November is Native American Heritage Month!
This Native American Heritage Month, join us in celebration of the rich history, achievements, and ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples in our watershed.
For over twelve thousand years, the Indigenous people of Northeast Woodlands have stewarded our watershed, cultivating interdependent relationships with our river and fighting for its protection.
Indigenous people have endured the displacement, dispossession, and violence of colonization. Yet, Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag nations have resisted, and are today resurgent––keeping cultural traditions alive, strengthening networks of care and resources, and creating new opportunities for Indigenous youth. This Native American Heritage Month, we invite you to learn more.
FIRST POST-COLONIAL MISHOON BURNING IN BOSTON
For the first time in over 400 years, Indigenous tribes came together to hold Boston’s first post-colonial mishoon burn at the Little Mystic boat slip in Charlestown.
A mishoon is a dugout canoe created by means of a continuous, controlled burn according to tradition that’s been passed down through generations. This ceremony is an act of radical cultural revitalization that aims to build community, strengthen tribal bonds, educate the public, and teach new generations.
Called “Communal Waters: Highways of Intertribal Exchange,” the project was led by Andre Strongbearheart, a cultural steward for the Nipmuc tribe, and Thomas Green, an artist and educator of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, and it brought together members of the Chappaquiddick, Mi’kmaq, Mashpee Wampanoag nations and Indigenous people from across the world.
“What it means is being able to create these camps for indigenous youth, even indigenous elders, to come together and share in these old ways… what colonization did is it scrambled our puzzle here. So we’ve been slowly putting our puzzle pieces back together,” said Andre Strongbearheart. “And I think it’s places like this that allow an extra piece every time to be put back in.”
"Most people forget that no matter where you’re from, your ancestors were indigenous to somewhere and they very likely worshiped the earth because that’s what indigenous people do,” said Thomas Green. “I don’t know why we stopped worshiping it because it’s the only thing that can support human beings. It doesn’t need us, but we definitely need it."
“We need to braid our communities back together in this very way that we're doing right now,” said Strongbearheart in an interview with WBUR. “And we need to braid our language and our ceremonies and our walks stronger, braid them tighter, back together.”
Learn more in the Boston Globe, WBUR, and in the video by the City of Boston.
DAM REMOVAL & RIVER RESTORATION
Before colonization, Charles River flowed freely and Indigenous ancestors relied on its vibrant population of migratory fish for food and cultural inspiration.
In 1783, despite Massachusetts law requiring dam owners to provide ample fish passage, colonists raised Watertown Dam several feet to increase its power yield, completely blocking spring fish runs upstream to the Nipmuc people in Natick. Nipmuc ancestors residing in Natick actively petitioned the state legislature in opposition to the Watertown Dam, as it infringed on Indigenous rights to food sovereignty, stripping the community of vital resources, cultural ways of life, and free-flowing water.
Today, Kristen Wyman, a member of the Nipmuc Nation, has been a leader in advocacy for removal of the Charles River Dam in South Natick. In her influential presentation to the Charles River Dam Advisory Committee, Kristen brought this history of Indigenous resistance to dams alive and called for the restoration of fish passage and indigenous food sovereignty. This month, we celebrated the Natick Select Board's decision to remove the dam and restore Charles River, a decision due, in part, to Wyman’s strong leadership and the Nipmuc people’s longstanding resistance.
SACRED PADDLE TO DEER ISLAND
Each October, members of the Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag nations come together to honor and remember the sacrifice of their ancestors with a twenty-mile sacred paddle between Natick and Deer Island.
The long journey, which traces the forced removal of Native ancestors from Natick to imprisonment on desolate Deer Island by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1675, includes a twenty-mile paddle up Charles River from Boston Harbor to Watertown Dam, the furthest extent of fish migration today, and a ten-mile walk from Brighton to Natick.
This powerful ceremony remembers the sacrifice of Indigenous ancestors, many of whom lost their lives on Deer Island, and honors the survival, resilience, and ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples today.
RESTORING INDIGENOUS FOODWAYS ON REMATRIATED LAND
Eastern Woodlands Rematriation Collective is a grassroots collective led entirely by indigenous womxn, queer, and two-spirits boldly reclaiming the right to food and relationship to the earth in “New England”. EWR helps sustain existing community-led food and medicine projects across tribal communities in the Northeast to restore polycultural food systems and local fisheries and build traditional medicine and foodways, all while reengaging spiritual foundations of these livelihoods.
Recently, the collective has had the opportunity to reclaim and restore a 64-acre area in Millis, MA along Bogastow Brook, a tributary of the Charles River. A former working farm, the collective hopes to transform the space into a place for learning, community, and ceremony for Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands as well as restore natural ecology and river health through invasive species removal.
We humbly acknowledge our work is carried out across the traditional territory of the Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Wamponag nations and recognize Indigenous people as past, present, and future caretakers of the Charles River watershed.
