You are standing in a reassembled room that was removed from a colonial cottage built along the Chesapeake Bay on stolen Patuxent land. This space displays some of the earliest artworks from the Bay region in the Museum’s collection. However, Native Americans did not create the artworks in this gallery. The Museum does not presently take care of any works by Native artists from this region made prior to 1800 due to historic collecting practices which prioritized white, colonial American history. On view, instead, are glass, metal, wood, ceramic, and textile artworks that illustrate the widespread cultural and political change brought to the Chesapeake Bay area by European colonization in the 1600s and 1700s. Native communities such as the Powhatan, Susquehanna, and Patuxent had lived along the Bay for over 10,000 years. As European settler colonists violently forced Indigenous people off their homelands to found present-day Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, the Chesapeake became a site where free and indentured immigrants, enslaved Africans, and local and foreign goods flowed into the colonies. This room is uniquely able to tell such a story of colonial commerce. The original cottage was in Calvert County, about 80 miles from where you now stand. According to oral history, it was once owned by a sea captain, who would have transported pewter, glass, porcelain, textiles, and likely people—enslaved and free—throughout the Chesapeake. Baltimore, also located near the Chesapeake Bay, became one of the largest slave trading ports on the East Coast of the United States by the early 19th century. The contemporary textile at right reflects on enslavement and the social impacts of Maryland maritime trade. Where do you see the consequences of colonization in spaces across Maryland?