New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
UConn map traces Native American land in CT
If you’re in Guilford, you are probably sitting on land where the Menunkatucks lived.
West Hartford was where the Sicaogs once called home. The Podunks were in what is now South Windsor and Vernon. What is now Bridgeport, Stratford and Milford was once Wepawaug land.
The University of Connecticut library has published a digital “mashup” map that shows what native American tribes were on land now managed by Connecticut towns and municipalities.
The original map, redrawn in 1935 and housed in the Boston Public Library, shows what “Indian trails, villages and sachemdoms” existed in Connecticut circa 1625.
Drawn by artist Hayden Griswold, the map was made at the behest of an organization called the Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America — an group that still exists.
It was based on a map drawn by John Chandler in 1705 that relied on even older maps. The earliest known map of Connecticut, according to UConn anthropologist Kevin McBride, was drawn in 1614.
Now an effort called LandGrabCT is underway to document the land, both in Connecticut and west of the Mississippi River, that was taken from native peoples and sold to create the University of Connecticut.
“There's this act in 1862, called the Morrill Act, which established land grant universities,” said Garrett McComas, a postdoctoral fellow at UConn’s Greenhouse Studios.
The act assigned strips of land across the country to various states. The more congressional representatives, the more strips of land a state was assigned. That land, on which native peoples had been living, would then be sold to create an account through which universities would be funded.
“So a land grant university is the beneficiary of these sold strips of land,” McComas said. “They get a portion of the base amount, which for Connecticut is $135,000.”
In total, 178,190 acres of land in Nebraska, Michigan, California and Montana were sold to create the University of Connecticut, according to LandGrabCT.
“It's really looking at the dispossession of indigenous people, the dispossession of their land,” McComas said. “And then the way that dispossessed land was used to fund the land grant university system.”
Mohegans, Mohicans and Pequots
The LandGrabCT project is focused on land in other states sold to create land grant universities like UConn, but McComas noted that the property on which the university itself sits was once native land.
“They have made acknowledgment statements that acknowledge the tribes that lived on the land the university is physically located on,” McComas said. “So that would be the land within Connecticut's borders, and the tribes that are associated with those lands.”
The UConn library’s mashup map, which digitally overlays modern town borders onto Chandler's 1705 map, shows that Mohegans lived where UConn’s primary campus now sits.
But McBride said it’s not so simple.
“UConn and, of course, other institutions are on formerly native lands. I think it's sort of disingenuous and a little simplistic to say that they stole the land,” he said. “Of course, we know that was the outcome, but it was a complex process.”
However, Rodney Butler, chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, did not hesitate to use the word “stole.”
“The end result was that they took the land, no matter what the intent was,” he said. “The heart of it though was about economics, whether that’s land or the wampum or fur trade.”
The 1935 reprint of Chandler’s map was included as part of a booklet explaining Connecticut’s Native American history. That booklet suggests the Mohicans in what is now New York state and the Mohegans of Connecticut were once a single group, though McBride said that is outdated and likely false.
McBride’s specific area of study is the Pequot War, which he said started as the Pequots attempted to gain control of the region’s fur and wampum trade.
“By the time the English arrived in 1633 into the Connecticut Valley, the Pequots were sort of at the height of their power,” he said. “They controlled the Connecticut Valley, they controlled the Long Island coastline, and they began to run afoul of the English who ignored Pequot claims through territory by right of conquest.”
Disease
The Pequots were already suffering by the time the Pequot War began. When asked how many people lived in Connecticut before the first permanent settlers arrived, McBride said the real question is “how many were here before the first smallpox epidemic in 1633.”
There were, he said, probably about 8,000 Pequots alone before the epidemic, and perhaps 4,000 after it.
“Estimates vary on the mortality rate, anywhere from maybe 50 to 90 percent,” he said.
It’s important to remember, McBride said, that disease and conflict had reduced the population of Native Americans in Connecticut. “Their numbers became thin,” he said.
And though the Pequots and Mohegans did not take part, many tribes in New England became part of a coalition “that fought against the English to, in theory, drive them into the sea.” That became known as King Phillip’s War.
The process, however, through which the Pequot lost their land was not so slow, Butler said. It was spurred by the Treaty of Hartford, signed Sept. 21, 1638, between the English colonists and the Narragansett
and Mohegan people.
That treaty stipulates a payment to the English for every Pequot man, woman and child, and that “the Pequots will no longer live in their homelands, and the Narragansetts and Mohegans may not live in the former Pequot territory.”
Before the treaty, the Pequots controlled 250,000 acres of land, according to Butler.
“We went from 250,000 to zero on the signing of that treaty,” he said.
Buying the land back
There was an ebb and flow to the Pequot land holdings. Butler said the tribe received their first parcel back in 1651. It was 200 acres in Noank.
“The reservation in Noank was the first formal reservation established in the continental United States,” Butler said. “We never lost our identity.”
That was increased to 2,000 acres in 1666, and then slowly sold to white farmers, illegally, until the tribe was down to 200 acres in 1856.
In the 1960s, renewed interest in returning the land to native people encouraged the Pequots, under the leadership of then-chairman
Skip Hayward, to sue for those lands that had been illegally sold in the 1800s.
“From ‘75 to ‘83, we were in and out of court fighting for our land,” Butler said.
After the tribe was formally, federally recognized, a settlement in 1983 returned about 900 acres.
Since then, the tribe has been slowly acquiring more land. There are 1,600 acres “in trust” as official, sovereign land and another 2,000 or so acres owned by the tribe, but not yet officially in trust.
“The ultimate goal is, eventually, get all of that into trust, so that we have the sole authority in managing those lands,” Butler said.