Beneath the Table

Beneath the Table is a public humanities initiative exploring how Indigenous and Asian American experiences can expand our understanding of American identity, cultural memory, and belonging.

Launching in 2026, this multi-year project brings together public feasts, oral histories, digital storytelling, participatory mapping, peer learning, and collaborative scholarship to examine the relationships between food, migration, land, infrastructure, kinship, and cultural practice. Beginning with a series of gatherings and shared meals, the project will develop into a participatory digital archive, peer learning experiential retreats, and ultimately a humanities case study exploring friendship, kinship, and relational collaboration as methodologies for cultural and intellectual work.

Rooted in the Berkshires, the ancestral homeland of the Mohican people, the initiative asks what becomes visible when Indigenous and Asian American experiences are treated as foundational rather than peripheral to American life, and how relationships sustained across cultures, geographies, and generations can generate new approaches to place-based practice, storytelling, and knowledge production.

The project is developed by AncestralRebel, the collaborative cultural and culinary practice of Farah Momen and Lucy Grignon, in partnership with Jan Padios, Professor of American Studies and Chair of Asian American Studies at Williams College. Together, the collaborators bring backgrounds in foodways, storytelling, oral history, public humanities, community-based research, and cultural practice to explore new ways of understanding identity, belonging, and relation across difference.