Bethany Berger, University of Connecticut School of Law, and Chloe Scherpa, have posted Mohegan Women, the Mohegan Church, and the Lasting of the Mohegan Nation:
On a hill at the end of Church Lane in rural Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. To someone unfamiliar with its history, the church might represent Mohegan acculturation, a triumph of missionaries in breaking an Indigenous people from their “heathen” ways. But the church is part of a long history of Mohegan transformation of non-Indian ways to preserve their land and community in the face of colonialism. While most of these efforts won only temporary success, the church remained as a center of the tribe, paving the way for tribal recognition and reestablishment of the Mohegan Reservation in the late twentieth century. And women were always the center of this history, recovering and making visible women’s traditional importance in Mohegan politics and culture. This Article tells this story, along with the story of the missionary woman whose work with the Mohegans allowed her to resist prescribed roles for early-nineteenth-century White women.
Sherpa, who now is in house at the Travelers Indemnity Company, worked on this topic as a student in Professor Berger’s Race and Property in U.S. History class
--Dan Ernst
