According to some histories, the Nipmuc people were fairly isolated from colonial communities in the 1600s. These histories are fragmented since most documentations come from the colonial writers rather than the indigenous peoples themselves and a commonly studied archaeological site in Grafton, MA. This site is called the Sarah Burnee/Sarah Boston Farmstead in the Hassanamesit Woods. Colonial history has a way of making the indigenous people seem as though they have been left behind in the past.

Colonial and racist legacies have made these histories seem farther away which subsequently erases the people. But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Nipmuc people have tried to fight this erasure. An Abenaki historian, Lisa Brooks, has written a comprehensive history of events from New England indigenous peoples perspectives called Our Beloved Kin. In it, she describes the bloody war of between the colonizers and the Algonquin coalition under Chief Metacomet. She shows throughout the book and its complementary website that research and oral tradition can counter the histories written by New England colonizers.

Our Beloved Kin as a project details stories like the story of the Nipmuc scholar, James Printer, who was one of the leaders of Hassanamesit (Grafton), "a place of small stones," the town on the Nipmuc (Blackstone) River. Grafton had been designated a “Praying Town,” a place where the settlers forced Nipmuc people to live and convert to Christianity. James Printer and his entire family were important leaders in the town, (although the British missionaries who describe them name only the men).

In 1980, the Nipmuc people filed to be recognized by the US federal government as a sovereign nation. They were denied this recognition in 2004 because of the work of a nineteenth century Worcester commissioner, John Milton Earle. Earle had contended that the Nipmuc people had intermarried too much with African Americans and that such intermarriage had rendered the tribe extinct. This “Earle Report” was used in the twenty-first century to deny the Nipmuc their sovereignty, using the old-fashioned, colonial, race-based definition of nationhood.

Works Cited:

Brooks, Lisa Tanya. Our beloved kin: a new history of King Philip's war. Yale University Press, 2018.

Thee, Christopher J. "Massachusetts Nipmucs and the Long Shadow of John Milton Earle." The New England Quarterly 79, no. 4 (2006): 636-54. Accessed May 24, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/20474497