2026 Honorees 

 

Princess Red Wing Arts & Culture Award:

Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason (Schaghticoke/HoChunk)

Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, Brown University

Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason is an award-winning educator, traditional storyteller, author, and advocate with more than 25 years of experience promoting social and cultural equity in education.

She currently serves as Assistant Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown University, where she supports the expansion of Indigenous-focused academic programs and fosters relationships with Tribal communities. Through her consulting firm, Wunneanatsu provides workshops and professional development for educators nationwide focused on combating misinformation and ensuring Indigenous histories are authentically and respectfully represented in classrooms. She has developed classroom materials, teacher resources, and textbook content for organizations including McGraw-Hill Education and the Library of Congress. 

In recognition of her outstanding contributions to education, she was named the 2024 National History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History—the first Indigenous educator to receive this honor. She has served on local, state, and national committees working to ensure accurate Indigenous representation across the educational landscape, including her recent appointment to the Gilder Lehrman Institute's Indigenous History Advisory Group and her previous role as Chair of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Indigenous Peoples Policy Task Force. Additionally, she is a founding member of the Schaghticoke Women's Traditional Council. 

Wunneanatsu draws inspiration from her grandmother, Trudie Lamb-Richmond, a renowned Tribal Historian, Educator, and Master Storyteller. Her grandmother's teachings inform Wunneanatsu's approach to storytelling and cultural preservation and inspired her debut children's book, Grandmother Moon, which was recently selected by NCSS and the Children's Book Council as a 2026 Notable Social Studies Trade Book.

Eva Butler Scholar Award:

Marjory O’Toole

Executive Director, Little Compton Historical Society

MA in Public Humanities, Brown University

Marjory O’Toole has spent the last twenty years returning the voices of underrepresented people to the histories of Little Compton, Rhode Island, also known as Sakonnet. She is the curator/co-curator of twenty exhibits and the author/co-author/editor of eleven local history books. Most recently her work has focused on the history of the Sakonnet Wampanoag people in collaboration with Wampanoag and Narragansett Knowledge Keepers.

Marjory has over thirty years of museum experience. Her career began as the Director of Public Programs  at the Thames Science Center in New London, Connecticut, an organization founded by Eva Butler. There her mentors encouraged her to “think without limits” and provided ample opportunities to grow as a museum professional.

Born and raised in Little Compton, Marjory and her young family left Connecticut to help establish Little Compton’s brand-new Community Center. Eight years later she eagerly accepted her position at the Little Compton Historical Society and fell in love with the process of doing local history. The Historical Society provided her with the opportunity to study for her Master’s Degree at Brown University where she had the privilege of being taught by several previous recipients of the Eva Butler Scholar Award.

Marjory is the proud mother of three adult children, and a tremendous fan of their wonderful partners. She lives in Little Compton with her husband Tim O’Toole and their pets on a small piece of her grandparent’s former farm. She is deeply honored to receive this a

Ellison "Tarzan" Brown Champion Award:

Gaia

Creator of the “Still Here” mural in Providence’s downtown

Gaia was born as Andrew Pisacane in 1988 in New York City and raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His artist name, Gaia, is derived from the Greek designation for "earth goddess," a deity that is the personification of Earth. Early in his career he created murals on derelict buildings, alleys, and abandoned billboards that depicted his fear of global warming, frequently using animal imagery to blend nature in with the urban landscapes. In 2007, while still in high school in New Yaxork, Gaia started wheat-pasting prints of his linoleum blocks in Bushwick, Williamsburg and Chelsea. He participated in several successful shows in Bushwick at Ad Hoc Art.

Gaia studied for four years at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where he broadened his iconography and graduated in 2011. Gaia also developed an interest in the evolution of urban neighborhoods. He began incorporating portraits of influential, and sometimes controversial urban developers: people such as Nelson Rockefeller, Robert Moses, Henry Flagler, James Rouse, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. These men built highways, skyscrapers and housing projects and collectively and irrevocably, they altered our perception of public space. For this reason, Gaia layered them into his urban murals.

Perhaps considered the most iconic mural in the current Downtown portfolio, Gaia's Still Here is a portrait of a contemporary Narragansett woman named Lynsea Montanari holding a portrait of her tribal elder, Wampanoag and Narangansett leader Princess Red Wing. Lynsea wears contemporary clothing in lieu of traditional regalia, an inference to the community of Indigenous people currently living, working, and holding tradition in modern-day Providence.

The location of the 32 Custom House building (and the parking lot that was the former Daniels building) provides a sweeping view of the wall from the Weybosset bridge and river. According to the City Department of Art, Culture & Tourism, "Weybosset Street was a site where three important Indian trails met, one coming down from the north, the second up from the southeast Mount Hope region called the Wampanoag Trail, and the third up from Connecticut in the southwest called the Pequot Trail."

Gaia's opening idea for the mural was to consider erasure, considering the landscape that existed before colonial settlement, asking the question of whose history gets recorded and whose doesn't. As he captures in his artist interview (viewable above), through partnership and permission seeking with the Tomaquag Museum, the work evolved into a narrative that captures a living person holding legacy and tradition, advocating for human rights and environmental justice, a people still here across time that continues today.

