https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7531-128X
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ABSTRACT
This article presents Siwá knowledge, exploring the resilient Shores where Land and Water meet. Like whalers’ logbooks, it charts the historical and present Siwá feminist approaches to Ocean relationality, marking ripples of influence across time. I explore the meaning of Siwá Feminism, through the nation-building actions of Shinnecock women to restore the Water, Sea, Ocean, and Shore through birth, stewardship, and ceremony. Examining the aftermath of the Circassian shipwreck (1876), I reveal how settler colonialism exploited Shinnecock grief. Matriarch-led healing paths emerge post-marine violence, spotlighting Shinnecock women's voices in shaping the future of Siwá Feminism and fostering reconciliation with the Sea.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Thunder Bird Sisters, “Circassian 1876,” Rise Above My Enemies Upon the Smoke (compact disc), credits Mr. Arthur P. Davis and Mrs. Grace Valdez Smith, in Diane M. Caracciolo, “By Their Very Presence: Rethinking Research and Partnering for Change with Artists and Educators from Long Island’s Shinnecock Nation” (PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2006).
2. Nancy Shoemaker, “Mr. Tashtego: Native American Whalemen in Antebellum New England,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 1 (2013): 109–32; and John A. Strong, “Shinnecock Whalers: A Case Study in Seventeenth-Century Assimilation Patterns,” Algonquian Papers-Archive 17 (1986).
3. Rachel Yacaaʔał George and Sarah Marie Wiebe, “Fluid decolonial futures: Water as a life, ocean citizenship and seascape relationality,” New Political Science 42, no. 4 (2020): 498–520.
4. Kelsey Leonard, “WAMPUM Adaptation framework: Eastern coastal Tribal Nations and sea level rise impacts on water security,” Climate and Development 13, no. 9 (2021): 842–51.
5. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010).
6. Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1996), v.
7. Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 8–34.
8. Maracle, I Am Woman, x.
9. Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Navigating our own ‘Sea of Islands’: Remapping a theoretical space for Hawaiian women and indigenous feminism,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 27.
10. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, ed. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik (Duke University Press, 1995), 86–98.
11. Hall, “Navigating Our Own ‘Sea of Islands’.”
12. Ibid., 16.
13. Beverly Jensen, Shinnecock Indian Nation (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2015); Kelsey Leonard, “The (Un)Making of Property: Gender Violence and the Legal Status of Long Island Algonquian Women,” in Keetsahnak/Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters, ed. Kim Anderson, Maria Campbell, and Christi Belcourt (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2018), 103–24.
14. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism.”
15. Mishuana R. Goeman and Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “Native feminisms: Legacies, interventions, and Indigenous sovereignties,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 9–13; Cutcha Risling Baldy, Cutcha, “Mini-k’iwh’e: n (For That Purpose – I Consider Things): (Re) writing and (Re) righting Indigenous Menstrual Practices to Intervene on Contemporary Menstrual Discourse and the Politics of Taboo,” Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2017): 21–2.
16. Makere Stewart-Harawira, “Practicing Indigenous Feminism: Resistance to Imperialism,” in Making Space for Aboriginal Feminism, ed. Joyce Green (Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2007), 1–2.
17. Joyce Green, ed., Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2007), 18.
18. Stewart-Harawira, “Practicing Indigenous Feminism,” 2.
19. Kelsey Leonard, Max Wolf Valerio, and Jo Carrillo, “Indigenous Feminism and This Bridge Called My Back: Storytelling with Chrystos, Max Wolf Valerio, and Jo Carrillo,” Feminist Studies 48, no. 1 (2022): 81–107; and Kim Anderson, “On Seasons of an Indigenous Feminism, Kinship, and the Program of Home Management,” Hypatia 35, no. 1 (2020): 204–13.
20. Heather Dorries and Laura Harjo, “Beyond Safety: Refusing Colonial Violence Through Indigenous Feminist Planning,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 40, no. 2 (2020): 210–9.
21. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism.”
22. Deborah McGregor, “Reconciliation and Environmental Justice,” Journal of Global Ethics 14, no. 2 (2018): 222–31.
23. Stewart-Harawira, “Practicing Indigenous Feminism,” 11.
24. Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
25. Risling Baldy, “mini-k’iwh’e: n,” 22.
26. Ibid.
27. Mark A. Nicholas, “Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod, the Whalefishery, and Seafaring’s Impact on Community Development,” American Indian Quarterly (2002): 165–97; and Risling Baldy, “mini-k’iwh’e: n”; Shoemaker, “Mr. Tashtego”; and Strong, “Shinnecock Whalers.”
28. “The Fated Circassian,” The Corrector, January 13, 1877, 2.
