Indigenous Heritage
For more than 11,000 years before first contact with Europeans, native peoples lived in what is now New England. The fish and game they harvested, the sap they collected from maple trees, the cranberries they foraged, and the crops they cultivated—corn, squash, pumpkins, climbing beans, sunflowers—all remain important to this region today. And many of the names they bestowed upon the lands and waters here remain, 400 years after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts. America’s annual Thanksgiving holiday, celebrated with a feast on the fourth Thursday in November, still honors the cooperation between the Native Wampanoags and the Pilgrims.
Contact, over time, had catastrophic effects on indigenous people, who suffered the ravages of war and disease. Yet their history continues to this day, as proud members of New England’s Algonquian tribes work to preserve their art, music, languages, stories, and traditions. Each of the New England states offers opportunities for you to learn about these cultures and to support their preservation.
CONNECTICUT
The largest Native American museum in the United States, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Ledyard takes visitors on an interactive journey that begins with the last Ice Age and concludes with a close-up look at the tribe today. As owners of remarkably successful entertainment and hospitality businesses—including nearby Foxwoods, one of the largest resort casinos in North America—the Mashantucket Pequots continuously invest in telling their survival story in unique ways. In addition to life-size dioramas, compelling films, and permanent collections of handcrafts and artifacts, the museum hosts temporary exhibitions and special events that delve into all aspects of Pequot culture, such as the role of women within the tribe.
In the western part of the state, the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington is equally devoted to indigenous lifeways. Located on an archaeologically rich site where the ancestors of the modern Schaghticoke tribe lived, this is your place to not only view indoor exhibits but also to explore a recreated Algonkian village, learn pottery making and other traditional crafts, and even solve challenges, as indigenous people did, in order to navigate through the dynamic and immersive Wigwam Escape room.
Although it is small, the Mohegan tribe’s Tantaquidgeon Museum, located just four minutes from Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, is notable because it is the oldest museum in the nation owned and operated by Native Americans. Mohegan tribal members lead tours and share their distinct historical perspectives.
MAINE
The history and culture of Maine’s Wabanaki tribe, the People of the First Light, are the focus of the Abbe Museum, which has two seasonal locations in Bar Harbor: a small outpost within Acadia National Park and a highly regarded Smithsonian-affiliated facility downtown. The museum’s collection of works by Wabanaki basket makers is particularly strong, and you can purchase finely woven baskets by some of today’s leading artisans in the gift shop.
For more than 55 years, the Passamaquoddy tribe has invited visitors onto its bay-side reservation in Perry, near the Canadian border, for Passamaquoddy Days. This colorful festival, held the second weekend in August, features singing, dancing, drumming, spiritual practices, a marketplace, and the sharing of a traditional meal.
Although it focuses on a place far from Maine, the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College in Brunswick is a worthwhile detour for anyone interested in indigenous cultures. Named for Arctic explorers and Bowdoin graduates Robert E. Peary and Donald B. MacMillan, the museum is a trove of contemporary Alaskan and Canadian Inuit art, in addition to relics from their expeditions. It is also where visitors can learn about the effects of climate change on the Arctic’s indigenous population—which is a topic of relevance for New England’s Native peoples as well.
MASSACHUSETTS
Native American creations were among the first objects acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) when it was founded in Salem in 1799. In addition to being one of the oldest collections of Native American art in the Western Hemisphere, this is one of the most diverse, with works in a variety of media by thousands of indigenous artists representing hundreds of native nations and a time span of 10 millennia. In recent decades, PEM has added modern native art to its impressive early holdings.
On Cape Cod, the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum is home to the world’s first permanent exhibit to examine the arrival of the Mayflower Pilgrims from the perspective of the native Wampanoags. Titled Our Story: The Complicated Relationship of the Indigenous Wampanoag and the Mayflower Pilgrims, it gives an accurate, enlightening view of events beginning with the Pilgrims’ first landfall in Provincetown, in 1620.
In Plymouth, where the Pilgrims built their settlement, Plimoth Patuxet Museums is a long-popular attraction that is now evolving to better balance its living history portrayals of the Pilgrim colonizers, who came here in search of religious freedom, and the indigenous Patuxet band of the Wampanoag tribe, whose members helped the Pilgrims survive their first New England winter and jointly celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Visitors learn about native farming practices, cooking, canoe building, and family life from descendants of New England’s earliest inhabitants.
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Located near New Hampshire’s capital city, Concord, the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner takes inspiration for its installations and events from Native Americans’ reverence for nature. Here, you can walk the Medicine Woods Nature Trail and discover how indigenous peoples used plants for food, medicine, shelter, tools, and textile dyes. Then, venture inside to see a collection of art and artifacts associated with tribes from throughout North America.
If you’re visiting the coastal city of Portsmouth, make a point of experiencing the People of the Dawnland exhibit at Strawbery Banke Museum. Archaeological evidence tells us the Abenaki people hunted and fished on this site, preserved now as Portsmouth’s oldest neighborhood, as far back as 12,000 years ago. This interactive exhibit, which includes a recreated wigwam and Abenaki teaching garden, was created in collaboration with tribal descendants who are committed to preserving their ancestors’ storytelling and cultural traditions.
RHODE ISLAND
Founded in 1958 by Princess Red Wing, a descendant of the Narragansett and Pokanoket-Wampanoag tribes, the Tomaquag Museum has its own story of resilience. While small in size and rather hidden in Exeter, within Rhode Island’s forested interior, this is a highly regarded educational institution that dispels myths and brings to light indigenous views. Through its Indigenous Empowerment Network, the museum works to eradicate poverty and to gain visibility for Rhode Island’s Native Americans.
A half hour’s drive east of Exeter, in South Kingstown, you can see additional examples of native people’s art and handcrafted tools at the Peace Dale Museum of Art and Culture, which was established more than 130 years ago and now counts more than 15,000 objects from preindustrial societies all over the world among its collections.
VERMONT
After the official recognition of Vermont’s Abenaki tribes in 2012, awareness of this state’s indigenous history has continued to spread through initiatives such as June’s annual Abenaki Heritage Weekend at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes. Meanwhile, the Ethan Allen Homestead in Burlington hosts rituals and events, such as fall’s Harvest Celebration, held by the Vermont Indigenous Heritage Center. In the Homestead Museum’s Visitor Center, a permanent exhibit illuminates how the state’s indigenous people secretly preserved their culture for generations and explains more about the seasonal celebrations cherished by today’s Abenaki descendants.
