Thoughts on the 250th: Remembering Indigenous Resistance and Survivance in Natick - The Land Remembers. We Remember.
© 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, relationships, and responsibilities existed long before the United States? And what does it mean to remember a war for independence from the perspective of the Indigenous people who fought it?
For Indigenous Revolutionary War veterans—particularly those who fought alongside the “Americans” in southern New England—the war was not an isolated event. It was part of a much longer history of resistance to settler colonialism and the hardships it imposed upon Nipmuc/k and other Indigenous peoples throughout the region which began with King Phillip’s War one hundred years earlier.
English colonists, soon to become “Americans,” spoke of freedom and liberty. Indigenous peoples were confronting a different question: how to survive, persist, and maintain sovereignty and self-determination in the face of a colonial society that was becoming a new nation. The goal was not to become part of that nation. It was to remain Indigenous -- to retain languages, cultures, ethics, diplomatic traditions, relationships to land, and connections to one another. To preserve the identities and responsibilities of Indigenous nations that existed long before the United States.
Jicarilla Apache scholar Carey Vicenti described the relationship between Native people and their traditional lands as “that radiant sense of belonging.” She connected that belonging directly to the struggle against conquest and to the importance of memory.
“This conquest is not complete, and it won’t be complete until eventually that radiant sense of belonging is extinguished. Once that happens then the conquest is complete and we will also lose that quality of memory that is so important. To remember the long lines of ancestors going generation after generation. That is in essence what we are fighting for. Fighting against. That we have to retain that quality of memory and that beautiful and radiant sense of belonging to the country from which we come. It’s for this reason that we can’t stop.”(¹)
Memory, in this sense, is not simply about the past. Memory is resistance. It is how we remember “the long lines of ancestors” who came before us. It is how we maintain relationships across generations. And it is how we carry responsibilities forward to those who will come after us.
The Indigenous veterans of the Revolutionary War stood within those long lines of ancestors. Their participation in the war was shaped by a much older history of resistance, persistence, and survival. For Indigenous peoples in southern New England, survival itself was an exercise of sovereignty.
Remembering Our Relatives
This history is also personal. I am an enrolled citizen of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc, with roots at Nashaway (Lancaster) and Natick within Nipmuc/k homelands. The men whose stories I have written about for this project are either my ancestors or my kin. John Chore/Chowen is my fifth great-grandfather. Nichodemus Gigger is my fifth great-uncle, having married my fifth great-grandmother’s sister. The three Cape Indigenous men about whom I wrote did not survive the war and are kin to me through my Mashpee Wampanoag relatives. My mother’s sister married a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal member, as did two of her first cousins. Through those marriages, my family became connected by marriage to the Bearse, Tobey, Pocknett, and Hendricks families. I carry a generational responsibility to these men. Telling their stories is therefore more than historical recovery. It is an act of remembrance, relationship, and love. It is also a responsibility to the generations who come after us.
The Women We Have Yet to Remember
Natick Indigenous women are absent from these particular Revolutionary War stories. Where they appear in the historical record, it is often in connection with Indigenous men from outside the Natick community and in relation to proprietary land shares. Their broader leadership, authority, and contributions remain largely invisible.
Their absence requires us to ask questions about the historical record itself. Who was considered important enough to be recorded? Whose leadership was recognized? Whose stories were preserved—and whose were left out?
The patriarchy embedded within settler societies has diminished and obscured the leadership and contributions of women, including Indigenous women. Yet Indigenous women have always held central roles within their communities. When early English settlers arrived at Mishawum, present-day Charlestown, they encountered the Sonkskwa of Mystic, a female leader with whom they engaged in diplomatic and treaty negotiations. Indigenous communities and nations throughout this region were matrilineal and matrilocal. Women held—and continue to hold—active and central roles in tribal life.
The stories of Natick Indigenous women during the Revolutionary War period remain to be told. Their absence from the archive should not be mistaken for an absence from history.
Reframing Natick
Historical context matters.
