWT; LNG carriers of at least 150,000 cubic metres; and LPG carriers of at least 50,000 cubic metres. Net fossil fuel import data by country are based on Ember analysis of the IEA World Energy Balances 2023.
A 26-year-old man is facing two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of two University of South Florida doctoral students who went missing last week, local authorities said Saturday.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Florida said that evidence presented to the state attorney’s office resulted in the charges against Hisham Abugharbieh, the roommate of Zamil Limon, one of the doctoral students.
Abugharbieh is accused of premediated murder with a weapon. He was arrested on Friday, the same day Limon was found dead.
The family of Nahida Bristy, the other doctoral student, told CBS News that police said she is also likely dead. That is based on the volume of blood discovered at Abugharbieh’s residence, which he shared with Limon.
“Police told us she is no longer with us,” Bristy’s brother, Zahid Prato, said early Saturday.
The family was told her body may never be found and police believe she may have been dismembered, according to Prato.
CBS News has reached out to police for more information.
Authorities said in a statement Saturday they were still searching for Bristy.
Limon’s remains were found on the Howard Franklin Bridge in Tampa Friday morning, Chief Deputy Joseph Maurer with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said. His cause of death was pending autopsy results.
Deputies with the sheriff’s office took Abugharbieh into custody on Friday after responding to a domestic violence call at a home in the Lake Forest Community, a neighborhood near USF’s Tampa campus, officials said. He also faces charges of domestic violence and evidence tampering, as well as a charge of failing to report a death to law enforcement.
Limon and Bristy, both 27, had last been seen in the Tampa area on April 16.
Limon was studying the use of AI in environmental science and was set to present his doctoral thesis this week, his family said. Bristy is studying chemical engineering.
When President Barack Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran more than a decade ago, his point man was Secretary of State John Kerry. Over 20 months of talks, Mr. Kerry met with his Iranian counterpart on at least 18 different days, often several times per day.
High-level nuclear diplomacy was a natural role for the top U.S. diplomat. Secretaries of state traditionally take the lead on the country’s biggest diplomatic tasks, from arms control treaties to Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
But as President Trump prepares to send a delegation to the latest round of U.S.-Iran talks in Pakistan this weekend, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, will remain where he often does: at home.
Mr. Rubio did not attend the last U.S. meeting with Iran earlier this month. Nor did he join several meetings held over the past year in Geneva and Doha. Mr. Rubio has also been absent from U.S. delegations abroad working to settle the war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza. Despite a long period of crisis and war in the region, he has not visited the Middle East since a brief stop in Israel last October.
In recent months, Mr. Rubio — consumed with his second role, as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser — has not traveled much at all.
During the Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken made 11 foreign trips from January 2024 to late April 2024, stopping in roughly three dozen cities, according to the State Department. So far this year, Mr. Rubio has visited six foreign cities, including a stop in Milan for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Mr. Trump has outsourced much of his diplomacy to others, including his friend Steve Witkoff, a wealthy associate from the world of Manhattan real estate, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner have spearheaded diplomacy with Israel, Ukraine and Russia, as well as Iran, whose delegation they will meet for the second time this month in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
Mr. Rubio’s distance from the trenches of diplomacy reflects his dual role on Mr. Trump’s national security team. For the past year, he has served as the White House national security adviser even while leading the State Department — the first person to do so since Henry A. Kissinger in the mid-1970s.
The secretary of state runs the State Department, overseeing U.S. diplomats and embassies worldwide, as well as Washington-based policymakers. Working from the White House, the national security adviser coordinates departments and agencies, including the State Department, to develop policy advice for the president.
The twin roles reflect Mr. Rubio’s influence with Mr. Trump, and offer him a way to maintain it. For Mr. Rubio, less time abroad means more time at the side of an impulsive president prone to making critical national security decisions at any moment.
As Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Kushner and Vice President JD Vance met with Iranian officials in Pakistan earlier this month, Mr. Rubio was at Mr. Trump’s side at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, noted Emma Ashford, an analyst of U.S. diplomacy at the nonpartisan Stimson Center in Washington. “Rubio clearly prefers to stay close to Trump,” Ms. Ashford said.
Mr. Rubio accepted the national security adviser job on an acting basis last May after Mr. Trump reassigned the job’s previous occupant, Michael Waltz. But officials say that Mr. Rubio is expected to keep it indefinitely.
That arrangement is not inherently bad, Ms. Ashford added. And she noted that previous presidents had entrusted major diplomatic tasks to people other than the secretary of state. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. delegated his C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to handle diplomacy with Russia and cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, for instance.
But she echoed the complaints by many current and former diplomats that Mr. Rubio seems less like someone performing both jobs than a national security adviser who sometimes shows up at the State Department. “I do think it’s to the detriment of the whole department of State and to America’s ability to conduct diplomacy in general that we effectively have the secretary of state position sitting vacant,” she said.
Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, contested such claims. “Anyone trying to paint Secretary Rubio’s close coordination with the White House and other agencies as a negative could not be more wrong,” he said. “We now have an N.S.C. and State Department that are totally in sync, a goal that has eluded past administrations for decades.”
Mr. Rubio divides his time between the State Department and the White House, often spending time at both in the same day. In an interview with Politico last June, Mr. Rubio said he visited the State Department “almost every day.”
While there, he often meets with visiting dignitaries before returning to the White House. Last week, Mr. Rubio presided over a meeting at the State Department between Lebanese and Israeli officials that set the stage for a cease-fire in Lebanon.
His twin jobs “really do overlap in many cases,” he said. “In many cases you end up being in the same meetings or in the same places; there’s just one less person in there, if you think about it,” Mr. Rubio added. “A lot of people would come to Washington, for example, for meetings, and they’d want to meet with the national security adviser and then meet with me as secretary of state. Now they can do both in one meeting.”
Asked about his travel schedule during a news conference last December, Mr. Rubio said he had less reason to travel abroad because “we have a lot of leaders constantly coming here” to visit Mr. Trump at the White House. Mr. Rubio also joins Mr. Trump’s foreign trips in his capacity as national security adviser.
Many national security veterans call the arrangement unwise, saying that both jobs are extremely demanding and incompatible with one another.
It was not easy even for Mr. Kissinger, who had firmly established himself over more than four years as national security adviser before convincing President Richard M. Nixon to let him take on an additional role as secretary of state in 1973. (In a reversal of Mr. Rubio’s approach, Mr. Kissinger was in constant motion, including a round of Middle East shuttle diplomacy that kept him on the road for 33 straight days.)
“In general, it’s a mistake to combine those roles,” said Matthew Waxman, who held senior roles at the National Security Council, State Department and the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration.
“That said, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that a dual-hatted Rubio is so offscreen right now,” Mr. Waxman added. “Especially while so much attention is focused on high-wire diplomacy with Iran, someone needs to manage foreign policy around the rest of the world.”
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