Nanepashemet's Statement to the Eastern States Archaeological Federation Conference

November, 1994

In the last year or so of Nanepashemet's life, his family, Plimoth Plantation colleagues and friends noticed the decline in his health due to diabetes. Everyone interviewed for NANI: A Native New England Story agreed that Nanepashemet was no self-destructive "romantic." Rather, he was just working harder than ever, as the onset of this disease became more difficult---working on scholarly articles (perhaps a book), new lectures and public events, music, crafts; and, state-of-the-art museum presentations which then were culminating in the Plimoth exhibits called Irreconcilable Differences. But Nanepashemet, taking his highly-regarded dancing that year to the Pequot Schemitzun Festival, collapsed into a coma and passed away soon after, surrounded by his family and closest friends.

Nanepashemet videotaped this "Statement" because by this time he was too ill to attend that year's ESAF Conference. He speaks about the need to change assumptions that write History and the prejudices that divide it from "Prehistory"; about the importance of a serious and meaningful respect for Native peoples' own knowledge of their past. A science whose methods anatomize the dead must respect and learn from their living descendants, in the Native Americans of today---their knowledge of ancient evidences, their inheritances of historical fact, and their choices about the future of their past.

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