Lawmakers suggest tribes need to agree on what to call Thames River
Nolan’s renaming bill gets hearing at Capitol
Hartford — State lawmakers signaled Monday that if a bill renaming the Thames River is to go forward, the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes might have to agree on what the river should be called.
And public-hearing testimony suggested that could take some doing.
While “Pequot River,” the name state Rep. Anthony Nolan, D-New London, proposes in House Bill 5503, has the full support of the Mashantucket Pequot and Eastern Pequot tribes, the Mohegan Tribe takes issue with it.
The river, which the Mohegans have historically called the Massapequotuck, “runs adjacent to our homeland,” Charlie Strickland, chairman of the Mohegan Council of Elders, wrote in testimony he filed with the legislature’s Transportation Committee. “It has been the lifeblood of our tribe for centuries . ... As such, we oppose the renaming of the river to the Pequot River for what we hope are self-evident reasons.”
Strickland attached a reproduction of an old map identifying the river as the “Mohegan-Pequot River.”
Rodney Butler, the Mashantucket chairman, said the map, a depiction of Connecticut in 1630, was published in 1851. And while the Mohegans say the river was variously called the Mohegan and the Mohegan-Pequot as well as the Pequot before the English changed its name to Thames in the mid-17th century, Butler said “all the documentation we have says otherwise.”
The Mashantuckets believe the river was historically known only as the Pequot River before the English renamed it and that the proposed legislation would simply restore the river’s previous “proper” name.
Strickland has contacted the Mashantuckets in hopes of discussing a traditional name that would be agreeable to both the Mashantuckets and the Mohegans, Connecticut’s only federally recognized tribes and operators, respectively, of Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun.
Butler said he expects the tribes to discuss the matter though no meeting has yet been scheduled.
“Hopefully, the tribes will come to some agreement so we can move forward,” state Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, co-chairman of the Transportation Committee, said.
State Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, the committee’s other co-chairman, and state Sens. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, and Tony Hwang, R-Greenwich, both committee members, expressed support for Nolan’s bill, which Osten and state Rep. Aundré Bumgardner co-sponsored.
Butler said he’s confident the committee will pass the bill, which likely would assure the measure gets wider consideration in the House.
Daniel Menihan, a Mashantucket tribal councilor, and Shirley “Laughing Woman” Patrick, a Mashantucket spiritual leader and vice chairwoman of the tribe’s elders’ council, joined Butler in testifying.
Butler told committee members that 17th-century accounts consistently refer to the river as “Pequot” before the English renamed it “Thames.” He cited the journal of John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; “A Brief History of the Pequot War,” which John Mason, a military leader who led English forces against the Pequots during the Pequot War, wrote around 1670; and John Underhill’s “Newes from America,” a history written between 1637 and 1638.
“The goal of this legislation and the core of our support is to celebrate the rich indigenous history of the Pequot River, the surrounding region and the shared history of the state of Connecticut that was born along its shores,” Butler said.
Restoring the river’s name “recalls a time period before our tribal lands were taken,” Menihan said. “The bodies of our brave lie in unmarked graves all along the water’s edge.” Patrick said the river was renamed the Thames “by the very colonists who sought to rid the Pequot Tribe of their land, culture, language and ultimately their lives.”
Lawrence Wilson, a member of the Eastern Pequots’ tribal and elders’ councils, testified via Zoom, saying his tribe was fully supportive of Nolan’s bill and the Mashantuckets’ role in advocating for it. He said Osten was “exactly right” when she said restoring the name of the river was not about any one tribe but rather it was about all of Connecticut’s tribes, which are historically related.
Returning the name of the river to the Pequot River would honor all of them, Wilson said.