Today the American Antiquarian Society releases the new online exhibition Reclaiming Heritage: Digitizing Nipmuc Histories from Colonial Documents.
This online resource presents fully-digitized versions of seven pre-1820 Indigenous-language imprints as well as digitized materials from four manuscript collections. The printed books featured in the exhibition add to an existing archive of early American imprints used today for language reclamation work among Indigenous communities in the northeast. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscript materials, including land deeds, proprietors and trustees’ reports, genealogical lists and accounting receipts from the towns Grafton, Sutton and Webster, Massachusetts (all within Nipmuc homelands), and the Society’s John Milton Earle collection, provide greater insight into the relationships between Nipmuc communities and settlers in central Massachusetts.
Supported in part by a Lapidus Initiative Fellowship for Digital Collections from the Omohundro Institute, Reclaiming Heritage provides more free, equitable access for Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous studies scholars to printed and archival materials directly related to the languages and lives of the Nipmuc people (upon whose homelands the AAS is built) and of other Indigenous nations across the northeast.
