GILL — The Nolumbeka Project, in collaboration with Elnu Abenaki and Nipmuc tribal partners, is raising $50,000 to install a sculpture made by a Northeastern Indigenous artist to counterbalance the monument on Route 2 that lauds the English forces behind the Great Falls Massacre, and to tell the Native American perspective of the massacre 350 years ago.
A ceremony on Saturday recognized the deed transfer between the Deerfield-based Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association and the Nolumbeka Project — a nonprofit dedicated to cultural and historical preservation of Native American history — for land near the Turners Falls-Gill Bridge that contains a stone monument dedicated to Capt. William Turner and his English forces, who killed 300 non-combatant Natives, namely women, children and the elderly, during the Great Falls Massacre of May 19, 1676.
The inscription lauds the colonial violence against the Native people who gathered at the Great Falls, called Peskeompskut, which was a peaceful, intertribal area for fishing and trade. The text, in part, says that Capt. William Turner, with 145 of his English forces, “surprised and destroyed 300 Indians [sic]” there on May 19, 1676.
PVMA’s board of directors voted on April 22 to transfer the deed for this land that is home to the monument to the Nolumbeka Project, according to Nolumbeka Project President David Brule. The property was transferred for $1.
“We’re turning the page,” Brule said. “We have big plans for that little site.”
This is a new phase of a plan long in the making. Since the Great Falls Massacre, efforts to heal the land have progressed, including through a 2004 Reconciliation Ceremony that officially recognized the massacre.
The former Battlefield Grant Advisory Board, which oversaw a 12-year battlefield study of the Great Falls Massacre and subsequent fighting, has previously discussed ideas for what should go with the existing monument, including last August upon completion of the battlefield study.
Carol Letson, president of PVMA’s board of directors, spoke at Saturday’s Day of Remembrance ceremony about the deed transfer, and in an interview on Monday, she shared her appreciation for Brule’s support throughout the process of transferring the deed and expressed her gratitude over seeing this long-held idea come to fruition.
Brule explained on Saturday that the plan is to raise enough money to issue a request for proposals to all Northeastern tribes to create some type of sculpture that would be placed next to the existing monument, selected by a jury of both Native and non-Native people.
According to the GiveButter donation page, the campaign has already raised just under $1,000. The hope is to have the sculpture installed by May 19, 2027, in time for the next anniversary of the Great Falls Massacre.
The existing granite monument was installed after the former land owner, Timothy M. Stoughton of Gill, gave the property to the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. An article published in September 1900 in the Greenfield Recorder, then called the Gazette & Courier, details the scene at the ceremony celebrating the monument on Sept. 12, 1900. The article quotes late Congressman George P. Lawrence, who said the battle “was against great savagery” and thanked those who were involved with placing the monument.
Margaret M. Bruchac (Nulhegan Abenaki), founder and former director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania and consultant to PVMA, shared some of the sentiments of those at the September 1900 ceremony, including Stoughton. She said Stoughton celebrated the perceived erasure of Native American presence in the Pioneer Valley, saying that Turner’s forces were successful and “freed forever our valley from the thralldom of barbarism.”
“That narrative style of historical erasure has been repeated so often and weaponized by so many that the sheer emotional impact of those words has almost obscured the truth of the history,” Bruchac said, her voice soaring above the noise of nearby traffic, “and so we are here today to tell a different story — one not of Indigenous erasure and destruction, but one of survival, persistence and continuance against all odds.”
Also speaking at the monument on Saturday was Jose “Ite” Santana, of the Chaubunagungamaug Band of Nipmuck Indians, who shared a vision for what the future could look like for the Great Falls, which includes fishing for shad and smoking it through the Nipmuc Cultural Hunt & Fish Club that he leads.
“You will see us on this shore again, and we will be together as, hopefully, a community that is really sharing in the bounty that this river has to offer,” Santana said.
The “Indigenous 1676 Memorial” fundraiser is available at tinyurl.com/4b8cdbyk.
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