It’s a sunny spring morning as Nakai Clearwater Northup stands amid white pine trees, near a river, surveying the land.
Looking at his Narragansett homelands in southern Rhode Island, he says hunting and fishing here are plentiful.
“I grew up on deer and turkey and anything we could harvest, quahogs, blue crabs,” he says.
It’s hard work. And as Northup puts in “miles and miles and miles” hunting each year, he says he’s grown to care for the land like a member of his family.
“You learn how to be a father or a parent from your kids. Each kid is going to teach you how to raise that kid,” he says. “That’s the same thing with the land.”
This land is more than a weekend destination for a hunting trip or a material asset. It's central to Native cultural, spiritual, and community identity.
It’s a place imbued with thousands and thousands of years of tradition, spirituality and culture. Native Americans have been through so much, but through it all, that connection with the land endures.
“You have to spend time on the land,” he says, “and understand what it needs.”
A story of resilience
Over the past several hundred years, after Europeans arrived, Native peoples endured warfare, epidemics and enslavement. Both federal and state governments pushed them off their land; today, they live on a small fraction of their ancestral homelands. For generations, government leaders erased Native identity from documents and even insisted that they didn’t exist.
As the United States marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Native Americans are a part of the American story. They are working to reclaim narratives and offer a different history lesson. They’re also determined to keep their culture alive and carry Native life forward to future generations.
It’s a story of resilience. And it’s a story that’s hundreds of years – even thousands of years – in the making.
“Everything that I do is important for the next generations that come in,” said Lorén Spears, a member of the Narragansett Tribal Nation and executive director of the Indigenous-led Tomaquag Museum in Rhode Island. “Our ancestors did that. They ensured that we're here today. And my job is to ensure that my great, great, great, great-grandchildren down the road are able to be here. That’s … why we tell the stories that we tell.”
From traders to enslaved
Early encounters between Natives and Europeans should be viewed less as a one-sided story of “contact and conquest” and more as ongoing encounters between different sovereigns, says Native historian Ned Blackhawk.
Blackhawk is a history professor at Yale University and author of the award-winning book, “The Rediscovery of America.”
“The Northeast was in fact among the most diverse, heavily settled and prosperous parts of North America at the time of European contact,” Blackhawk says.
At first, Dutch and French explorers to New England traded with Native peoples. But these early travelers also carried foreign diseases – smallpox, measles and influenza – that led to widespread death in Native communities.
In the late 15th century, European explorers began to kidnap Indigenous people.
“They would pretend to trade with local Native peoples and then seize people and then take them back to the ships,” Blackhawk says.
Some Natives were sold into slavery. Others were trafficked back across the Atlantic so Europeans could gain information before returning to North America. Scholars are just beginning to uncover this early stealing of Native people, Blackhawk says.
“It’s hard to piece together the biographies of a lot of these captives,” he says. “But there is this already present slave trafficking of Indigenous peoples across the Atlantic that we’ve never really learned about.”
Stolen Relations is a new tribal collaborative project at Brown University that seeks to illuminate the role of Indigenous enslavement in settler colonialism and its impact today. According to their research, 50 Abenaki Natives were kidnapped from the coastline of Maine between 1500 and 1501 by explorer Gaspar Corte-Real. The captives were sold into slavery in Lisbon, Portugal.
Puritan arrival and the Pequot War
When English Puritans began to settle in the Northeast, they brought worldviews that contrasted sharply with Native life. The Puritans believed their religion was the only true faith. Private land ownership and individual wealth were starkly different ideas from Indigenous relationships to land and cultures of shared wealth. Conflicts led to violence.
That history is highlighted at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, the largest tribally-owned museum in the world.
“Having the museum, which is tribally owned and operated, allows us to tell our story from our point of view and perspective,” says Northup, who develops educational programs at the museum. He’s of Narragansett descent and an enrolled member of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. “Oftentimes our history was written by other people.”
In the 1630s, Northup says the Pequots were among the dominant tribes in the region. But as European settlers moved into Connecticut, violence erupted and war followed.
“The Pequot War is really the first major war between a European power and a Native nation,” Northup says. “It is a war that really sets the foundations of colonialism.”
Walking the halls of the museum, Northup stops in front of a replica of a drawing from the 1630s. It was created by an eyewitness to one of the most brutal events in early American history – the Mystic Massacre.
In 1637, soldiers from the Connecticut and Massachusetts colonies, with Native allies, surrounded a Pequot community in Mystic, Connecticut, and set it on fire. Within hours, an estimated 500 to 700 men, women and children were burned alive or slaughtered.
“This event was meant to eradicate us as a people,” Northup says.
Still here
By the end of the Pequot War, only a few hundred of the 3,000 Pequots in Connecticut survived.
“From this comes a document called the Treaty of Hartford, which states that Pequot people can’t live on their land, can’t call themselves Pequots, can’t speak their language,” Northup says.
The Pequots were divided into two groups: western Mashantucket and Eastern Pequots. Many were sold into slavery or sent to live with other tribes.
Even now, 350 years later, Northup says Pequots grapple with the atrocity of the Mystic Massacre. A sculpture of the assault is etched onto Connecticut’s Capitol building in Hartford.
“Still to this day on the Connecticut Capitol building, carved into stone, is a depiction of a community being burned down,” he says.
A statue honoring the Connecticut captain who led the massacre stands nearby.
Today, New England’s Native nations live on a small fraction of their traditional homelands. Stereotyping of Native Americans is deeply embedded in the American consciousness.
For more than 10,000 years before Europeans arrived, the Northeast was home to many tribes with organized leadership, governance and deeply overlapping histories.
“The reality is you would be hard pressed to find anybody in a southern New England tribe that doesn’t have two or three other southern New England tribal ancestries in them,” said Michael Thomas, board member at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum.
He is both Mashantucket Pequot and Narragansett.
“My joke in the family is we can’t teach kids about a family tree because we don’t have a tree,” he says. “We have a bush – just branches crossing everywhere.” Natives across New England know this history from their families. But it was not shared in the classroom.
“When I was in school, they told us that the Narragansett didn’t exist,” says Mack Scott, a visiting assistant professor at Brown University, who is Narragansett. “And my grandmother’s at home, right? My mother’s there. I know that we exist, but the idea is that we don’t.”
Native history was erased from America’s story, says Brenda Geer of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation.
“I went to school [and] they said that there were no Pequots left,” Geer says. “They were all annihilated in the Pequot War. And I’m like, ‘here I am, you know?’”
For generations, native peoples of the Northeast have survived attempts to erase their rich tapestry of culture and history. And they’re still here.
Read more from Still Here: Native American Resilience in New England
Chapter 1: For Native Americans, an enduring spiritual connection to the land
Chapter 2: The hidden history of Indigenous slavery in New England and beyond
Chapter 3: 'Unsung hero:' How runner Tarzan Brown put the Narragansett tribe on the map in the 1930s
Chapter 4: Amid mist and music: A Native American reverence for water, celebrated on the banks of the CT River
Chapter 5: Power of powwow: A cultural connection echoes across generations of Native Americans
