Sneak Peek: Elizabeth James-Perry Podcast

Elizabeth James Perry: I'm enrolled with the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe and our tribal community is on Martha's Vineyard in what used to be called Gay Head but we've renamed it to our community name of Aquinnah…Our ocean heritage, I think, is reflected in my art in that I was raised with a combination of family history and storytelling and whaling adventures and misadventures being related--along with an introduction to the coastline and different places of significance and just very much at home in the beauty of the Atlantic Ocean. So the water is as much our homeland as the land is, if that makes sense. And it's a great inspiration to a lot of Native art on the coast. We use shells in our art in creating traditional beads of wampum. We use a lot of other marine resources as well and it's a big part of our daily sustenance in terms of our diet and life ways, too.