The Pequot Museum Tells The Story Of The Pequot Tribe, Displaying Their Culture, History, And Reservation Lands
Chef Sherry Pocknett, Director of Food and Beverage at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, grew up on the tribe’s reservation lands in southeastern Connecticut and is intimately familiar with the natural resources that surround her. “Both of my parents were native, and we lived off the land,” she tells The Buzz. “They taught me and my siblings about the food in the woods and in the bay. We learned about seasonality and the indigenous foods that the Earth provides.”
The idea of a single day of Thanksgiving is not one she grew up with. “We have many Thanksgivings,” she says. “Our new year starts in late March or April when the fiddlehead ferns come out and the herring return. Then the maple sugar trees start to drip. That’s a sign that the Creator is waking things up. This is our first Thanksgiving of the year. We celebrate with dance and song, burning sage and cedar and seagrass. And there is always a Spirit Plate to give thanks for the food.”
In early June, the strawberries ripen. “That is our second Thanksgiving,” Sherry explains. “The fish come back and the birds, snapping turtles and frogs wake up. The berries ripen each in their time. When the weather is cold, we hunt deer, never in the spring when they are giving birth to their young.”
Chef Pocknett considers education an important part of her job. “We need to teach the young ones these lifeways,” she says. “How to live in harmony with the seasons. How to use every part of the animal or fish or plant, to take nothing for granted.”
It’s this drive to educate that brought Sherry to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. “I visited when it first opened in 1998 and they were serving hamburgers and hotdogs in the museum cafe. That had nothing to do with our heritage, so I decided to change it.”
Sherry’s sustainable foodways are an important part of the museum’s mission to explore ways the Native American culture can contribute to present day problems, Tanya Rose Lane, a historian and educator at museum, tells The Buzz. “Our exhibits follow the story of the indigenous people from the Ice Age to today,” Lane says. “For the Pequot, this is their family museum, and tells their unique story, but it's also introduces other people to the culture that once existed here and how it survived.”
At 308,000 square feet, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum is the largest Native American museum in the world, larger even than the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. Exhibits begin with the Ice Age as you go inside a glacier, and a display of megafauna, including a mastodon, dire wolves and giant beavers. People enter the picture with a dramatic diorama of an elk hunt 11,000 years ago. The next gallery recreates a Pequot Village as it would have been in 1550, on the eve of European contact, when both hunting and foraging in the forest and agriculture, the so-called Three Sisters - squash, corn and beans - became important to the people.
“The exhibits show how the landscape shaped our lives, how we adapted to changing conditions,” Tanya Rose says. “By 1600, after European contact, the tribe is taking refuge a palisade.”
One of the most unique aspects of the village exhibit, she says, is that all of the figures were created from life casts of actual tribal members. “So you are seeing real people, most of whom are still alive and living here.”
A dramatic new exhibit tells the story of the Pequot War, and the decisive battle at Mystick Fort on May 26, 1637, when the English and their allies burnt some 500 Pequot men, women and children alive in a surprise nighttime attack. The powerful story is told through artifacts discovered at the battle site, as well as a new film, “The Witness.
“It was a watershed moment,” Tanya Rose believes. “No native force had been defeated by Europeans until the Pequot War, and it led to the marginalization of the native peoples, both here and across the continent.”
Despite the European efforts to destroy the Pequot people and their culture, the tribe has managed to hang on and, in recent years, thrive. “At one point in the 1950s, we were down to just two elderly women living on our reservation,” Tanya Rose says. “Most of our land had been sold off illegally. But they reached out to relatives and got them to come back. Our landmark year was 1983. Ronald Reagan gave us Federal recognition, and we won our court case and were able to reclaim 1500 acres of our beautiful forest. That’s what Mashantucket means: place of many trees.”
In 1986, the Pequot tribe opened a hugely successful high stakes bingo game and in 1992 began development on Foxwoods Resort Casino, which takes its name from the Pequot’s traditional name: the Fox People. Now the largest resort casino complex in North America, Foxwoods is connected to the nearby Mashantucket Pequot Museum by a free shuttle.
“The most important thing is that our tribal members can now live and work on our land,” Tanya Rose says. “You can feel the people’s pride.”
Up on the fourth level of the museum, Chef Sherry Pocknett is busy creating snapping turtle soup, stuffed quahogs, venison stew, blueberry slump and other dishes from traditional foods used by the peoples of the Eastern Woodlands for more than 10,000 years. The cafe, which looks out on the forest through an enormous window wall, is open to the public, with or without museum admission.
“I’m doing a pumpkin stuffed with venison and a maple brined turkey for our November Thanksgiving feast,” she says. “I was born with a wooden spoon in my mouth - literally - and there’s such an amazing bounty out there… I never run out of ideas.”
Renee Wright
A graduate of Franconia College in Social Psychology, Renee has worked as Travel Editor for Charlotte Magazine and has written three travel guidebooks for Countryman Press among other writing assignments. She enjoys food and camping.
Make Sure To Stay At:
Ashaway RV Resort, conveniently located near beautiful beaches, golf courses, pristine rivers as well as Casinos, Mystic CT, Watch Hill and Westerly RI.