Month: October 2025

Between Land and Law: An Exploration of Tribal Identity and Sovereignty

When I set out to curate this collection of writing on “sovereignty,” I knew it was a mammoth to explore. Among original peoples of the Northeast, the word – the idea  – is layered with centuries of entanglement between dispossession and self-determination, belonging and constraint. By its simplest meaning, sovereignty implies the authority or autonomy […]

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ON THE COVER: Ella Mahoney

In creating the cover of Motif’s Indigenous Peoples Month issue, artist and visual arts teacher Ella Mahoney took her inspiration from her birthplace, Aquinnah, in Martha’s Vineyard, MA. “Every year, the members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe go to the cranberry bogs, and pick cranberries together,” she relates. “From that, I took images of the […]

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