A Relationship That Outlives Us: Land, Responsibility, and the Nipmuc Community Land Project

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, watershed significance, long-term stewardship costs.

But that wasn’t what surfaced first.

Someone began speaking about the waterways that once connected Nipmuc villages across this region. Another person named the plants that should be here in spring — not ornamental species, but food and medicine. Someone else imagined where children could learn to plant corn, beans, and squash — not as a demonstration plot, but as a continuation of responsibility.

What struck me in that moment was this: For Nipmuc people, land does not enter our lives as an asset. It enters as a relative.

And relatives are not conserved. They are cared for.

That distinction — between conserving land and being in relationship with land — is at the heart of why the Nipmuc Community Land Project exists.

Most land trusts in the United States were formed to protect land from development. The Nipmuc Community Land Project, formed in 2025, was formed to restore relationship — relationship that predates development, predates conservation law, and predates the United States itself. We are not initiating a connection to land; we are carrying forward responsibilities that were violently interrupted and disrupted by colonial dispossession -  but never extinguished.

To understand why this matters structurally — not just philosophically — we have to briefly return to history.

Nipmuc homelands span what is now central Massachusetts, northeastern Connecticut, and northwestern Rhode Island. For thousands of years, Nipmuc communities lived in seasonal relationship with these lands — cultivating corn, beans, and squash, collecting maple sap, tending sheets of birch bark; stewarding forests and waterways; maintaining trade and diplomatic networks across villages.

When English colonists arrived in the 17th century, they encountered not wilderness, but inhabited, managed, politically complex territory.

Colonial expansion — and particularly the violence of King Philip's War — fundamentally reshaped land tenure in the region. Through warfare, forced relocation, debt schemes, missionary “praying towns,” and coercive land sales, Nipmuc landholdings were systematically transferred into colonial control and, eventually, private property regimes.

The legal infrastructure that conservation professionals work within today — fee ownership, conservation easements, deed restrictions, charitable trust doctrines — evolved from that property regime.

That does not mean all conservation organizations are or must be colonial projects. But it does mean that the framework itself was built on the assumption that Indigenous land tenure had already been extinguished or was irrelevant.

Indigenous-led land trusts like the Nipmuc Community Land Project begin from a different premise.

We begin from continuity.

We begin from the understanding that relationship to land was not dissolved when title was transferred. Responsibility was constrained — but it persisted. Kinship endured. Memory endured. Ceremony endured. Knowledge endured.

So when NCLP engages in what we sometimes call land rescue or rematriation, we are not acquiring new territory. We are restoring our capacity to enact long-held responsibilities.

This shift changes how we think about governance.

In many conventional land trust models, fiduciary duty centers asset protection and perpetuity. In our context, fiduciary responsibility includes cultural continuity, intergenerational teaching, ecological reciprocity, and the ability to adapt land use practices in accordance with living tradition. Sometimes that includes land use outside of the western traditional “norms” …like housing, or the radical idea of letting the land own itself. 

Where a traditional conservation framework might ask:

How do we protect this parcel from risk?

We also ask:

How do we ensure this land can sustain ceremony? How can it feed our people? How can children learn here? How do we ensure habitat for the more than human relatives who also live in these places?

That is not a rejection of conservation science. It is an expansion of what counts as stewardship.

And this is where solidarity becomes concrete.

Many of you reading this post may work for conservation organizations, land trusts, or environmental nonprofits. Increasingly, those institutions are asking how to engage meaningfully in land return, co-stewardship, or partnership with Indigenous communities.

Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples is not symbolic acknowledgment alone.

It is not partnership in name while retaining structural control.

It is not imposing standard deed provisions that quietly undermine Indigenous governance in the name of risk management.

Solidarity looks like listening before drafting. It looks like accepting Indigenous leadership in defining conservation priorities. It looks like flexibility in legal mechanisms when those mechanisms conflict with Indigenous relational frameworks. It looks like moving from consultation to shared or Indigenous-led authority.

It requires humility — especially in professions that are accustomed to being the technical experts in the room.

At NCLP, our work sits at the intersection of land rescue, cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and food sovereignty.

You cannot revitalize traditional agricultural practices without land access.

You cannot teach seed saving without soil.

You cannot rebuild kinship networks without a place to gather and harvest.