Reconciliation in Stockbridge: Working with the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans

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I believe that good governance is mostly a matter of showing up — showing up with your eyes open, making connections other people haven't made yet, and doing the work to turn those connections into something real. My relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans is as good an example of that philosophy as anything I've been part of. But before I get to what I did, I need to tell you what happened here. Because without that, none of the rest of it makes sense.

What Happened Here

The Mohicans had lived in the Berkshires for thousands of years before European contact. Stockbridge was founded in 1739 as a deliberate experiment — Indigenous and colonial people would live, work, and govern together. The town board had both Mohican and colonial representatives. For decades, it worked.

Then came the Seven Years' War, which ended in 1763. White settlers poured in and had no interest in maintaining the balance. They took Mohican land by squatting and illegal purchase and consolidated power on the town council and in the courts. When the Revolutionary War erupted, the Mohicans saw a kinship with those resisting the Crown — and an opportunity to win back what had been taken. They joined the fight.

They fought with distinction. The Mohicans built fortifications, scouted British movements, ambushed Redcoats, and acted as colonial emissaries to other Indigenous tribes. Then, in 1778, Chief Abraham Ninham and 17 Mohican warriors were killed by the British at the Battle of Kingsbridge in the Bronx after tracking enemy movements through New York and reporting back to the Americans. A monument marks the site today at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City.

When the war ended, Washington acknowledged the debt. On July 3, 1783 — just months after the Treaty of Paris — he signed a letter to the Mohicans by name, writing that during the whole of the war the tribe "have remained firmly attached to us and have fought and bled by our side," and calling on all tribes and persons to "consider them as friends and subjects to the United States of America."

The letter is a remarkable document — and a painful one. Washington was already writing it as a letter of safe passage, not a promise of protection. The tribe told him they intended to remove from Stockbridge to Oneida Country. He acknowledged their service and wished them well. The appreciation did not translate into land, or justice, or anything that would keep them here.

How were they rewarded beyond that letter? The men who might have sustained the community were gone. What remained — the women, the children, the few surviving men — fell into debt. Immigrants coveted the lands and properties held by Mohican widows and the children of men who had died for the American cause. One by one, mortgages were called in. The Mohicans lost most of their land not in battle, not by treaty, but to the quiet machinery of debt in the decades after a war they had fought on our behalf. By 1808, there was nothing left. They walked — first to eastern New York State, then, after further dispossession there, all the way to Wisconsin.

They had volunteered for our revolution. They had fought bravely and died in significant numbers. The ensuing poverty and opportunistic greed of a few resulted in their departure from Stockbridge in abject poverty. We could have treated them better. That is not ancient history. It is a wound that has never fully closed, and a debt that has never been repaid.

More than two centuries passed. The Tribe rebuilt their nation in Wisconsin — the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans now has about 1,500 members, based on a reservation in Bowler, Wisconsin adjacent to the Menominee Reservation. But they never stopped being connected to this place. The Berkshires are their homeland. The bones of their ancestors are here. The river still carries the name they gave it.

When I was elected to the Stockbridge Select Board, I decided this was something I needed to tackle. I wasn't the only person working on reconciliation — there were others, and good ones — but I was the one in a Select Board leadership position who was willing to make it a sustained institutional priority. That decision shaped everything that followed.

Founding the Stockbridge Mohican Commission

Sherry White is the Tribal Liaison for the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans, traveling from Wisconsin to spend a week in the Berkshires every month — working with locals, educating, advocating for the Tribe's interests on its ancestral land. Getting to know Sherry was one of my first priorities. She introduced me to Jeff Bendremer, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer. I also worked closely with the Tribe on burial ground issues — quietly, carefully, and always in close consultation with the Tribal Liaison. That work doesn't make headlines, but it matters enormously to the Tribe and to the integrity of this community.

One of the first things I did in office was propose returning a collection of 18th-century documents to the Tribe. These weren't documents in a museum. They were Mohican proprietor records from before the Revolution — discovered in the trash at Stockbridge's Old Town Hall as the building was being cleaned out. They had been thrown away. I built support locally and with the State House delegation, which culminated in legislation signed by Governor Charlie Baker. The documents were returned to the nation whose history they documented.

It was a small act in the scheme of things. But it said something about what kind of town Stockbridge wanted to be — and it established trust with the Tribe that made everything else possible.

Out of all of this came a bigger idea. In consultation with Sherry, I wrote the proposal for a Stockbridge Mohican Commission — a formal standing body dedicated to education, land issues, and ongoing outreach between our two communities. It was approved by both the Stockbridge Select Board and the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Council. I co-chair it with Sherry. Other members include Stockbridge Land Trust President Rich Bradway, Bonney Hartley, the Tribe's historic preservation manager in the Berkshires, and local researcher and former Police Chief Rick Wilcox.

