Native Land Pilgrimage 2024

Expanding from the Landscape of Slavery at Harvard Tours, in May of 2024, chaplains, students, and community members walked 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 was 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 practiced 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 walked to the Mashantucket Pequot museum, the land grant sites nearby, and 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 passed through the land of various Massachusetts peoples—including Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Penobscot into lands of Mohegan, Narragansett, and Pequot. Where possible we sought the permission and blessing of members of those peoples whose land we walked with.