Pocumtuck Homelands Festival

08/29/2026

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08/29/2026

08/28/2026

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New England sold Native people into slavery. Not as a figure of speech. Ships left its harbors carrying Wampanoag, Narragansett and Nipmuc captives to Barbados, Jamaica, Bermuda, the Azores, Spain and North Africa.

The largest wave came out of King Philip's War, the conflict that began in sixteen seventy five when the Wampanoag sachem Metacom went to war against the colonies. Historians document more than two thousand Native people taken captive by the English. Around five hundred were shipped overseas and the rest were sold or bound into service inside New England. Massachusetts had legalized slavery in sixteen forty one, and for much of that century enslaved Native people in New England outnumbered enslaved Africans.

Metacom was shot on the twelfth of August, sixteen seventy six. His head was set on a pike at Plymouth and left there for about twenty years. His wife and their nine year old son were captured, and Plymouth's ministers argued for months over whether to kill the boy or sell him before selling him. No record survives of where either of them was sent.

The Wampanoag are still on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. Aquinnah was federally recognized in nineteen eighty seven and Mashpee in two thousand seven. In twenty twenty four the Supreme Court ended an eight year fight over the Mashpee reservation by declining to hear the case, and the land stayed in trust.

08/22/2026

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Scott Strong Hawk Foster’s“Ways of My Ancestors – We Are Still He...

08/21/2026

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ONLY A FEW MORE DAYS! COMING DOWN SOON. LAST CHANCE TO SEE THIS BEAUTIFUL AND INSPIRING EXHIBIT IS NEXT WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26. THANKS TO SCOTT FOSTER FOR LIGHTING OUR PATHS TO AWARENESS!

08/14/2026

Around 12:20 AM on July 29, 1976, nine Mashpee Wampanoag men were arrested at Twelve Acres, a sacred area of historical relevance not far from the shore of Mashpee Pond, and the spiritual center of Mashpee for the Wampanoag Tribe.

The charges? Disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assault and battery, unnecessary noise. The actions in question? Gathering, drumming, singing and sharing food.

“We were Mashpee Indians sitting in Mashpee, singing Indian songs around the fire,” Chief Earl “Swift Eagle” Mills Jr., also called “Chiefie,” said in the 2016 “Mashpee Nine: The Beat Goes On” documentary. “We were doing nothing wrong.”

On Tuesday evening, the Native Land Conservancy screened the documentary, created by Paula Peters and Talia Landry, for Mashpee Wampanoag youths and families.

“It was a great effort to put this together,” Peters, author of the accompanying “Mashpee Nine” book, said on Tuesday. “Everyone wanted this story told, collected in this way, so we can tell you how hard-fought it is, our right to these cultural practices, to beat the drum, to dance…we are not going to be denied, and this is the story of that cultural justice.”

Renée Lopes-Pocknett, the school district’s Indian Education director and one of the organizers of Tuesday’s screening, told attendees that it is important to know the Tribe’s history and “what happened 400 years ago…but it’s just as important to know the more recent history” from the elders who are still around to talk about it firsthand.

Read more about the story of the Mashpee Nine and Tuesday's screening → https://conta.cc/4pQt2CB

08/14/2026

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