JEBI Keynote Speaker: Larry Spotted Crow Mann
Wednesday November 13 at 3:30 pm, REHM Library, Smith Hall
Indigenous People's Keynote Reception and Heritage Month Kickoff Celebration
Wednesday November 13 at 4:30 pm, Carey Lounge, Smith Hall
E83.67 .B795 2018
The Town of Worcester is comprised of three native territorial homelands: Quinsigamond, which translates to “the pickerel fishing place” in the Algonquin language; Sagatabscot or “the place of the hard rock” which is the southeastern most part of Worcester; and Tatnick or “at the great hill” which is a brook, a hill, and village in the western part of Worcester. Packachoag or "bare mountain place" or "treeless mountain" in Algonquin, is the name of the area where Holy Cross now stands. It was a village organized around what we now call the Blackstone river. All of this information can be found in greater detail in the sources on this page. Since 2020, Holy Cross has done a number of projects to engage with the Native American Heritage of our land and community. Please use this page to explore the various projects conducted by our Holy Cross community and consider the question: how can we best acknowledge the indigenous experience of our campus?
Translations of place names above provided by:
Sources for Nipmuc History:
General Information:
(European) Historical Sources:
Indian names of places in Worcester County, Massachusetts : with interpretations of some of them
by
Date(s): 1828-2016.
National, local, and student publications produced by Indigenous communities across the United States in Canada. To access, sign-up for an e-card.
A Note on Conducting Research...
When conducting research on indigenous peoples (and other historically-oppressed groups), it's important to understand that even our systems of information are colonizing to a certain extent. Many systems that we use to organize information even today, such as the Library of Congress Call Numbers, are relatively old and may continue problematic language and organization. Librarians as a profession are working hard to change the way our information is organized -- but in the meantime, you may encounter organizational schema or vocabulary that we would not typically use today.
For example, when dealing with specific Native American nations, it's important to recognize that the names used in the Library of Congress system may not be the ones considered most appropriate today. For example, the Five Nations identify themselves under the name Haudenosaunee rather than the name Iroquois more commonly used by European settlers. However, the designation Iroquois is still used in the catalog system (and will appear in the titling and summaries of older secondary sources).
Likewise, you will find that indigenous voices are often poorly-preserved compared to those of their colonizers, and that indigenous authority is not always, in our academic systems, accorded the same weight as other kinds of authority (ex., peer-reviewed articles). Most of our citation systems are also not designed to properly acknowledge indigenous knowledge (see more on the Collect & Cite Research page).
Indigenous Voices & Sources:
