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Who Is Nipmuc? Unraveling Identity, Enrollment, and Community

“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.


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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 recognition - beginning for Nipmucs in the 1980s -  thrust our people into a long, painful bureaucratic process.


Federal recognition demanded a paper trail and specific forms of “evidence” that are rooted in colonial values: census rolls, land deeds, written records, nuclear family structures—things designed by and for a system that was never meant to validate Indigenous lives. In that process, the rich, complex, and interconnected fabric of Nipmuc community life was narrowed to numbers, files, and formulas.


In the time immediately before applying for federal recognition, the Hassanamisco Nipmuc community had close to 2,000 people on its membership roll. This number reflected lineal descendancy, family connections, kinship ties, and ongoing cultural participation—our true understanding of who we are.


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But during the federal recognition process, that number was whittled down to under 800. Entire family lines were suddenly seen as questionable. Some people were cut from the roll due to insufficient documentation—despite being deeply embedded in the community. Others were asked to reprove who they were, even if they'd been recognized by their own people for generations.


This wasn’t a mistake. It was a direct result of federal criteria that favored colonial definitions of community and legitimacy. For those who remain on the roll, it’s not a mark of being “more Nipmuc”—it’s a reflection of navigating an unjust system. And now, as the roll grows again, we have to reckon with what that means—not just in numbers, but in belonging.


Before federal recognition was even a thought, we didn’t need paperwork to know who our kin were. Our community - our ties to our Nipmuc relatives within and across bands, and to our kin in Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pequot and other tribal communities - told us. 


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Enrollment is a political choice. For some people, being enrolled offers a sense of visibility, protection, or political leverage. For others, it’s irrelevant—or even painful.


To be Nipmuc is to carry forward the stories, the languages, the memories, and the responsibilities of our ancestors. It’s to walk in relationship with the land, to show up for our people, to honor our elders and teach our youth. It’s to survive centuries of erasure, and to insist that we are still here. We don’t need any government entity to validate this for us.  



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