#nipmuc

The last time I was on Mt. Tom I had this exact thought!! I went looking and couldn't find any sources specifically about the mountains, but I will share what I did find and maybe that will help somebody else find what we are looking for.

First, native-land.ca says that the Nonotuck, Nipmuc, and Pocumtuc all called Mt Tom their home. The Nipmuc and Pocumtuc lived across much of the state, but the Nonotuck were much more localized to what we call Pioneer Valley now. I highly recommend clicking through each nation and the sources listed on that site.

Importantly, members of all three nations still live in the area! While the Nonotuck and Pocumtuck both mostly merged with other nations, the Nipmuc have (at least) two organizations that represent the modern nation: the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band (nipmuc.gov/) and the Tribal Government of the Nipmuc Nation (nipmucnation.org/). Both groups have many members, events, and education. There seems to be some amount of fighting between them, but I do not know nearly enough about it to make any sort of comment or informed opinion.

The Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band also runs the Hassanamisco Indian Museum in Grafton, MA (eastern-central MA). The website for the museum is currently broken, and Google says it is temporarily closed, so if anybody has any further info about that, that would be great! I'd love to go some time.

There are also a variety of pow wows and similar events held here in Massachusetts that are open to the public. One of the biggest is a Nipmuc pow wow held in the late summer every year. And yes, I have been told directly by multiple indigenous folks that they really actually do want non-natives to go to these events and learn and have fun and buy native-made goods. (https://calendar.powwows.com/events/annual-nipmuck-pow-wow/)

the mark of wagésuk

Nipmuc, of Wabbaquasset, Chaubunagungamaug or Magunkaquog.

This document, signed by Wagesuk, Wuttasacomponom, Job Kattenanit and others, reports to be submitted on behalf of “...We the inhabitants of Quanutusset, Mônuhchogok, Chaubunakongkomuk, Asukodnôcog, kesepusqus, wabuhqushish and the adjacent parts of Nipmuk…”It pledges the submission of  inhabitants of those praying towns to the government of Massachusetts. It’s signed in 1668, a little less than a decade before the War would begin and at a time where tensions were high between Nipmuc and Mohawk tribal communities. 

This might be a long shot, but let’s do it!

If you are of the Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, or Mohican Nation and are interested in collaborating/consulting for a small art project, comment below! :D I’d like to make something in honor of the Native Land I live on in time for November. 🍁

Simply put, I’d like to draw something aquatic, with the inspiration and guidance of Native themes. The pictures above are examples of pieces I’ve made for the past three months. No worries if you don’t have creative experience, and there’s no commitment needed to reach out.

[ OTHER INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE AWARENESS CHALLENGE POSTS]

Here is another IYIL post, this week on Nipmuc (I couldn’t find a word for the language in Nipmuc).

Basic Information

The Nipmuc language is very closely related to all the languages that I’ve looked over before for this challenge. While there is no confirmed historical attestion of it, a language called “Loup A” from a French priest’s 18th century manuscript is generally agreed to likely be Nipmuc. However, listening to people involved in revitalization efforts, it seems like there is a fairly continuous tradition of the language up to the modern day (so it’s never been dormant). It is spoken in Central Massachusetts down into northern parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island, but the main locations where it’s spoken are around Grafton/Natick/Worcester.

Modern History

By the end of the 19th century, much of the Nipmuc land that had continued in their possession was sold or broken up by the Massachusetts government, with the only exception being the Hassanamisco Reservation (fun fact: this is the only reservation in Massachusetts to never have been owned or occupied by non-Native people, which says a lot about how bad colonization was here). Many Nipmuc intermarried with Black people, and the two communities had close ties, with Nipmuc enclaves in Worcester often being within Black neighborhoods. Nipmuc traditions were maintained and people continued to meet at the Hassanamisco Reservation, which was a center for cultural and social life. The Cisco family of Hassanamisco became tribal leaders, and in the 1920s they began getting involved, along with members other New England nations, in advocacy and attempts at recognition and reparations. In the 1930s, leader Sarah Cisco asked the Massachusetts legislature for pensions for Nipmuc people and to maintain the Hassanamisco Reservation, as well as the return of Lake Ripple to Hassanamisco possession, something which was only gained later on under the leadership of Zara Cisco Bough. In 1976 the Hassanamisco Nipmucs were recognized by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Chaubunagungamaug Band, descendants of the inhabitants of the Dudley Praying Town (modern-day Dudley, MA and Webster, MA), reacquired lands that had been sold off in the 19th century, creating a 10-acre reservation, and were incoporated in 1981. They are also recognized by Massachusetts. A third group, the Natick Massachusett, also have state recognition, although members are of mixed Massachusett and Nipmuc descent. None of the groups have federal recognition.

Linguistic Revitalization

Linguistic revitalization has been taking place, although I'm not sure to what extent it’s being taught and how many people are taking part in the revitalization. I did find an article about the teaching of the language, which gives some idea, and there is a website with lessons and classes, so there are definitely things happening. The language was also used in a PBS documentary (?), and here is a video talking about the language consulting for the film.

Support the project!

You can donate to the Nipmuc Nation here (scroll down to the blue “Donate” button).

Howan ken? Teag kukquenauehik? Toh Usseonk? Tonnoh Kootohkeem? Toh a quompi kittinnemonchemnekit?

