In his classes on Indigenous and colonial American history, Professor Nathan Braccio assigns students a research paper that explores the past of a place they know well — or, at least, thought they did.

“As you look out your window or walk around campus,” for instance, “you’re not just in Worcester, you’re in the Nipmuc homelands.”

The often-bloody evolution of New England homelands has been at the center of Braccio’s studies into the “cultural negotiations” among Northeastern Indigenous peoples and New England colonists in the 1600s and early 1700s.

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