Native American mounds a casualty of Hopping Brook expansion
(Holliston MA)
By Bill Shaner
Daily News staff
HOLLISTON – Along the edge of woods that crews have recently
cut to expand the Hopping Brook Business Park sat a pile of stones unlike the
uprooted boulders and tree trunks in which it surrounded.
The stones were laid in an oval-shaped mound. The mound had
rounded edges that wrapped around a depression in the center. Overgrown and
worn, with faded moss on the granite rocks, the mound had clearly been there
for years. Some would argue it's been there for centuries.
A small but resolute group of archaeologists, historians and
activists believe the mound is one of thousands of similar artifacts, sometimes
called rock piles, that predate white settlers. Left by native people, experts
believe they were created for spiritual purposes, perhaps for burial or other
ceremonies.
And soon, that one particular mound in Holliston will be
gone.
The mound on Tuesday afternoon resembled an island,
surrounded by hundreds of acres of deforested land. Crews had already removed a
mound next to it, said Joanne Hulbert, town historian.
“That's pretty much the sad tale of it,” said Hulbert.
“Bulldoze it over, the march of progress, and a little vestige of Native
American evidence goes away once more.”
When the 200-acre development, essentially a delayed second
leg of the Hopping Brook Business Park, is complete, the mound will make way
for a road or a parking lot, foundation for an office space or a warehouse.
Construction started about a month ago.
Standing by the mound, Matthew Howes, a Holliston man who's
helped archaeologists discover and register native landmarks in the area,
lamented the fact it would disappear.
“People need to kind of wake up and realize that native
people were here for thousands of years … and their remains are everywhere,” he
said.
There are hundreds of similar mounds in the area, and those
who are passionate about native histories want to see more thought given to
their preservation.
Curtiss Hoffman, a Bridgewater State University professor,
has inventoried about 5,100 similar mounds all along the Eastern Seaboard, from
Georgia to Nova Scotia. The mounds, he said, often sit in clusters – 50 or so
built very close to one another. It's something he feels isn't an accident.
The only way to truly save the mounds is to have state
preservation offices acknowledge them as historic, and include them in state
registries. Until then, he said, local ordinances and land acquisitions to
preserve the mounds are the most effective method.
But before that happens, there needs to be consensus in the
archaeological community. Some feel the mounds are the product of colonial
farmers removing rocks from farmland. Hoffman feels the mounds are too
deliberate, too ornate in their arrangement, for that to be legitimate.
Bill Shaner can be reached at 508-626-3957 or at
wshaner@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @bill_shaner.
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20160712/holliston-native-american-mounds-casualty-of-hopping-brook-expansion/?Start=1
Most Recent Step: go back and read the story above...
Ethnic Cleansing
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of
ethnic or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group,
with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous.[1] The forces applied may
be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer),
intimidation, as well as mass murder and genocidal rape.
Ethnic cleansing is
usually accompanied with the efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence
of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social
centers, farms, and infrastructure, and by the desecration of monuments,
cemeteries, and places of worship..."
First Step:
"At the time of the earliest European settlements,
where Holliston exists now was part of the territory of the Awassamog family of
Natick (the first Nipmuc Praying Town), who also held authority over land near
Waushakum Pond at Framingham and land near Annamasset at Mendon. In 1701, a
large tract of land that included the west half of Holliston, eastern Milford
and parts of Hopkinton and Ashland was given to the local Nipmucs in a land
exchange with Sherborn. Their ownership of the tract was brief, as settlers
purchased tracts of land there until all traces of Nipmuc presence disappeared.
The Nipmuc village of Mucksquit (translation – “place of much grass”), located
on the shore of Wennakeening (translation – “smile of the great spirit”) was
near the site of the Morse family farm, today known as Lake Winthrop. The
Morses, Sheffields, Marshalls and Bullards and many others followed Pout Lane
(an old Native American foot-path, now partly modern day Rte 16 and Highland
St., respectively) out to the new territory and settled along the path, thus
forming a cluster of farms that would eventually become Holliston. John Eliot
and Daniel Gookin (Christian missionaries) also followed the path in search of
converts to Christianity and encouraged the Nipmucs to gather into villages,
which made their task of finding them easier. Though not as famous as the Bay
Path or the Old Connecticut Path, Pout Lane played a major role in the
settlement of Holliston and other points southwest of Boston. Holliston, then
part of Sherborn, was first settled by Europeans in 1659 by Massachusetts Bay
Puritans..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holliston,_Massachusetts
The Nipmuc or Nipmuck people are descendants of the
indigenous Algonquian peoples of Nippenet, 'the freshwater pond place', which
corresponds to central Massachusetts and immediately adjacent portions of
Connecticut and Rhode Island. The tribe were first encountered by Europeans in
1630, when John Acquittamaug arrived with maize to sell to the starving
colonists of Boston, Massachusetts.[5]
The colonists introduced pathogens, such as smallpox, to
which the Native Americans had no prior exposure. They were also exposed to
alcohol for the first time, which led to huge numbers of natives succumbing to
the effects of alcoholism. With the passage of increasingly harsh laws against
Indian culture and religion, the loss of land, legally and illegally, to
growing English colonies, many of the Nipmuc joined Metacomet's rebellion in
1675, the results of which were disastrous. Many of the Nipmuc were interned on
Deer Island in Boston Harbor and perished, and others were executed or sold
into slavery in the West Indies.
The Reverend John Eliot arrived in Boston in 1631 and began
an ambitious project to learn the Massachusett language, widely understood
throughout New England, convert the Native Americans, and published a Bible and
grammar of the language. His efforts, with colonial government backing,
established several 'Indian plantations' or 'Praying towns'—predecessors to the
Indian Reservation—where the Native Americans were coerced to settle and
instructed in English customs, Christianity, but governed and preached to by
other Native Americans and in their own dialects. By the 19th century, the
Nipmuc were reduced to wards of the state that were administered by
state-appointed commissioners. The passage of the Massachusetts Enfranchisement
Act of 1869 effectively 'detribalised' the Nipmuc, and the last of the remaining
Indian plantation lands were sold. Nipmuc communities continued to survive, and
the tribe received state recognition in 1979, but efforts at federal
recognition have not met with success.
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