The Quinnipiac

The Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop is located on the ancestral lands of the Quinnipiac people.

The Quinnipiac and others in the area spoke Quiripi, a language in the Algonquian family. In Quiripi, the “Quinnipiac” translates as “people of the long water land” - the watery environs of what is now New Haven County, with its rivers, estuary marshes, harbor, and shorelines. Their territory covered approximately 300 square miles: along the coast between what is now West Haven and Madison and inland about 20 miles, including areas that are now Woodbridge, Cheshire, and Durham.

Quiripi was closely related to other Algonquian languages like those spoken by the Mohegan and Nipmuc peoples. The Mohegan word for the region’s biggest river - Quinnetuket, the long tidal river - was Anglicized to Connecticut. You might notice that Quinnetuket and Quinnipiac share the same first syllable: quinne or quinni, meaning Iong. (Spelled “quni-” in modern Mohegan.)

The Quinnipiac built semi-permanent villages but also moved across their territory with the seasons. They would have fished and foraged along the waterway that English settlers later named the Mill River. The natural waterfall at the Armory site (now the location of the Lake Whitney Dam) may have been a particularly good site for fishing.

The Quinnipiac way of life changed when European explorers, traders, and settlers began to arrive on the shores of Turtle Island (North America). In 1634 and 1635, a smallpox epidemic ripped through Indigenous communities in what is now southern New England, killing as much as 90% of the regional Indigenous population. With their population devastated, the Quinnipiac may have felt under pressure from outside forces, especially in light of a volatile situation unfolding to their east between the Pequot and the Connecticut Colony.

In the 1630s the Pequot, another Algonquian-speaking group, were actively pursuing control of the regional Indigenous population while also pushing back against European colonization. From their ancestral lands in what is now southeastern Connecticut, the Pequot expanded west into the Connecticut River valley, where they came into direct conflict with the English settlers of the Connecticut Colony, who were also expanding their scope of control. Years of confrontation between the two groups led to the Colony declaring war on the Pequot on May 1, 1637. It was the first major conflict between Indigenous people and European colonists, and it changed the face of the Indigenous-colonial relationship. Entire villages of Pequots were massacred: men and women, elders and children. After the colonial victory in the fall of 1637, the settlers tried to wipe the Pequots out, enslaving the survivors, selling their lands, and banning their language and culture. The tribe nevertheless endured, and their lineage and culture continue in the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation today.

English Puritan colonists arrived in the Quinnipiac lands in April 1638, approximately six months after the end of the Pequot War. They intended to create a settlement around what is now known as New Haven Harbor. The Quinnipiac were hospitable, sharing resources and information about how to find food.

When the New Haven Colony was founded, the Quinnipiac were living in four groups centered on four villages: Quinnipiac in the area that is now New Haven, Monotwese (North Haven), Menunkatuck (Guilford), and Totoket (Branford). In November 1638, Momauguin, the sachem (leader) of the village near New Haven Harbor, entered into a treaty with the newly-established colony.

In the treaty, the colonists agreed to provide military protection for the Quinnipiac if they gave up a large portion of their ancestral lands. As a result, the colonists set up the first reservation for Indigenous people in North America, a 1,200 acre plot on the east side of New Haven Harbor, centered on Momauquin’s village. There, the treaty said, the Quinnipiac would be free to settle, farm, and hunt and fish.

In comparison to many later treaties and reservations, the settlement created by the Momauquin Treaty was relatively humane: it did not force the Quinnipiac to leave their ancestral lands completely, and gave them access to natural resources and good farmland. However, the basic structure of the treaty set the stage for centuries of dispossession, displacement, disadvantage, and cultural erasure. The agreement was heavily weighted in the colonial favor and severely restricted Indigenous rights to their land, movement, lifestyle, and economic opportunity. The colonists also soon broke their side of the agreement, leading to further hardship, displacement, and the rapid destruction of the Quinnipiac as an independent cultural group.

Before the New Haven Colony was settled, Quinnipiac territory had covered over 300 square miles. After the treaty, a single village had the rights to 1.75 square miles. It is unclear if Momauquin had any right to make an agreement on behalf of all the Quinnipiac. The treaty may have only been for his village group. In the decades after the treaty, however, members of the other villages came under pressure from colonialist expansion and also moved to the reservation.

The restrictions of the treaty also disrupted the Quinnipiac way of life. The group had been semi-nomadic, occupying villages and planting crops for part of the year, but also moving to fish, forage, and hunt as the season dictated. The treaty prevented this traditional activity and limited the Quinnipiacs’ ability to hunt, fish, and manage their lands as they saw fit.

In exchange, all the colonists had to do was provide protection if the Quinnipiac were attacked and give a small number of gifts to pay for the land: 12 each of coats, spoons, porringers (metal bowls), hatchets, hoes; 24 knives; and four cases of other knives and scissors. The treaty also stated that the group had 47 men of fighting age, so this payment was paltry even for their relatively small population.

The agreements of the treaty did not last long. By 1675, the colonists were not providing protection to the Quinnipiac. When the anti-colonialist Indigenous uprising known as King Philip’s War broke out, New Haven was fortified, and although the Quinnipiac were fighting on the side of the colonists, they were not allowed inside the town. By the 1680s, with the colonial population expanding, white settlers were pushing into East Haven and buying up land from the Quinnipiac on the reservation. Continued economic disenfranchisement left the shrinking Quinnipiac population desperate, and by the 1720s, the reservation had been broken up entirely and sold to white farmers. At the same time, the Quinnipiac were not allowed to buy land from white people, leaving the population of about 400 people with nowhere to go.

During the 1700s, the Quinnipiac scattered, moving to places where they could still access land, or ally with other tribal groups. By the 1756 census, there were less than 100 Quinnipiac left around New Haven; in 1774, there were 11. Around 1770, many of the remaining Quinnipiac had moved north to the Farmington area, where they merged with the Tunxis, another Alngonquian group. To do so, they sold the last 30 acres of the New Haven reservation.

Even after joining with the Tunxis, the Quinnipiac were not able to settle. The Tunxis/Quinnipiac group allied with the Iroquois Confederacy in 1774 and were granted land near Oneida, New York. They named their new settlement Brothertown, but within 3 years they were displaced again during the conflict of the American Revolution, which saw a split between Indigenous groups like Brothertown who supported the revolutionary cause and those who supported the British. They moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, then back to New York, before the state stripped them of much of their land and they moved much further west, to what is now Wisconsin.

Additionally, not all the Quinnipiac left their ancestral lands. From the mid-1700s to mid-1800s, a group of displaced people from a variety of Algonquin tribes lived in the West Pond area of Guildford. Some Indigenous craftspeople moved across the area selling baskets, brooms, and other goods well into the nineteenth century, and others returned to East Haven to visit relatives and find seasonal farm work. As late as the 1880s, an Indigenous basketmaker was recorded living in Branford. Quinnipiac family lines still survive in Connecticut and in other areas where the group settled after their displacement, and their story is an active part of the history of New Haven and the Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop site.