Walking Native Land

Expanding from the Landscape of Slavery at Harvard Tours, this May, chaplains, students, and community members wish to walk to the sites of four land grants mentioned in the Harvard & Legacy of Slavery report in Connecticut/ Rhode Island.  

As with the tour, the goal is to walk the land with the sacred intention of reckoning with the legacy of colonization, suffering, and land theft which is bound up in our institutions' relationship to the land and to native peoples today.  We will practice offering periods of silence as a way to sit with this history.  Silence and walking are ways of listening to the land, trying to hear what can be hard to hear. Silence and walking create space for witnessing, grieving, reflecting, and honoring.  

Over 8 days, we hope to walk to the Mashantucket Pequot museum, the land grant sites nearby, and to walk back to Cambridge to feel the interconnectedness of these places, and the scope of this history.  Our destination is recorded as Pequot land, and to walk there we pass through the land of various Massachusetts peoples- including Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Penobscot into lands of Mohegan, Narragansett, and Pequot. It is our intention where possible to seek the permission and blessing of members of those peoples whose land we will walk with. 

For more information, contact Rita Powell (rita@harvardepiscopalians.org).