Week of July 24, 2025
In 2016, I was getting ready to interview Adam Fortunate Eagle, a resident of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Reservation who’s best known for having led the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969-’71. I picked up his autobiography, titled Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School.
Embarrassingly, this was the first I’d heard of an Indian boarding school. I was 44.
Also embarrassing: Growing up in Connecticut in the 1970s and ’80s, I had no idea that familiar places like Hammonasset (the beach!) and Lake Quassapaug (the amusement park!) had Indigenous names. The only “fact” about local Indigenous history I recall having learned as a child was that the Pequot were “the Indians who used to live here.” But my one “fact” was incorrect: There are still two federally recognized Pequot tribes in Connecticut…