Nahatan Street

William Nahatan also signed many land grants, with his name appearing on a plethora of land deeds all over the South Shore. According to the Massachusett Tribe, he sold a large tract of land in the Newton/Wellesley area, including Newton Upper Falls, which was used as a site for fishing using weirs by the Massachusett Tribe, to John Clark. He also granted a large amount of land in the Needham-Wellesley area to colonists on a deed that now belongs to Dedham Historical Society. 

 

According to some sources, Nahatan was the name of a Massachusett village that existed in Westwood. Although this information is not certain, ample evidence suggests that there were permanent Native settlements in the area. When West Dedham (now called Westwood) broke away from Dedham in 1897, the town wanted to be called Nahatan, but a representative from the town of Nahant objected, and the town became Westwood instead. 

 

It is important that we recognize the history of Nahatan Street’s name, especially since it is an important road that is home to Westwood High School, with even the school newspaper, the "Nahatan News," bearing the name of William Nahatan. Without this history, we are actively contributing to the erasure of indigenous people; saying a name every day, without understanding or acknowledging whom it was taken from, covers up the legacies of people who shaped the land that we live on. 

​

It's also essential to understand exactly how, and why, William Nahatan and other Native people in the New England area sold off so much of the land that belonged to them during this time period. The land deeds do not represent the whole story: there were all sorts of atrocities committed by the English that contributed to the decline of indigenous populations. The first one was disease: according to the Massachusett Tribe's website, almost 80 percent of the Massachusett population was wiped out by a plague in the early seventeenth century. The Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag  that in the late seventeenth century, English settlers weaponized the disease of smallpox through the trade of infected blankets (see "The Death of Chickataubut" section on the Massachusett Tribe's website) that were brought over from England's infirmaries to be sold to Massachusett people, who valued those items. The effect of disease on Native populations is often considered to be "inevitable," due to differing immunity between European peoples who had been exposed to the disease before (through livestock) and Native people who hadn't, but one of the primary reasons why smallpox had such a devastating effect on the Massachusett population was the use of biological warfare, or weaponized disease-spreading, by English settlers. 

​

Another method of erasure that the English was the establishment of Praying Towns and the removal of the Neponsets from their land on the Blue Hills. Praying Towns, such as Ponkapoag and Natick, were created by John Eliot to separate Native people who had converted to Christianity from their non-Christian counterparts, whom Eliot called "savages." In these Praying Towns, Native people were required to practice Puritan traditions, which was a cruel form of forced assimilation. Some Native people moved to these towns willingly because of the protection that they offered from many hostile English settlers. Even within the effort to erase Native presence in the area, many indigenous inhabitants of Praying Towns maintained key aspects of their culture, and continued to maintain their connections to their land. The Nahatan family, who lived in the Praying Town of Ponkapoag, may not have had access to the entirety of their ancestral lands as they did before colonization, but they still understood and maintained their multi-generational connection to it. 

​