Hassanamisco Nipmuc
The Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band owns three and a half acres of reservation land in what is present day Grafton, Massachusetts.
[10] They once had a vast amount of land and were spread throughout what is now eastern to central Massachusetts and parts of Rhode Island and Connecticut.
[citation needed] In the mid-1600s, Hassanemesit was one of more than a dozen Praying Towns established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England as permanent, European-style settlements for Christianized "praying Indians" in an effort to commit genocide and convert Eastern Algonquians to Christianity.
[13] From the 1720s to the 1740s, the Colony of Massachusetts put unassailable pressure on the Hassanamesit Nipmuc to sell their land and enter the market economy.
[citation needed] In the early 2000s, there was excavation work done at the Hassanamisco Reservation to find the remains of Sarah Boston's farmstead.
[14] In the seventeenth century, a Protestant missionary by the name of John Eliot spoke in Northeastern Connecticut in an attempt to convert the local Native Americans to Christianity.
[2] Hassanamesit was already an established community when Eliot arrived, so he illegally claimed it in order to enslave the people already living there to the settlers and their religion.
[4] Metacom, also known as King Phillip, recruited many different Native American tribes in New England to fight with him in his conflict with the colonists.
[10] In October of the same year, non-combatant Nipmuc were confined to Deer Island, in Boston harbor, for the winter, where more than half died from exposure and starvation.
At the end of the war, the Nipmuc tribal members who had joined King Phillip that did not manage to escape were either killed or sold into slavery in the West Indies.
[18][19][20] The Nipmuc Nation - Hassanamisco Band failed to meet criterion 83.7(a), which requires that "the petitioner has been identified as an American Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis since 1900.
"[16][9] The final determination found that the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Nation was not identified externally as an American Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis between 1900 - 1970.
"[16] The Branch of Acknowledgement and Research determined that the members of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Nation had no extended social or political interaction with each other prior to 1978.
From the 1920's through the 1970's, the evidence in the record showed occasional social interaction between Hassanamisco descendants and [Dudley Webster] descendants, most frequently in the context of pan-Indian or intertribal activities...On the basis of precedent, this type of limited interaction is not sufficient in scope to establish a community under 83.7(b) during any time period.
"[9] During the federal acknowledgement process, the Branch of Acknowledgment and Research also determined that the historic Hassanamisco tribal entity ceased to exist in the 18th century, writing, "There is sufficient evidence that the historical Hassanamisco Band retained community from colonial times until the period of the American Revolution, as a majority of its population lived on the reservation in Grafton, Massachusetts.
From the American Revolution until the mid-19th century, there is limited written evidence concerning continuing social ties among the Hassanamisco proprietary families.
[22] In 1980, the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Nation filed a petition with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to gain federal recognition; they received preliminary approval but were ultimately denied.
