Honoring the Past, Restoring Balance

Join us in commissioning an enduring landmark to break 350-years of silence.

For untold generations, Northeastern tribes gathered seasonally at the Connecticut River's thundering falls (Peskeompskut) 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 recorded in the historical record as Turner's Falls by the geologist Edward Hitchcock in the 1820s; the planned industrial village took that name at its founding in 1868 and has carried it to this day.

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 working with Abenaki and Nipmuck partners and raising $50,000 to commission 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.

For related events, visit nolumbekaproject.org

(Photo by Maryann Zujewski)

Indigenous 1676 Memorial