Unsettling Massachusetts
︎︎︎ download Zine
Film, performance and public history project.
2021 - ongoing
How do lines on a map inform, and disinform? What does shifting our perspective do?
Unsettling Massachusetts is a research, film and public history project delving into the history and persistence of Indigenous people and land use change in and beyond areas now known as Medford, Arlington, Winchester, Malden, Somerville, Cambridge, Boston, Masachusetts — regions both intimately familiar to the artists and contested sites of placemaking central to Greater Boston’s emergence as an academic, technological and political hug from the early 1600s onward. This collaboration among geographer and artist Mary Jirmanus Saba, Massachusetts Sagamore Faries Gray and Native Historian Balraj Gill culminates in a film, a zine series, an annotated land-use map, and walking tour and a public video projection along the Mystic River exploring the past and present of Indigenous Massachusetts.
Project and public programming supported by the Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture, the Medford Arts Council, Malden Cultural Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Stills from public performance, community discussion, walking tour and Zine launch in November 2023. 
In 2021, I dreamt I was using an analogue camera which allowed me to see Massachusetts as persistently Native land. As a self-taught videomaker, I was terrified by analogue. It is too permanent, too expensive. At a friend’s prodding, I borrowed a 16mm camera from the Harvard Film Study Center where I was a fellow. I son learned the camera was originally purchased by Robert Gardner, a founder of visual anthropology whose influential ancestors were among the first Europeans to settle in Massachusetts. Gardner participated as a filmmaker in colonial expeditions to places like “Dutch New Guinea,” and he established the Film Study Center along with John Marshall, whose family wealth came from military contractor Raytheon. I managed to film one eleven minute roll of film before my fellowship ended in 2022.
This uncanny confluence set off an investigation leading from (and away from) the Gardner family, the role of camera technology in colonialism and Harvard leading me to my collaborators, Massachusetts Sagamore Faries Gray and Native Historian Balraj Gill, and back to the original impulse to unsettle our relationships to this land.
