NCLP Blog

© 2026. Kimberly Toney. Posted with permission. The views expressed here are my own. I write in my personal capacity as a Nipmuc person and NCLP member; This post is published by the Nipmuc Community Land Project as part of an effort to make visible the different positions held by Nipmuc people and NCLP members regarding public representation and organizational partnerships. Nipmuc people do not all agree about where we should appear, whom we should work with, or what kinds

© 2026 Pamela A. Ellis (adapted from a forthcoming work on Indigenous Revolutionary War Veterans in Natick, MA). Posted with permission from the author. As the United States commemorates the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War, there is an opportunity to ask a different set of questions about 1776. What did independence mean to the Indigenous peoples who already belonged to these lands? What did sovereignty mean to people whose nations, communities, languages, relation

The following is adapted from a talk by Kimberly Toney given at the 2026 Mass Lands Conference held at Umass Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. 2026. Kimberly Toney. Published by NCLP with permission from the author. Last year, I was standing on a small parcel of land that had come into conversation for possible transfer. It was winter — quiet, bare, unassuming. If you were evaluating it through a conventional conservation lens, you might have noted acreage, habitat value, wa

“Who is Nipmuc?” This question—once rarely asked within our communities—has, in recent decades, become both a painful inquiry and a political flashpoint. It’s not new to us to know who we are. What is new is having to prove it to outsiders, and even to one another, in the language and systems of a settler colonial government. Being Nipmuc is not the same as being enrolled. And yet, those two terms have been forced into uneasy proximity, especially since the pursuit of federal

Overlooking Nipnet from Bear Hill, Wales, Massachusetts. Land trusts, at least in Massachusetts, have been around for over a century.1 Indigenous-led land trusts, however, are relatively recent arrivals in the local land trust space. The Native Land Conservancy (NLC), founded in 2012 by Mashpee Wampanoag Ramona Peters and based in Mashpee, MA, was the first Indigenous-led land trust east of the Mississippi River. 2 On why she founded the NLC, Peters stated, “As a Wampanoag, l