“You Can’t Unknow the Past”
Twelve Years of Archaeological Research Affirming Centuries of
Indigenous Memory and Belief Neglected by Non-Indigenous Historians
This production opens with the voice of David Brule, Coordinator of the American Battlefield Protection Program Advisory Board leading an April 2, 2025 monthly board meeting, open to the public, in the Town Hall of Montague, Massachusetts in Turners Falls. He gives a broad overview of a research project now completed, funded with grants totaling nearly $200,000 from the National Park Service since 2014, to explore the archaeological past of a bloody massacre by English colonists, and the battle that ensued following seven miles of the frantic English retreat down the Green River.
At dawn, May 19th, l676 hundreds of elderly and young multi-tribal refugees awoke in an unprotected encampment at Great Falls, on the North side of the middle Connecticut River, to musket fire and the screams of their people’s murder. Brule’s recounting is an important summary of the place of this brutal event in the larger tapestry of King Philips War. It was the bloodiest war of the Colonial period, perhaps of our entire national history, and established the tone of governmental policy toward displaced Indigenous populations ever since.
Raised just a mile away, Brule grew to young adulthood without ever hearing the gruesome story: it was never referenced in school curricula or local lore. In fact, being Indigenous was barely acknowledged anywhere. Colonial histories have pretty thoroughly excluded the Indigenous perspective. The victors usually write the history.
In 1900 on the Town of Gill’s shore of the flooded Connecticut River above the Great Falls Dam in the presence of a gathering of thousands, a newly set stone monument acknowledged the leadership of William Turner and his 145 armed recruits in a predawn attack, killing more than 300 unarmed elderly and child-aged refugees encamped near the river. The short text, carved in stone, does not go on to explain that the atrocity was carried out within earshot of the nearest Indigenous coalition forces encamped on the other side of the river, who immediately gave chase. In the seven miles of deadly pursuit, archaeologists centuries later, exhuming troves of musket balls from the buried past, have documented the maneuvers of Indigenous forces which killed more than 50 of the retreating English, including Captain Turner himself. It was a heavy price to pay for a campaign of genocide against the Natives.
Nonetheless the 1900 monument remains, a 125 year old assertion of a significant English colonial victory. It is a powerfully engrained vision to challenge with alternative, long buried truths, now finding their way into daylight through scientific interpretation.
David Brule is the details person in this case, having for 12 years chaired the American Battlefield Protection Program Advisory Board. He is also a compelling storyteller who has brought to life in recurring public presentations a new understanding of the Valley’s past. As president of the Nolumbeka Project, Incorporated, at the annual Pocumtuck Homeland Festival at Unity Park in August along the River’s edge over the last ten years he regales growing audiences.
Brule has stirred widespread research of the vast array of complex sources, including early Colonial observations of Indigenous life through unpublished letters, diaries and other written records. For more than two decades, he has been lifting a shroud of erasure far and wide, offering an alternative, balanced, collaborative narrative of an unforgettable, shared past, in search of peace and reconciliation.
The final archaeological report of more than 400 pages by the Heritage Consultants, LLC., further enriches and complicates our understanding of the Northeast region and the people who lived and died trying to defend it from the ruthless Colonial experiment beginning 400 years ago.
