Ashfield Historic Museum curator adding Indigenous exhibits to decolonize collection

About a year into her tenure as the new Ashfield Historical Museum curator, Sky Suslov is making good progress on her goal of decolonizing the museum.

In addition to the mock general store storefront, along with artifacts from wars throughout U.S. history and the town’s industrial endeavors, and records and photos from Sanderson Academy, the museum now includes Indigenous tools and clothing.

“I’ve been working on trying to decolonize the museum, so my collection from home is on display,” Suslov said. “There was no previous Indigenous display prior to that, aside from a mortar and pestle.”

Suslov’s personal collection includes items made and used by Indigenous relatives such as her cousin’s great-great-grandfather’s moccasins, sewing baskets, a rattle, a crooked knife used for basket-making, a hunting whistle and fire bag, and a knife decorated to look like a turtle made for Suslov by a cousin.

“I hate snapping turtles and I think they made it for me because they knew it would make me uncomfortable,” Suslov joked.

Before the town was settled and incorporated by colonists in the late 1600s and early 1700s, the region was home to the Pocomtuc tribe, Suslov said. The colonists and the tribe did not have a good relationship, and there was violence, land ceded at gunpoint and raids conducted in revenge.

“In the big scheme of things, it was relatively peaceful when it came to native and colonist relationships. By the time they (the colonists) came here, they (the natives) already mostly left because they knew what was coming,” Suslov said.

Eventually the tribe was forced north into Canada and settled near the Saint-François River where the Odanak tribe lived.

“There were basket makers that came through … but nobody really came back to settle,” Suslov said. “However, ironically, I descend from Odanak and during fall festival I met another woman who is Odanak.”

The museum also has a display of a few ribbon skirts made by HealingStiches, a clothing company based in Quebec whose creators have Mohawk and Mi’kmaq ancestry.

The skirts, with their bright, colorful ribbons, symbolize different causes and organizations Indigenous groups have spoken in support of, such as the orange shirt movement that recognizes the Indigenous children who were forced to attend residential schools and assimilate into white culture.

“It brings attention and make people ask questions,” Suslov said of the skirt display. “We get to describe the different movements to them; I like to get people’s minds moving and asking questions.”

Suslov said she would love to get more Indigenous culture and history into the museum, and incorporate more modern items as well.

“This all puts us in the past,” Suslov said. “None of these baskets are prior to 1940; I want some more contemporary things because this is just relegating us to the past and we’re not just in the past — we’re here now.”

While Suslov is working to incorporate more Indigenous history into the museum, the former exhibits that tell the story of the settlers and how the town evolved from their arrival in the 1700s to today remain, but might not look exactly as it did before.

To accommodate the mobility impairments of some of the museum’s older visitors, Suslov relocated the Sanderson room — with records, photos and trophies from the school — downstairs.

It took a lot of work and a lot of organizing, Suslov said. She and assistant curator Jenny Wildermuth worked through the winter in the unheated building, going through boxes, sorting and shuffling around the museum.

“During COVID it was closed, so there was a lot of backlog,” Suslov said. “Before I started you couldn’t even really walk down the halls because there was too much clutter. There was so much to see that you couldn’t even really see anything.”

While sorting through boxes and organizing the museum, Suslov found a number of unexpected items such as WWII German battle armor, a Spanish sword, and a cracker believed to be carried by a union soldier in the Civil War.

“It was in with a bunch of uniforms and I pulled it out and it was wrapped in a flag. I unwrapped it and was like, ‘This is a cracker,” Suslov said. “We don’t know how it got here.”

The museum also houses a Victorian mercantile and apothecary storefront with items original to the time period that the people of Ashfield would have purchased and used in their day-to-day lives; a replica apartment with a kitchen, parlor and bedrooms with items dating back to the Colonial era; and artifacts from the various industries that were once prominent in town, su medical equipment manufacturing and peppermint.

The Ashfield Historical Museum is open on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon, as well as for special events and for occasional tours upon request. For more information visit ashfieldhistorical.org. 

Reach Madison Schofield at 413-930-4579 or mschofield@recorder.com.