Kaukont Philanthropic Award:

Dr. Saundra McMillan

Saundra McMillan received a PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California on a fellowship from RCA-NBC and taught in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at California State University, Long Beach for 30 years. Prior to that she worked as a print journalist and radio public affairs producer. 

Saundra has been involved in numerous indigenous and environmental issues. At CSULB, she established the first radio station and ensured all had access to programing including the American Indian Studies students. She was deeply involved in protecting the last remnant of Puvunga, the Tongva town on which CSULB stood, and educating about its history and descendants.  She and her husband William Resch, whose mother was California Indian and Mexican and whose ancestry included two Spanish soldiers who helped "establish Los Angeles," sought to inform that a Tongva town, Yaanga, was already there. 

After retiring, they moved to the country North of Kansas City, Missouri, where Saundra grew up.  There she designed and general contracted an earth sheltered home and restored 80 acres in a conservation program. Her volunteering activities included presentations about Indian agriculture in schools, boardrooms, and at area Indian festivals.

Since moving to Rhode Island in 2016 to be near her daughter, Amanda Resch, Saundra has regularly attended and supported Tomaquag events.  She donates to the operating and new museum building funds, sponsors the Honoring Celebration, and provides auction items. She also shares information and provides encouragement. 

Eleanor Dove Entrepreneur Award:

endawnis Spears (Diné/Ojibwe/Chickasaw/Choctaw)

Co-founder, Akomawt Educational Initiative

endawnis Spears is an educator working in the public humanities. She is an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation and is Yucca Fruit Strung Out in a Line Clan, born for the Otter Tail Pillagers of the White Earth Nation of Ojibwe.

She received her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Denver and has worked with institutions including the Heard Museum, Museum of Northern Arizona, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Her board service includes the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Tomaquag Museum.

Spears is Co-Director of the Upstander Academy, a nine-day professional learning program that provides classroom educators with an immersive and experiential understanding of American Indian history and contemporary realities in the Dawnland. She is also a founding member of the Akomawt Educational Initiative, an Indigenous education and interpretive consultancy serving museums, schools, and public humanities sites informed by the principal belief that honoring the knowledges of Native Peoples in shared educational work can create a better world for all.  She currently serves as Practitioner in Residence for Tribal Engagement in the Office of Community Engagement at Brown University, where she works to help the University build sustained, mutually beneficial, and institutional partnerships with regional tribes.

Originally from Camp Verde, Arizona, Spears lives in Hope Valley, Rhode Island, with her husband, Cassius Spears Jr., and their four children, Nizhoni (13), Sowaniu (11), Giizhig (9), and Tishominko(7).

Volunteer of the Year Award:

Katherine Estes, CPA

Katharine Estes became a CPA in the early 1980’s while working for an international accounting firm and serving as treasurer of the board of directors of the International Institute of RI (IIRI), her former employer.  After five years she left the large firm to work at a much smaller firm that specialized in nonprofit organizations, leaving that firm after six years to work for a client, Northern Rhode Island Community Mental Health Center (NRICMHC), now the Community Care Alliance.  

While working at NRICMHC several nonprofit organizations asked her to provide services for them and a CPA friend offered to rent her a room in his office, so, in 1997 she began her practice.  She offered contract financial management as well as audit, review, compilation and tax preparation services to the nonprofit community.

Her favorite clients have included the development office of Bryant University, several RI Land trusts (Block Island, Little Compton, Narrow River, Tiverton, South Kingstown and Westerly), the Land Trust Alliance Accreditation Commission, Planned Parenthood of RI, the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence (Boston), Dorcas International Institute, Save the Bay and, of course, the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum.

She has made presentations of nonprofit accounting to the RI Association of Fundraising Professionals, the RI Land and Water Conservation Summit, Rally: The National Land Trust Alliance, the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, and the Connecticut Land Conservation Conference.

Katharine has often been asked to serve on the board of directors of clients she has served. In addition to her sixteen-year stint at IIRI, she has served on the boards of Alternative Living Concepts, Blackstone Mental Health Realty, Caritas House, the InTown Providence YMCA, Planned Parenthood of RI, the RI Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Sojourner House and the South Kingstown Land Trust.

Katharine has been a member of the American Society of Certified Public Accountants since 1990 and a member of its not-for-profit section since 2016.

Katharine provided audit, review and tax services to Tomaquag for approximately fifteen years.  In working at and for the museum during the last year she has had the great good fortune to become more familiar with the staff and the extraordinary, meaningful and important work they do.

 

Lifetime Achievement Award:

Michael Kickingbear Johnson (Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation)

Michael Kickingbear Johnson is a citizen and elder of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. With a thirty-year career in digital media, Michael is the founder of Creative Arts, which produces video and multimedia for Foxwoods, the Mashantucket's gaming enterprise. He has worked at the Tomaquag Museum as a Marketing and Technology manager. 
 
Michael currently serves as the Mashantucket Deputy Historic Preservation Officer, consulting on gas and oil pipeline projects in the Northeast, monitoring regulation changes through the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.  He is passionate about protecting tribal sacred sites culturally significant to indigenous people.

He is also the co-host and technical director of the Native Opinion podcast.