Listening and Learning

This chapter outlines some of the benefits of collaborative research. It draws on the experience gained and the lessons learned from close to a decade’s collaboration between the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Nipmuc Nation of Massachusetts. Close collaboration as part of the Hassanamesit Woods Project between Nipmuc archaeologist Dr. D. Rae Gould of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a member of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc, and the author has resulted in numerous ontological shifts. One of the more noteworthy has been a reassessment of the history of the seventeenth-century “Praying Indian” communities of colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut that have always been viewed as having been “established” by English missionary John Eliot. Such a view, long held by historians and archaeologists alike, was challenged as an outgrowth of collaborative dialogue resulting in a reassessment of notions of community and deeper connections to traditional Nipmuc lands. As a result, research examined deeper connections between the seventeenth-century community of Hassanamesit and earlier Nipmuc use of the area. Through a series of analytical studies, it was determined that cultural and spatial continuity could be demonstrated between recent Nipmuc communities and a deeper past.