29. Emily Button, “A Family Affair: Whaling as Native American Household Strategy on Eastern Long Island, New York,” Northeast Historical Archaeology 43, no. 1 (2014): 6; M. Harrington, “Shinnecock Notes,” Journal of American Folklore 16, no. 60 (January 1, 1903): 37; and David Bunn Martine, Time and Memories: Histories and Stories of a Shinnecock-Apache-Hungarian Family (Lulu.com, 2013).
30. Amanda Draper, “The Two Shipwrecks of the Circassian,” Victoria Gallery & Museum Blog (blog), July 29, 2021, https://vgm.liverpool.ac.uk/blog/2021/the-two-shipwrecks-of-the-circassian/?fbclid=IwAR1b8uru-GhS8LqHmqILAmgJtfEqBKKUrjJwEL8iTbWEbR6uDOunUsg113U (accessed August 24, 2023).
31. Dan Rattiner, “Our Amazing History: The Circassian Shipwreck,” Dan’s Papers, June 29, 2021, https://www.danspapers.com/2021/06/history-circassian-shipwreck/ (accessed August 24, 2023); John Albert Sleicher and Frank Leslie, eds., “Wreck of the British Steamer ‘Circassian’ Off Long Island,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 20, 1877, No. 1112, Vol. XLIII, 321–7, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000020241407&seq=39; United States Life-Saving Service, “Annual Report of the Operations of the United States Life-Saving Service for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1877” (1877): 13–20.
32. O.R. Pilat, “Cast Up By The Sea,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 31, 1934, 15.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Cailin Riley, “Shinnecock Look to the Future,” The Express Magazine (blog), May 20, 2019, https://sagharborexpress.com/express-magazine/summerbook-articles/shinnecock-look-to-the-future/.
38. United States Life-Saving Service, “Annual Report,” 15–16.
39. Pilat, “Cast Up By The Sea,” 15.
40. “Particulars of the Wrecking of the Circassian,” The Daily Commonwealth, January 2, 1877.
41. “Circassian Shipwreck,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
42. Shinnecock Nation, “Circassian 100th Remembrance Service” (Shinnecock Nation, 1976); “The Fated Circassian,” The Corrector.
43. “The Fated Circassian,” The Corrector.
44. Shinnecock Nation, “Circassian 100th Remembrance Service.”
45. “Circassian Remembrance Feast,” The Nations Voice, December 29, 2019.
46. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism”; and Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
47. Hugo Canham, “Black Death and Mourning as Pandemic,” Journal of Black Studies 52, no. 3 (April 1, 2021): 296–309, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934720981843; and Patrice D Douglass, “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (January 2018): 106–23.
48. Hall, “Navigating our own ‘Sea of Islands’”; Jaimey Hamilton Faris, “Sisters of Ocean and Ice: On the Hydro-Feminism of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna’s Rise: From One Island to Another,” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 13, no. 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.21463/shima.13.2.08; and Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,” in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, ed. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 21.
49. Cheryl Lawther, “Haunting and Transitional Justice: On Lives, Landscapes and Unresolved Pasts,” International Review of Victimology 27, no. 1 (2021): 4, https://doi.org/10.1177/0269758020945144.
50. Emily Button, “A Family Affair: Whaling as Native American Household Strategy on Eastern Long Island, New York,” Northeast Historical Archaeology 43, no. 1 (2014): 6; and Mark A. Nicholas, “Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod, the Whalefishery, and Seafaring’s Impact on Community Development,” American Indian Quarterly (2002): 165–97.
51. Leonard, “The (Un)Making of Property.”
52. Button, “A Family Affair,” 6.
53. Ruth B. Phillips, “‘Making Fun’ of the Museum: Multi-Disciplinarity, Holism, and the ‘Return of Curiosity,’” Museum and Society 17, no. 3 (2019): 316–41.
54. Nicholas, “Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod.”
55. Ibid.
56. Button, “A Family Affair,” 6; and Nicholas, “Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod.”
57. Elmarie Kotzé, Lishje Els, and Ntsiki Rajuili-Masilo, “‘Women … Mourn and Men Carry On’: African Women Storying Mourning Practices: A South African Example,” Death Studies 36, no. 8 (September 2012): 742–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2011.604463.
58. Ibid.; and Mamphela Ramphele, “Political Widowhood in South Africa: The Embodiment of Ambiguity,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 99–117.
59. Jensen, Shinnecock Indian Nation.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 57.
63. Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 96.
64. Leonard, “The (Un)Making of Property”; and Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633280.
65. Harrington, “Shinnecock Notes”; William M. Laffan, The New Long Island: A Hand Book of Summer Travel Designed for the Use and Information of Visitors to Long Island and Its Watering Places (New York: Rogers & Sherwood, 1879), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011208954; and Pilat, “Cast Up By The Sea,” 15.
