Homelands and Meeting Places: Native American Peoples and History in the Upper Connecticut River Valley
An Educational Initiative for Teachers, 1999-2000
The infamous door from the 1704 Deerfield attack, 500-year-old planting hoes, the Pequot writer William Apess, the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1629), and the bowl from a Pocumtuck smoking pipe found in Deerfield.
Under the auspices of the Gill-Montague Regional School District and the Five College Public School Partnership, Native peoples, historians, anthropologists, and school teachers came together to plan a series of monthly workshops. The goals were to explore the long history of Native American communities in the upper Connecticut Valley and to develop ways to bring these histories into local classrooms. Read on to find out more about this exciting initiative.
Funding for "Homelands and Meeting Places: Native American Peoples and History in the Upper Connecticut River Valley" was provided by the Massachusetts Department of Education as part of their Goals 2000 initiative.
Participation
32 participants, grades K-12 took part in this series that ran from October 1999 to May 2000 and was held at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield.
Overview of the Series
The ancestral homelands of the Pocumtuck and Squakheag peoples began to be created more than 5000 years ago along the Upper Connecticut River in Massachusetts in Deerfield, Montague, Greenfield, Gill, and Northfield. Together these homelands comprised an extensive social and sacred world that extended north into Abenaki country. Later, as traders, trappers, and settlers arrived, these homelands became important landscapes of survival and resistance as Native peoples struggled to maintain their communities.
Much is known about these homelands and histories and was shared in monthly workshops led by teams of scholars and school teachers who have been working together on Native American issues for more than ten years.
October 6, 1999 All day
Exploring contemporary Indian New England: communities and work, the process of federal recognition, casino economies, education, identity, and persistent stereotypes.
November 3, 1999 4-6:30
Wampanoag Indian history and new perspectives on Thanksgiving.
December 1, 1999 4-6:30
Ancestral homelands in the Upper Connecticut River Valley: archaeological histories, oral tradition, and 17th-century maps.
January 12, 2000 4-6:30
Living together and apart in the 17th century: land deeds, the fur trade, and court cases.
February 2, 2000 4-6:30
King PhilipÕs War (1675-6) and the aftermath: Native survival and continuing resistance in the Upper Valley.
March 1, 2000 All day
Working on ideas for activities, student projects, and thematic units.
March 15 or March 22, 2000
Field trip to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Ledyard, Connecticut: building a wider, comparative perspective on the histories of Indian New England
April 5, 2000 4-6:30
Native communities and lives in the 18th and 19th centuries: survival strategies for communities and families, woodsplint basketry, how Native writers of the time challenged persistent stereotypes.
May 3, 2000 4 -6:30
Urban-based Indian communities in the 19th-century valley: census records, local neighborhoods in the valleyÕs industrial cities.
June 27-28, 2000All day Institute
Two-day curriculum workshop, working on and finalizing ideas for activities, student projects, and thematic units.
Our Teaching Approach
This series is the type of initiative encouraged by Massachusetts's educational reform. We integrated ideas and materials across different disciplines (history, social studies, and language arts) and discussed specific links to the state's curriculum frameworks. Best of all, the approach was inquiry-based and student-focused, with the development of activities and approaches for classroom use in each session. Then was sharing of activities and compiling them into thematic units in the two-day June Institute.
Did You Know?
That Native peoples have lived in the Upper Connecticut Valley for thousands of years and that their early presence here is represented by archaeological artifacts and sites.
That important social and sacred landscapes - ancestral homelands Ð began to emerge in the valley more than 5000 years ago.
That Turners Falls and other industrial sites were important fishing places and traditional meeting grounds long used by the Pocumtuck and Squakheag peoples and their kin, and by Abenaki, and Pennacook peoples.
That even as the Euroamerican presence in the Upper Valley grew larger, Native peoples reserved the right to hunt, fish, plant corn, and even live in their homelands.
That Native peoples continued to live and work in the Upper Valley after King Philip's War. Their communities were sometimes invisible to outsiders, but often their presence, knowledge, and skills were known to their non-Indian neighbors.
