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Aug 12, 2023

A return to the past: Monument Mountain set to revert back to Mohican stewardship

A state grant will fund the return and implement tribal land strategies to combat climate change . Following today’s historic Stockbridge announcement by Massachusetts Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll,

A state grant will fund the return and implement tribal land strategies to combat climate change
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Following today’s historic Stockbridge announcement by Massachusetts Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, Monument Mountain will once again belong to the Indigenous people that settled the area centuries ago.

“The North slope of the land now known as Fenn Farm on Monument Mountain will once again be stewarded by the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation,” Driscoll said to a packed Stockbridge Town Hall, part of the ancestral homeland of the Mohican tribe that’s now based in Wisconsin. “That’s not only a meaningful step forward in relation to our history, but [it] also means that Indigenous land management practices and traditional ecological knowledge are going to help us fight and adapt to an ever-growing and present-changing climate future.”

She acknowledged the work done by Stockbridge officials to affect the return of this land.

The change is promulgated by a $31.5 million grant program—the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program (MVP)—that provides local communities with funding and technical assistance to implement climate resilience projects. Along with 56 different individual municipal grantees, the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans was awarded a $2.26 million grant to reclaim 351 acres of their Indigenous homelands, while implementing tribal conservation and forest management strategies to combat climate change.

“We are celebrating the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans reclaiming land in their ancestral homeland,” Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper said. “We are also celebrating the concept to have Indigenous land management as a key way to further climate resiliency in our state.”

Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans President Shannon Holsey described the day as “very joyful and emotional” for her community. “We believe that it is our responsibility to be land stewards and to advocate for future generations,” she said. “We are grateful to be home today, and we are grateful to be partners with all of you who made today possible.”

Holsey spoke of the “landback movement”—to get Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands—but said her tribe is “not trying to reclaim land from ownership in a Western colonial way of thinking about it.” She explained, “We are trying to reclaim our ways of being which was never based on money. It was the reclamation of our kinship systems, our governance systems, our ceremony and spirituality, our language, our culture, and our food and medicinal systems. Those are all based on our relationships to the land.”

Holsey told The Berkshire Edge that the funds will be used to reacquire anything that has “historical significance” to the tribal nation, to not only possess the artifacts but educate people about the tribe’s existence and honor its ancestors. Specifically, for Monument Mountain, she said the Stockbridge-Munsee Band presence will be felt “from the flying of our flag to the return of stones with messages with hopes and prayers of our people for future generations to remember that, in spite of everything that’s happened, we’re still here.”

A sacred site for the Mohican people, Reservation Trustees previously worked with tribal leaders to rename Monument Mountain in 2021 from “Squaw Peak,” a derogatory term, to “Peeskawso Peak,” meaning “virtuous woman” in the Mohican language. “Indian Monument Trail” was also renamed “Mohican Monument Trail” on the tract, and new signs were added to reflect the true historical significance of the site to the Mohican tribe.

At the announcement, Egremont was also awarded $81,500 to conduct a climate action program.

Stockbridge Select Board member Patrick White said the day represents how we address the impacts of human activity on climate. “The fact that we’re doing that and renewing this partnership and reconciling with some folks who left over 200 years ago is truly historic,” he said. “The Mohican community was based in Stockbridge, and they’re coming home.”

For Laurie Norton Moffatt, director and CEO of the Norman Rockwell Museum, the event marked an important time in history to welcome “the original citizens and inhabitants of our community that we all share a history with.” Signature artists at the Norman Rockwell Museum display imagery that recorded the moment the town was formed, she said.

Hilary Somers Deely, president of the Laurel Hill Association, the nation’s oldest village improvement society, said her group has had much interaction with the Stockbridge-Munsee Band. “It’s all good news for the tribe, and it’s all good news for us as people that care about conservation and preservation,” she said. “We sure don’t want developers to come in and take that sacred ground and start putting condos on it.”

Stockbridge Bowl Association president Pat Kennelly acknowledged the “very special and strong relationship with the Munsee tribe” that her group maintains after renaming the island in the center of the waters, per tribal leaders, “Kwuniikwat Island.” It was subsequently dedicated to the Stockbridge-Munsee Nation.

Driscoll’s August 30 announcement was a long time coming, centuries in fact. According to the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee, the Berkshire area was settled by the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans, with its original name meaning “People of the Waters that are Never Still.”

The traditional homeland of the Mohican people spanned from the Hudson River to the west to the Westfield River to the east, down northern Manhattan and Westchester County, and north to Lake Champlain, said Mark Wilson, Associate Curator for the Trustees of Reservations, which maintains the properties affiliated with the local Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community. Colonization of the area by the Dutch and English in the early 1700s brought disease as well as an interest to acquire land, driving the Mohican people from their territory in the Hudson Valley farther east into Connecticut and Massachusetts.

In 1734, John Sergeant, a Christian, began a mission to assimilate the Mohican people living in Wnahktukuk, present-day Stockbridge. In 1742, he built the Mission House on Prospect Hill. Eventually, it was moved to 19 Main Street, where it is maintained by the Trustees of Reservations.

Stockbridge, known as “Indian Town,” soon boasted a church and school. Ancestral Indigenous land can be found along Main Street, including the town cemetery, or burial ground, where Sergeant, a Mohican chief, and two Stockbridge Indian women are buried. According to Wilson, the local skyline not only included English houses but Mohican structures as well, representing an interrelationship between tradition and the new culture.

“There was no ownership of land for the Stockbridge(-Munsee) people,” Wilson said of the vast areas inhabited by the tribe and shared with other communities. “They lived on the land; they stewarded the land, but they didn’t own it.”

Although many Mohicans had served alongside colonists in the Revolutionary War, they were eventually pushed out of the Stockbridge area. “The tribe was forced off of the Select Board, they were excommunicated from the church,” Wilson said of the tribe. “Everything this town was set up for with them involved was taken from them.”

By 1783, the tribal community had left Stockbridge for western New York to live among the Oneida Nation. There, in New Stockbridge, the tribe thrived, but not for long. Local pressure to remove Native Americans from New York’s borders forced another relocation in the 1820s, this time to an area on Lake Winnebago in Shawano County, Wis. Renamed Stockbridge in the 1840s, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community is now a federally recognized Indian Nation, and the reservation houses about 1,500 of its members.

“We always maintained a relationship with the state of Massachusetts because our ancestors are still here,” Holsey said. “It’s also about stewardship and making sure we retain the historical significance of this homeland and making sure that we do whatever we can in a collaborative way to protect it for future generations.”

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