66. “The Last of the Shinnecock Indians L.I. N.Y.”/B.M. Franklin, Flushing, N.Y. New York Long Island (1884) (photograph), accessed from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/97511787/.
67. Cheryl Rodriguez, “Mothering While Black: Feminist Thought on Maternal Loss, Mourning and Agency in the African Diaspora,” Transforming Anthropology 24, no. 1 (2016): 68 https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12059.
68. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism.”
69. Hall, “Navigating our own ‘Sea of Islands’.”
70. Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke, “Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective,” Australian Feminist Studies 35, no. 104 (2020): 81–100, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952.
71. Kahala Johnson (Kanaka Maoli), “Indigenous Futurisms” (paper presented at Decolonial Futures, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2016).
72. George and Wiebe, “Fluid Decolonial Futures,” 505.
73. Siobhan Senier, Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
74. Kim Anderson, Maria Campbell, and Christi Belcourt, Keetsahnak/Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2018).
75. Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘o̱pua, “Indigenous Oceanic Futures,” in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, 1st ed., ed. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang (London: Routledge, 2018), 89 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429505010–6.
76. Ibid.
77. Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 21.
78. Ibid., 98.
79. Christen A. Smith, “Facing the Dragon: Black Mothering, Sequelae, and Gendered Necropolitics in the Americas,” Transforming Anthropology 24, no. 1 (2016): 312 https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12055.
80. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism,” 24.
81. Goodyear-Ka‘o̱pua, “Indigenous Oceanic Futures,” 90.
82. Ramphele, “Political Widowhood in South Africa.”
83. Risling Baldy, “mini-k’iwh’e:n.”
84. Anuradha Varanasi, “The Tribe That Brought a Damaged Shoreline Back to Life,” State of the Planet, June 8, 2021, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/09/18/shinnecock-coastal-habitat-restoration-project/.
85. Wuttahminneoh Birth Work, “How it All Began” (2021), https://www.heartberrybw.com/rootz.
86. Ibid.
87. “Two New Birth Circles Established,” The East Hampton Star, 2019, https://www.easthamptonstar.com/2019730/two-new-birth-circles-established.
88. Jaime Cidro, et al., “Being a Good Relative: Indigenous Doulas Reclaiming Cultural Knowledge to Improve Health and Birth Outcomes in Manitoba,” Frontiers in Women’s Health 3, no. 4 (2018), https://doi.org/10.15761/FWH.1000157.
89. Mark Harrington, “Shinnecock Women Launch Kelp Hatchery, Cultivation Operation,” Newsday, August 21, 2021, https://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/shinnecock-nation-kelp-greenwave-sisters-of-st-joseph-1.50339691; and “Indigenous Farmers Turn to Kelp to Restore Waters and Reclaim Cultural Practices,” GreenWave, 2021, https://www.greenwave.org/blog-who-farms-matters/shinnecock-kelp-farmers.
90. Phoebe Racine, et al., “A Case for Seaweed Aquaculture Inclusion in U.S. Nutrient Pollution Management,” Marine Policy 129 (July 1, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2021.104506; and Alexandra Talty, “‘It’s a Miracle Crop’: The Pioneers Pushing the Powers of Seaweed,” The Guardian, August 26, 2021, Environment section, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/26/new-york-seaweed-farming-kelp-producers.
91. “Indigenous Farmers,” GreenWave.
92. Robert Sforza, “Shinnecocks Plan Canoe Trip to Connecticut,” Dan’s Papers,” June 14, 2012, https://www.danspapers.com/2012/06/shinnecocks-plan-canoe-trip-to-connecticut/; and Beth Young, “Shinnecock Tribe Members Canoe across Bay and Sound to Connect with Connecticut Cousins,” Shelter Island Reporter, June 23, 2012, https://shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com/2012/06/23/shinnecock-tribe-members-canoe-across-bay-and-sound-to-connect-with-connecticut-cousins/.
93. Young, “Shinnecock Tribe Members”
94. Julia C. Mead, “Clash of Cultures on Southampton Beach,” New York Times, April 10, 2005, New York section, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/nyregion/clash-of-cultures-on-southampton-beach.html.
95. Maracle, I Am Woman.
96. Hall, “Navigating our own ‘Sea of Islands’.”
97. Dorries and Harjo, “Beyond Safety.”
98. Kotzé, Els, and Rajuili-Masilo, “‘Women … Mourn and Men Carry On.’”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kelsey Leonard
Dr. Kelsey Leonard is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate and Sustainability and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, where her research focuses on Indigenous water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings. Dr. Leonard seeks to establish Indigenous traditions of water conservation as the foundation for international water policymaking. Dr. Leonard has been instrumental in safeguarding the interests of Indigenous Nations for environmental planning and builds Indigenous science and knowledge into new solutions for water governance and sustainable oceans. Dr. Leonard is an enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation.