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- By Chez Oxendine
- Real Estate
The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians has reclaimed a slice of home after a 200-year battle for their ancestral lands.
The tribe has finalized a $2.5 million purchase for 372 acres of land on the northern slope of Monument Mountain in western Massachusetts, according to a story by The Berkshire Eagle. The purchase, which includes Fenn Farm and Sky Farm in the Cherry Hill Road area, was largely funded by a $2.26 million state grant awarded in 2023.
For millennia, the Mohican people inhabited lands across the Northeast, including modern-day Massachusetts and New York, before colonial displacement forced them westward to Wisconsin in the early 19th century. Their ancestral territory encompassed a vast region that included the Hudson and Housatonic river valleys and stretched across parts of five states in New England.
Stockbridge-Munsee President Shannon Holsey described the parcel as “sacred” and an important step in returning to the tribe’s original homeland.
“It represents a ‘landback’ movement to reclaim land in a way that differs from the Western colonial way of thinking about it,” Holsey said in a statement obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We are trying to reclaim our ways of being, which were never based on money. It is the reclamation of our kinship systems, our governance systems, our ceremony and spiritually, our language, our culture, and our food and medicinal systems. Those are all based on our relationship to the land.”
The land went on the market originally in 2022, following the death of its owner, artist and author Clover Swann. After carving out Swann’s home from the purchase, the land went on sale for $3 million, and later dropped to $2.5 million. The Swann home was sold separately from the tribal purchase.
The tribe now leads conservation efforts and forest management on the mountain itself, according to the Eagle. Holsey said with the deed in hand, the tribe would conduct an environmental survey to determine necessary conservation measures.