In southern New England, Indigenous history is embedded within settler colonialism. Colonial voices have dominated many of the narratives surrounding Natick, particularly accounts of its establishment as a seventeenth-century mission community. Those accounts have too often overlooked the persistence of Indigenous people in Natick throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. They have also failed to fully recognize the importance of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Natick community as a “regional Indian community.”(²)
An Indigenous-centered—or “Indigenized”—framing of Natick’s history is therefore necessary. It makes Indigenous agency visible. It recognizes that Indigenous people were not passive subjects of history. They made decisions. They negotiated. They resisted. They adapted. They persisted. They maintained relationships to one another and to their homelands.
Belonging, Citizenship, and Survival
Questions about belonging and citizenship are as old as the United States itself. Indigenous people fought in the Revolutionary War, yet their relationship to the new country remained fundamentally different from the relationship of the settler society around them. It was not until the passage of the 1870 Enfranchisement Act that “Indians” became citizens of the Commonwealth and the United States—despite Indigenous people having fought to establish the country less than a century earlier.
Before the Revolutionary War, Indigenous peoples lived among English colonial settlers. They understood the society developing around them and the racial hierarchy that already structured colonial life. They also understood the position that Indigenous people, including Afro-Indigenous people, were likely to occupy within the hierarchy of the new nation. The position would not differ from the colonial one. The Indigenous people of Natick had already experienced the brutality of their settler neighbors during King Philip’s War. Although Indigenous people living at Natick attempted to maintain neutrality between the warring Indigenous and settler forces in that earlier conflict, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony authorized the colonial militia to forcibly remove Indigenous elders, women, and children to internment on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. The vast majority perished during the winter of 1675–76.
That history mattered. For Indigenous peoples of Massachusetts, sovereignty and self-determination depended upon survival. They had learned from King Philip’s War that neutrality would not protect them from colonial violence. A century later, Indigenous people fought alongside the Americans during the Revolutionary War in part to avoid another genocidal onslaught and to ensure their survivance. Their participation cannot, therefore, be understood solely through the story of American independence. It must also be understood as part of a much longer Indigenous history of resistance, survivance, persistence, and responsibility to future generations.
The 250th: Remembering Differently
The 250th anniversary gives us an opportunity to remember 1776 differently. We can recognize the American struggle for independence while also recognizing that Indigenous peoples experienced that struggle from another position—one shaped by the defense of their homelands, their communities, their sovereignty, and their survival.
The Indigenous Revolutionary War veterans of Natick were not simply participants in the creation of a new nation. They were Indigenous people navigating a dangerous transformation of the world around them. Their stories remind us that 1776 did not mark the beginning of Indigenous history. It did not mark the end of Indigenous resistance. And it did not erase Indigenous belonging, “that radiant sense of belonging to the country from which we come.”
The land remembers. We remember. And remembering carries responsibilities. Responsibilities to our ancestors. Responsibilities to our communities. Responsibilities to the land. And responsibilities to the generations yet to come.
For the Nipmuc Community Land Project, remembering is part of that responsibility. Land, history, culture, and community are not separate. They are relationships carried across generations. As we approach the 250th anniversary, we can choose to remember more fully—to listen for the voices that have been overlooked, to restore Indigenous people to the center of their own histories, and to recognize survivance not simply as survival, but as the continuation of Indigenous relationships, responsibilities, and belonging.
The stories remain. The relationships remain. The land remains.
And so do we.
Endnotes
Rebecca Tsosie, The American Indian Religious Freedom Act's 25th Anniversary: Past Accomplishments and Future Challenges, INDIAN LEGAL PROGRAM (College of Law, Arizona State University), Dec. 2003, at 5, available at http://www.law.asu.edu/files/News/December ILP.pdf.
Thomas Doughton, “Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts, A People Who Had ‘Vanished.’” https://nativenewengland.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/unseen-neighbors-native-americans-of-central-massachusetts-a-people-who-had-vanished/
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