BIOGRAPHY
Elizabeth James-Perry
Elizabeth James-Perry (she/her) is enrolled with the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head-Aquinnah in Massachusetts. An internationally known artist and speaker, Elizabeth makes distinctive wampum shell jewelry, porcupine quillwork, and northeastern twined textiles. She cultivates many of the plants used in natural dyes; the rest are wild harvested in a sustainable way. The artist was awarded a Traditional Arts fellowship in 2014 from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A member of a Nation that has long lived on and harvested the sea, James-Perry’s is a perspective that combines Algonquian traditional ecological knowledge, genealogy, art, and science in her ways of relating to life on the North Atlantic. Her new recording about King Philip’s Sash, linking the rare textile to the colonization of Native homelands, will be included in the upcoming Hoist/Acknowledge + Listen exhibit as part of the initiative to replace the Massachusetts State Seal; the recording will also be played before the Massachusetts State Legislators. She worked as an archivist for Radcliffe’s Digital Indian Petitions Project to make historic tribal documents available online to tribes, the public, and educators. Film credits include producing shorts between 2005 and 2007 on King Philip’s War, with support from Mass Humanities grants; and the background scenery photography in Dartmouth for As Nutayunean, the Wampanoag Language Reclamation film. Among her tribal mentors she counts her mother Patricia James-Perry, a scrimshaw artist, along with her cousins Nanepashemet Tony Pollard and Helen Attaquin. She was honored to be a thirty-eighth voyager aboard the historic Charles W. Morgan whaling vessel as a descendant of the Gay Head crewmembers. James-Perry continues to shore up oral traditions and conducts research in local and European museums. She was employed for more than a decade in the Aquinnah Tribal Historic Preservation Office. Elizabeth holds a degree in Marine Science from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.