Honoring the Past, Restoring Balance

Your contribution will break a 350-year silence. Join us in commissioning an enduring landmark that honors the Pocumtuck ancestors and related Northeastern tribes. Help restore balance to this place.

For untold generations, the Pocumtuck hosted seasonal gatherings of Northeastern tribes at the thundering falls (Peskeompskut) on the Connecticut River for kinship-building, ceremony, trade, and shared abundance.

The massacre at Peskeompskut happened on May 19, 1676. Yet for more than three centuries, this ground has been held by the colonial narrative. The cataract at the bend in the river was written into the historical record as Turners Falls by the geologist Edward Hitchcock in the early 1800s; the planned industrial village took that name at its founding in 1828, and which remains the official name today.

On September 12, 1900, a crowd gathered on the Gill bank near the site to dedicate a granite monument lauding the actions of Captain William Turner and his armed militia.

This grey monolith frames an atrocity as a heroic victory, claiming that Turner and his men "surprised and destroyed over 300 Indians [sic] encamped at this place, May 19, 1676."

Yet, the people killed in a predawn military assault were elders, women, and children of multiple tribes — displaced by colonial violence and sheltering at a place of perpetual intertribal peace. Until recently, a fuller history of this massacre has been overwritten, and the memories of the survivors erased.

Now, 350 years later, the Nolumbeka Project is answering that silence. Having secured the deed to the monument plot, we are raising $50,000 to enable a collaborative commission with Abenaki and Nipmuck partners: a significant sculpture by a Northeastern Indigenous artist, not to replace the monument but to counterbalance the entrenched narrative.

Your support honors the ancestors attacked at these falls and the generations carrying on their legacy.

(Photo by Maryann Zujewski)

For related events, visit nolumbekaproject.org

Indigenous 1676 Memorial