About the Akomawt Movement

The Akomawt Educational Initiative was born out of our professional experience in museum and classroom education.  Our founders, as they worked together, saw an ever-growing need to supply regional educators with the tools to implement competent education on Native history and Native contemporary issues. We also saw the need to provide Native-sourced resources on contemporary issues affecting Native America.  The Akomawt Educational Initiative is here to supply that need.  Education is the tool that binds what we do with classroom educators, professors and university administrators, curators and museum professionals, but also in how Native peoples are looked at and talked about in this country.  We work to create a more inclusive environment in all of the spaces we educate and make community.  By honoring the voices of Native peoples in our shared educational work, we hope to create a better world for all.  We hope you will join us on the snowshoe path
We are educators connected around our passion for Native histories and cultures and our mutual concern about the persistence of myths, stereotypes, and misinformation about Native peoples that persists in public education and public history.  We are a multi-tribal, multi-cultural, multi-discipline coalition committed to:
  • Educate students, teachers, and the public about the history of indigenous people and the continuous nature of Native communities and cultures in the Native northeast and beyond through engaging and life changing programming that is indigenously sourced and academically driven.
  • Support educators in schools, universities, museums and cultural institutions in their work to create educational programming and interpret collections about Native People, colonial systems, power, culture and resilience.
  • Engage our Native economy that represents the vibrant and dynamic nature of indigenous communities through connections with educators and students and museums and visitors. Facilitate opportunities in which Native people stand in their rightful place in discourse about nationality, history, politics, and land rights. If there are not spaces for these conversations, help create them.
  • Consult with educational institutions, business partners, corporations, museums, historical societies and teachers who need assistance with cultural competency, leadership, and diversity initiatives in their own place of business/education.
  • ​Create new and innovative Native sourced  learning materials and travelling exhibits for a wide and diverse set of audiences, both Native and non-Native, as a competent resource for our education system at all levels.
  • Research for the future benefit of students, teachers, communities and the world..  We want to build better citizens out of our youth and our lifelong learners.  With our partners, our research will measure the impact of our work to constantly evolve and deliver new educational material. Flexibility and the ability to create are our strengths.  If we don’t currently offer what you need, we can work with clients to create it.

Meet Our Founders

endawnis Spears

Director of Programming and Outreach

Chris ​Newell

Director of Education

Dr. Jason Mancini

Co-Founder
The three co-founders of the Akomawt Educational Initiative have over 40 + years of combined experience in museum and educational work. They are also members and/or allies of Native communities  across the country and draw upon these experiences to make a change in the dominant American narrative. Collectively, Akomawt’s co-founders are connected to  an international community of  Native and Indigenous Studies scholars , indigenous and tribal museums and cultural initiatives creating an interconnected resource network for maximum educational impact.  
endawnis Spears (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) is impassioned about the diverse and complex intersections of Native American narratives and museums.  She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Denver and will complete her Master’s degree also in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst next year.  endawnis has worked for the Heard Museum, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma, the Narragansett Indian Tribe and was a Peabody Essex Museum Native American Arts and Culture Fellow.  In late 2019, she was elected to the Federation of State Humanities Councils' Board of Directors.  The federation is a national organization partnering all state humanities councils and supporting grassroots humanities programming in every state and territory.  She is the Director of Outreach and Programming and founding member of the Akomawt Educational Initiative, an Indigenous education support service  and interpretive consultancy.  Originally from Camp Verde, Arizona, she lives in Rhode Island with her husband Cassius Spears Jr., and their four children, Nizhoni,  Sowaniu, Giizhig, and Tishominko.
Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy) is co-founder/director of education for Akomawt Educational Initiative; a majority Native-owned educational consultancy based in Connecticut.  He was born and raised in Motahkmikuhk (Indian Township, ME) and a proud citizen of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township.  Chris’s education career began immediately after high school as a substitute teacher during his time as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College. He is a longtime member of the Mystic River singers, an internationally acclaimed and award winning intertribal pow wow drum group based out of Connecticut. For over two decades, Chris devoted much of his time to Mystic River travelling all over the US and Canada singing at community pow wows and spending time in those communities learning various Native musics.

​Chris earned an interdisciplinary Bachelor of General Studies degree from the University of Connecticut which propelled him back to educating as a profession. He served for six years as the Education Supervisor for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Out of the museum, Chris and his museum colleagues co-founded the Akomawt Educational Initiative as a response to observations of the public school system and the lack of representation of Native history and social studies. Chris combines his music and education disciplines together and often makes presentations that educate, but also entertain.  

Chris was the Senior Advisor for the Emmy-award winning documentary Dawnland and participant and co-director of the 2022 short documentary Weckuwapok: The Approaching Dawn chronicling a historic sunrise concert collaboration in 2021 with Wabanaki musicians/storytellers and 19-time Grammy-winning cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

In 2019, he was honored by the New England Museum Association with an Excellence Award for his collaborative efforts on the exhibit America Transformed: Mapping the 19th Century with the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center. He is a current board member for the New England Museum Association, the Tides Institute, Maine Public, and the New England Foundation for the Arts.  From 2020-2021, Chris served as the first Wabanaki Executive Director for the Abbe Museum, Maine’s only Smithsonian affiliate.  He and the team at the Abbe led the effort to create Digital AMIM in 2020 in response to the global pandemic which earned Chris and the entire Abbe staff a 2020 NEMA Excellence Award. His dedication to this work goes back to his experiences at Dartmouth.

In addition, Chris is author of the 2021 Scholastic children’s book If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving, a non-fiction retelling of encounters with Wampanoag peoples and early English colonists in the 17th century as well as the creation of the modern Thanksgiving holiday. Plimoth earned starred reviews from both the School Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews both describing the book as “essential.” In 2021, Plimoth also earned the endorsement of the National Indian Education Association.

Chris is a second-generation Passamaquoddy educator working to create a better, more informed future for us all.
Dr. Jason Mancini is Executive Director of Connecticut Humanities and former Executive Director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.  During the past 30 years, he has worked with, conversed, and shared his archival research with the tribes and indigenous peoples of southern New England, Alaska, Hawai’i, and New Zealand.  He is an ally to these communities and works to build awareness of indigenous rights and histories within non-Native contexts. His academic interests include indigenous social networks, Indian mariners, urban Indian communities, race and ethnicity in New England, cultural landscapes, and oral histories. He is the founder and director of the Indian Mariners Project, a collaboration between multiple tribes, institutions, and individuals that explores the history of and ongoing relationship between Native people and the sea.  In his spare time, Jason is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Connecticut College, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, and Social Sciences Instructor at Sea for Sea Education Association (SEA). Jason holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Connecticut with expertise in the archaeology and ethnohistory of New England. His article, “in contempt and oblivion”: Censuses, Ethnogeography, and Hidden Indian Histories in Eighteenth-Century Southern New England, published in the Journal of Ethnohistory and his forthcoming book projects, “Beyond Reservation: Indian Survivance in Southern New England,” to be published by SUNY Press and “The Narragansett Chief: Adventurers of a Wanderer” (an edited volume) examine the nuanced and subverted histories of the indigenous peoples of the American northeast.