Jessie Frazier and Amelia Moore have been collaborating with Maryann Gobern Mathews of Block Island and East Providence for two years to document the post-contact history of Native and African American residents of Block Island. Maryann, herself a descendant of Native and African peoples who have lived on Block Island for generations, has been promoting the resurgence of a Manissean community on Block Island. “Manissean” is the name given to the indigenous people who lived on the island of “Manisses”, renamed Block Island after the Dutch explorer, Adrian Block. The Manisseans were members of the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Niantic, and Pequot peoples of the region who used the island as a place to hunt, fish, clam, and live in shifting patterns over the course of the year in varying degrees of permanent residence. The arrival of the Dutch and British forever altered the composition of peoples on the island, and the decimation of the Manisseans is a part of the long history of genocide, slavery, and indenture that has shaped contemporary New England and the United States as a whole. Aided by a recent grant from the New England Humanities Consortium, our team was able to continue our historical and ethnographic work with Maryann this summer, despite COVID restrictions, visiting sites of intense personal and familial significance on the island, documenting examples of public memory making and erasure, and identifying key historical accounts in the archival record. In conjunction with a larger collective of researchers, scholars, and students from the region, including but not limited to Lorèn Spears, Marcus Nevius, Kevin McBride, Kendall Moore, Adrienne Keene, Christian Gonzalez, Kaytee Canfield, and Adrian Cato, our team plans to compile these examples and accounts into a traveling exhibit, tentatively entitled, “Public Memory, Place, and Belonging”, that will help tell the Manissean story from contact to the present day through the voices of Maryann, members of her family, and other members of the Manissean, Narragansett, and Block Island community.