The Commission gives the relationship institutional form. It doesn't depend on any one person's interest or one Select Board's priorities. It is built into how Stockbridge governs itself.

The Conservation Grant

The most significant tangible result of this relationship was a state grant that enabled the Stockbridge-Munsee Band to purchase the 351-acre Fenn Farm parcel — land on the northern slope of Monument Mountain, adjacent to the Tribe's ancestral homeland — for permanent conservation.

I wrote the climate section of the grant application, submitted through the state's Municipal Vulnerabilities Preparedness program. Stockbridge was asked to host the MVP announcement because the Stockbridge-Munsee application scored highest of all MVP applications submitted statewide that cycle. When Joe Miller — then a member of the Tribe's Tribal Council — later wrote publicly about the work, he described it this way: "Patrick privately counseled me to not settle for limited access to state-owned property, but instead to pursue the ultimately successful course of action to acquire the land on behalf of the Mohican people. Finally, after two centuries, we will once again steward land in western Massachusetts."

Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll came to Stockbridge for the announcement. Tribal President Shannon Holsey was there. The Secretary of Energy, the Undersecretary for Climate, the Undersecretary for Environmental Justice. It was an extraordinary day for a small town, and it happened because relationships had been built over years, trust had been established, and a coalition was already in place to move when the opportunity came.

After two centuries, the Mohicans will once again steward land in western Massachusetts. That is not nothing. That is something.

Beyond the Mountain: The River Signs

I proposed to the Stockbridge Select Board that we install bilingual signs at five Housatonic River crossings in town. The vote was unanimous. The signs read "Housatonic River" in English and "Wa'thatinik" — meaning "Beyond the Mountain" in the Mohican language — a name the Tribe's Council specifically requested be included. I personally designed the signs, drawing on the turtle from the Mohican flag with the Tribe's permission.

A bridge sign doesn't restore land or repair two centuries of displacement. But it does something important: it says to anyone crossing that bridge that this river has a name older than the English one, and that the people who gave it that name are still here, still connected to this place. Signs like that change how people think, slowly and cumulatively. And changing how people think is how you eventually change what they're willing to do.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In June 2024, reporter Frank Vaisvilas of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called me wanting to discuss the reconciliation efforts between Stockbridge and the Mohicans. His article introduced tens of thousands of Wisconsin readers — many of them Mohican tribal members or people who knew the community — to what we were trying to do here. It ran under the headline: "This tribe helped win the Revolution, then were expelled and migrated to Wisconsin. What's changed now?"

In the article, Frank mentioned Dennis Zack — a Mohican entrepreneur from Oshkosh whose tribal name is Tau-Tau-yah-com-no-wan, meaning "Talker to the Point." Dennis founded Tribal Sun Soap, making handcrafted, Native-inspired soaps in Wisconsin. He had dreamed of visiting his ancestral homeland but had never made the trip east.

A Phone Call and a Bar of Soap

I read that article and picked up the phone. I called Dennis Zack and asked whether any shops in Berkshire County were carrying his products. No, he said — but he'd love that. My next call was to Teresa O'Brient, owner of Williams & Sons Country Store on Main Street in Stockbridge. Teresa looked at the products and placed an order.

The soaps arrived. They sold. A Mohican-owned business now has a presence in the heart of its ancestral homeland, and a man named Dennis Zack is one step closer to the trip of a lifetime.

A big part of governing is bringing people together to do good. The extra mile is always the most rewarding part of any trip.

What This Is Really About

I tell this story not because the individual actions are large — most of them aren't. Returning documents. Designing a sign. Writing a grant section. Making a phone call. None of it is dramatic. What I hope it illustrates is something about how I approach public work: you start with the belief that this history matters, that the people who were here before us deserve more than a footnote, and then you look for every concrete, practical thing you can do to act on that belief.

You show up for lunch. You ask questions. You propose things at Town Meeting. You write the grant section yourself. You pick up the phone.

The conservation grant didn't happen because someone decided reconciliation was a good idea in the abstract. It happened because a network of relationships had been built over years, because the Tribe trusted that Stockbridge was a genuine partner, and because when the opportunity came, the coalition was already in place to move quickly and score the highest-rated application in the state.

The Mohicans walked out of Stockbridge in 1808 carrying almost nothing — their men lost in a war fought for a country that did not protect them afterward, their land stripped through debt and opportunism. We are not going to undo that. But we can decide, right now, what kind of community we want to be going forward. We can acknowledge the debt honestly. We can build relationships. We can put their river's name on a sign. We can return their documents. We can help conserve their land. We can make a phone call that gets a Mohican entrepreneur's soap onto a shelf in his ancestral hometown.

None of it is enough. All of it matters. I know which side of that work I want to be on.