Pamela A. Ellis and Deborah Spears Moorehead Join Larry Spotted Crow Mann as the Bunker Hill Community College's 2022-2023 Artist and Scholars in Residence
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Pamela A. Ellis, Esq.
An enrolled member of the Nipmuc Tribe, Ellis has served as a tribal council member to the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Indian Council, the Nipmuc Nation Tribal Council, and the Natick Nipmuc Indian Council where she also served as Tribal Historian and Genealogist. For over 20 years Ellis served as the primary organizer for the Deer Island Memorial and Sacred Paddle, an annual Event that commemorates the removal and internment of Nipmuc and other Native peoples from South Natick in October 1675 during the resistance known as King Philip’s War. A traditional singer and dancer, she is a founder of and performer with the Nettukkusqk Singers (My Sisters Singers), a group of southern New England Native women dedicated to the rematriation and reclamation of women’s drumming and singing traditions. Ellis currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Native Land Conservancy, the first Native-run land conservation group east of the Mississippi and the Clearing Brook, LLC, an intertribal land rematriation, food sovereignty, and Indigenous agriculture project. Ellis currently works as the Principal/Owner of Chágwas Cultural Resource Consulting, LLC. A graduate of Dartmouth College, she holds a JD and Certificate in Federal Indian Law from the Arizona State University College of Law where she was designated a Yates Fellow. She is retired from the practice of law in Massachusetts and was previously admitted to practice before the Mohegan Indian Nation.
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Deborah Spears Moorehead
Deborah Spears Moorehead is an internationally known fine artist, painter, and sculptor from the Seaconke Pokanoket Wampanoag Tribal Nation. Currently, she is the 2023-2024 Distinguished Artist Scholar in Residence at Bunker Hill Community College in sponsorship with the Mary L. Fifield Art Gallery. She earned her Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Sculpture. Spears Moorehead is the owner and director of Turtle Island Native American Tourism Company, Painted Arrow Studio, and Talking Water Productions, where she creates and teaches art. Through her art, cultural tourism and contributions as a Native American Elder, consultant, and historian, Spears Moorehead aims to educate, assert, promote, value, and validate the identity of the past, present, and further generations of the Eastern Woodland Tribal Nations. She is a direct descendant of the Pokanoket Wampanoag Supreme Chief Sachem Massasoit, who befriended and saved the lives of Pilgrims in 1620. She has authored two books, Finding Balance: The Oral and Written History and Genealogy of Massasoit’s People and Four Directions at Weybossett Crossings. She co-founded the Nettukkusqk Singers (My Sisters Singers), a women’s learning and teaching music performing group.
Spears Moorehead is the recipient of numerous commissions and awards. Her work has been commissioned and displayed in Bunker Hill Community College’s Mary L. Fifield Art Gallery, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, and The Quinnipiac Dawnland Museum of Gilford, Connecticut, which recently procured two of her murals as part of their permanent collection, and a collaborative piece was procured by New England Historic Society for the Casey Farm Museum. Spears Moorehead was the Nightingale-Brown House Artist in Residence at Brown University‘s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and awarded a Fitts Family Grant. In 2015, the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts honored Moorehead with a Community Leadership Award for her pioneering work in creating the “first” State Native American Art Exhibit. Two years later, she was the winner of the National Congress of American Indian Art Contest. Spears Moorehead was honored by The Tomaquaug Museum with a Princess Redwing Arts Award in 2020. She was also the winner of the Youth Mural Art Contest from the Smithsonian Institute.