Rethinking Native Spaces

The concluding chapter recaps how Nipmuc spaces across southern New England tell stories through archaeology and documents that the authors have engaged in over the decades. Details about the individuals discussed in the chapters and their everyday lives—how they travelled, made a living, or what they used for dishware—and about important decisions that changed the course of events for Nipmuc people, individually or collectively, were shared. Loss of land was central to many of these stories. The chapter summarizes how the physical links between past, present and future—of histories that have futures—are revealed in the material culture, landscapes and documents researched for this book, and how the combined efforts of the ancestors discussed throughout the book mirror the work of the authors who tell their stories. Both have worked to ensure the survival of Nipmuc history into the future, the latter through this model of a decolonized and collaborative historical archaeology.