Co-sponsored with Thoreau Farm and The Thoreau Society. Join Linda Coombs (Aquinnah Wampanoag) as she discusses her ground-breaking Young Adult book, Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, part of the Race to the Truth Series published by Penguin Random House that seeks to correct some of the long-standing myths about American history. The book has attracted many readers for its compelling story of a young girl's life in a Wampanoag family and community long before any contact with Europeans. This is juxtaposed in the following chapters with documented accounts of European exploration, settlement, the institution of colonization, as well as its many impacts, which carry through to the present day. The book has also attracted controversy, including a book ban in Texas. Coombs will discuss her work with the Wampanoag scholar Joyce Rain Anderson as part of the broader project of Native American revitalization. Linda Coombs. Linda Coombs is a citizen of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha's Vineyard, and has lived in Mashpee with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe for than 48 years. Her two grandchildren are enrolled with the Mashpee tribe, as was their father and grandfather. She has worked as a museum educator for 51 years, spending 11 years at the Boston Children's Museum, 30 years in the Wampanoag Indigenous Program at Plimoth Plantation, and 9 years at the Aquinnah Cultural Center, a small house museum dedicated to the Aquinnah Wampanoag. She has been an interpreter, an artisan, a researcher; led workshops and teacher institutes; written children's stories and articles on various aspects of Wampanoag history and culture; and developed and worked on all aspects of a wide variety of exhibits. In 2023, her book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story was published. The goal of all her work remains the communication of accurate and appropriate representations about the history, cultures, and people of the Wampanoag and other Indigenous nations. Joyce Rain. Joyce Rain Anderson is a professor of rhetoric and composition at Bridgewater State University, where she directs the Native American and Indigenous Studies program. She has published widely on cultural rhetorics and Indigenous pedagogy.