New England Public Media presents with the Nolumbeka Project, a talk with Dr. Margaret M. Bruchac (Nulhegan Abenaki), Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Free Event. This program is continuing as planned at 4 p.m. at the Shea Theater.

Native American memories and histories in the valley of the Kwinitekw (Connecticut River) are long and deep, tracing back to glacial times and marked by many, many generations. Native communities in the territories called Nonotuck (now Northampton and Hadley), and Pocumtuck (now Deerfield and Greenfield) were supported by reciprocal trade and diplomacy with their Native neighbors, including Abenaki to the north and Nipmuc to the east, among others. During the mid-1600s, the English colonists who came here survived by relying on Native ecological knowledges – maize horticulture, maple sugaring, seasonal fish runs, etc. – that became part of regional Yankee culture. Native leaders negotiated written documents that, they hoped, would preserve rights to hunt, fish, gather, plant, and live here in perpetuity. Yet, the increase in colonial settlement and colonial warfare forced the Native communities along the Kwinitekw (Connecticut River) to relocate. Even so, some Native families continued to travel familiar paths and waterways, setting up camps, marketing baskets and brooms, and dispensing Native medicines. During the 1800s, local historians across New England promoted the romantic stereotype of the “vanishing Indian,” despite the evidence of Native persistence. Native histories in Franklin County can be better understood by critically analyzing colonial documents, revisiting Indigenous landscapes, and otherwise dismantling myths and stereotypes that push Native people, then and now, into the vanished past.