Great Barrington — The NAACP Berkshires awarded its first-ever Indigenous Award to Larry Spotted Crow Mann during the Honoring Native American program on Saturday, October 8 at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center.
Mann is the founder and co-director of the Ohketeau Cultural Center in Ashfield. According to its website, the mission of the center is to provide interdisciplinary education through its cultural workshops, including dance, music, and art events. Mann is also the founder of the Native Youth Empowerment Foundation.
“We are honored and proud [that the NAACP] is a sustainer sponsor for this program because we know the importance of assuring that this event becomes a staple here in Berkshire County,” NAACP Berkshires President Dennis Powell said before he gave Mann the award. “We know that as a community we can no longer ignore the great people who occupied this land long before we arrived. The caretakers of this land understood and worshiped it. They respected our rivers and valued our trees, bushes, insects, and fellow creatures. They knew how to coexist with nature. The wisdom of the Indigenous People, both the wisdom that we are aware of and the wisdom that we have yet to know and may never know, must be revered for its preciousness. Only with this reverence can true inclusion and transformation occur within this community.”
Mann is a citizen of the Nipmuc Tribe and is a traditional storyteller, tribal drummer, dancer, and motivational speaker. “Thank you for the service that you have provided for your community,” Powell said.
“I’ve been an artist, poet, and activist my entire adult life,” Mann said in accepting his award. “I am thrilled that I’m seeing so many things that I thought I would never get to see in my lifetime, and it is truly a revolutionary time. Ohketeau is the first Indigenous-operated cultural center ever to be in Western Massachusetts.”
Mann said that “to do this life-changing work, it’s about alliances.” He continued, “For example, we’re doing revolutionary work with Bunker Hill Community College [in Boston]. We are changing the entire curriculum to reflect the Indigenous cultures and peoples on this land. With the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, we have created a curriculum developed for our Indigenous youth where the drug and alcohol prevention programs are using our traditional methods of storytelling, arts, and understanding the spiritual connection between them.”
Mann said that the health and well-being of Indigenous youth are very important. “Between 2014 and 2016, we had 24 suicide overdoses of Indigenous youth here in our state,” he said. “We are losing one child per month. We are under attack because of the many vicissitudes of our society and the many things that we have suffered.”
Mann described himself as “a defender of sobriety.” He explained, “It’s very important to me that I share my life of sobriety because I overcame addiction at a very young age. Here in Western Massachusetts, the abuse and the bullying from the teachers for being Indigenous was devastating enough to make many of our decisions to be poor decisions, including turning to drugs and alcohol. Knowing that I’m a native person from this land, yet I’ve always been treated like an outsider on my land.”
He said that he became sober when he was 21 years old. “After many years of doing crazy things, drinking, and getting into a lot of trouble, I ended up in the hospital due to alcohol poisoning,” he said. “On the tv in the hospital was a PBS documentary about Christopher Columbus. In the documentary, they explained how the Europeans brought alcohol to the Indigenous People for the first time, and then how they summarily robbed, extracted, destroyed, and usurped their land. They destroyed people through the use of this alcohol by weaponizing it. I was moved by that and I left that hospital never to drink again.”
He added that “it’s a really powerful time to be an ally” to the Indigenous People. “I tell our Indigenous People that, as we’re out there, sharing our art, cultures, or music, it is not our job to teach other people our humanity,” he said. “It is up to them to find the humanity within themselves and to see the world around them.”
