The R.W. Kern Center resides on stolen Nonotuck land. We acknowledge the history of colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous people that brings us to this land today. We’d also like to acknowledge our neighboring Indigenous nations: the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and Pequot to the South, the Mohican to the West, and the Abenaki to the North¹.

The Nonotuck, just one of many Indigenous Algonkian groups, lived in the Kwinitekw (Connecticut River) Valley—specifically in parts of what we now call Northampton, Hadley, and Amherst—for many generations before the arrival of European settlers in the early 17th century. The Nonotuck people took advantage of their location in the Kwinitekw Valley, where they could grow maize (which they ate and traded) and other crops², hunt, fish, and gather. Their contribution to the fur trade, until over-hunting, was beaver³ and they had strong relationships with many regional Indigenous groups.

It was not long after their arrival to the “long-inhabited, carefully managed landscape” of the Kwinitekw Valley³ that English and Dutch settlers extinguished a large number of Nonotuck peoples with the introduction of smallpox and other diseases, as well as conflict both with European settlers and other Indigenous tribes, as prompted by European settlers. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, remaining Nonotuck and other Indigenous people in the Kwinitekw Valley fled north, where many Nonotuck peoples joined the Abenaki, another Algonkian group⁴.

Acknowledging that we reside on land stolen from Indigenous people is just a first step toward supporting Indigenous communities. We encourage all of our fellow green buildings to learn about the Indigenous history of the land they occupy. If you’d like a place to start, check out Native Land to see what Indigenous land you occupy and Native Governance Center’s guide to Indigenous land acknowledgement.