Waban. His Mark

350 years ago, in May of 1676, the surviving Praying Indians imprisoned on Deer Island during King Philip’s War were released.

During the brutally cold winter of 1675–1676, hundreds of “Christian Indians” — including many Nipmucs who had converted to settler Christianity and pledged allegiance to the English — were forcibly confined on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. Historians estimate that hundreds perhaps even 1,000 people were imprisoned there. More than half of those men, women and children perished from starvation, disease, and exposure in just a few months’ time.

Natives were left on a deforested island with little shelter, inadequate clothing, no fresh drinking water and no food. Some survived by digging frozen clams from the shoreline, leading to food borne sicknesses. Colonial authorities also declared that any Native person attempting escape from the island could legally be shot on sight.

Among those imprisoned were Waban and his family.

This post features Waban’s pictographic mark from a land deed for almost 2,000 acres at “Sherborn, Massachusetts,” signed well after the end of the war, on June 20, 1682. For me, this document serves as a reminder that these are not anonymous victims of history, but Native people with names, families, political relationships, homelands, and enduring nations, and that the dispossession of native lives and lands did not stop in 1676.

When the survivors were released in May 1676, many were so weak, malnourished, and ill that it took days for them to return home. In the immediate aftermath, survivors were subsequently enslaved, indentured, coerced into military service, or further displaced from their homelands.

This history is not distant.

Deer Island remains a site of memory, mourning, survival, and colonial violence in the Northeast.

Sarah Phillips her mark

Moving out of the seventeenth-century for a minute to share the signature of Sarah Burnee Phillips, a Nipmuc woman of Hassanamesit, or so-called "Grafton, Massachusetts"

Sarah Burnee Phillips was born in 1744 to Sarah Muckamugg and Fortune Burnee. Her kinship lines connect her to Sarah Robbins, Peter Muckamugg, and Petavit. Several of the men in Sarah’s family, including Fortune Burnee Jr., Joseph Aaron, and Prince Paine, served in the Revolutionary War. Her half-brother, Joseph, returned disabled, no longer able to work the family farm. Prince Paine, Sarah’s first husband, died after returning from the war, in 1777. Before marrying Boston Phillips in 1786, Sarah worked the family homestead herself.

Sarah lived on ancestral land passed down through family matriarchs, even as that land had been constrained by colonial and state systems of allotment, debt, trusteeship, and dispossession. After Boston Phillips died in 1798, Sarah continued to sustain herself and her family at Hassanamesit through farming, animal husbandry and basket making. She died in 1824.

I have been thinking about Sarah while preparing a TEK and archival recovery walk through Hassanamesit Woods. Now a completely wooded landscape, there is sassafras, sarsaparilla, oak, berries, medicines, stone walls, trails. Beneath the native and invasive plants are cellar holes, buried pewter pots, stone tools. There are the invisible allotment lines, absences, stories, and records that vibrate in my mind when I walk this place.

The upcoming walk in these woods cannot only be about “learning plants.” It has to be about relationship, responsibility, surveillance, survival, and the archival traces of Nipmuc people who continued to live, farm, tend, make, remember, and remain there under conditions designed to make that survival nearly impossible.

Sarah and her kin lived at Hassanamesit for hundreds of years. Their homesite has been the subject of a series of intensive archaeological excavations in the 21st century. Because of that work, we can know intimate details about their household — even fragments of plates, spoons, and other belongings from their daily lives. In some ways, I am grateful for what can be recovered. I am also sitting with the harder question of what it means that so much of what can be known about ancestors comes to us through these forms of (settler) entitlement to knowledge, through legal documents like deeds, debt records, trustees’ reports, through excavations, and the documentation of colonial control.

Sarah's mark leaves the trace of a Nipmuc matriarch whose life at Hassanamesit asks us to read land, plants, archives, and memory together, not separately. 

So some backstory, there’s this little spirit that my and my family are pretty sure lives in our house and steals our stuff sometimes, and we’ve been trying to figure out how to be nice to it and have it steal our stuff less.

I started trying to do some research today about what that entity could be, and I figured a good starting place would be with local indigenous groups belief systems. THERE. WAS. BASICALLY. NOTHING.

ONE. BOOK. FROM 1989. AND A VERY SHORT WIKIPEDIA PAGE AND BRITANICA ARTICLE.

I am very certain that there was much more that existed before those idiot colonists came along and decided to almost completely erase an entire continents history and traditions.

People always talk about how the library of Alexandria was a great loss to the world’s knowledge, but honestly what about the erasure of an entire continent???????? I refuse to believe that more was lost in the burning of the library of Alexandria compared to the colonization of the americas.

I am beyond pissed because I honestly didn’t realize how much was lost until today because I thought it’d be a quick little Google search, like it would be with any kind of European belief system, but very much was not.

And honestly what else is appalling is that I was not aware of this issue until it personally inconvenienced me. As a white person, I have no idea what it’s like to have my entire culture essentially erased, so I can only imagine what it’s like for indigenous people trying to hold onto their traditions. And the fact that this is not being taught in schools or anywhere that it matters is only furthering the erasure of their culture, because if you aren’t taught that it’s there, then you don’t know to protect it.

I think it is absolutely ridiculous that colonization and white supremacy has made it so that an entire religion, which was practiced for thousands of years, is now stripped down to one book, a paragraph on Britanica, and a short Wikipedia page.