Connecticut’s Pequot Museum Recalls War, Despair, Courage, and Reconciliation

A reservation’s fine museum examines Pequot history from melting glaciers to a casino.

A few weeks ago, I was in New London in southeastern Connecticut for an exhibition opening at the Lyman Allyn Museum, a small, classy place that’s now part of Connecticut College. The next day, I drove to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, which preserves and interprets the heritage of the tribe that has lived there for thousands of years, more recently on a reservation but scattered through southeastern Connecticut and in southwestern Rhode Island.

With the development of the Foxwoods Resort Casino in the ’90s, the Pequots have prospered. The museum, now marking its 25th anniversary, is a niche place, but it tells the Pequot story with sensitivity and immersion. I’d never been there. It’s fascinating. And it’s a story in which Native Americans and Anglos make a peace for which everyone is grateful, though it took nearly 350 years. That’s my Thanksgiving story.

The museum opened in 1998 about a mile from Foxwoods, which I skipped. I’m a Methodist, and while I’ve seen Methodists commit enough vices to fill a tome the size of the Manhattan phonebook, gambling is a rare no-no, not a sin but a get-rich-quick scheme and an unwise use of money. The museum, casino, and such community-focused services as the fire station are on the reservation established in 1666 and deemed a nation in 1983. It’s the oldest reservation in North America and was established, in part, to compensate Pequots for deaths and mistreatment occurring during the Pequot War in the late 1630s.

The museum and center for research occupy a 308,000-square-foot building with 85,000 square feet in exhibition space, a huge conference center that feels like a cathedral nave, and a 185-foot tower with a sweeping view of the casino — a sea of sprawl and turquoise roofs — and a spread of flat woods. I visited in late October, when lovely fall colors make a show.

The museum’s mostly chronological except for the opening gallery, which introduces us to the Mashantucket Tribal Nation today with nifty group portrait of its members, alongside photographs of key players. There’s plenty of photographs depicting everyday life as well as a giant topographical plan of the reservation. I liked the wall panels on the reservation’s public services such as police and fire protection, schools, and governance.

At first, I thought this section belonged at the end as a denouement preceded by history, but it makes sense at the start. Lots of visitors, especially old time Nutmeggers like me, remember when a handful of bedraggled trailers housed the reservation’s few resident members, who lived in poverty but not squalor. The nation wants us to know they’ve set things right. Mashantucket is a self-contained and self-governing place-within-a-place, and a well-run place at that. It’s considered federal land, with its own zip code.

That the reservation has pulled this off rebuts a presumption dating to the ’80s, when casino talk started, that a vestige of the Mafia would be the stealth power running things and that the Pequots would be tools, well-off tools but still tools. Casinos, after all, were mostly illegal outside of Nevada until the ’80s. And we’d heard about Bugsy Siegel and seen Viva Las Vegas. Not right for this quiet, rural little corner of the state. The Pequots are the first reservation in the country to develop casino gaming as an economic engine.

I was happy to meet many members of the museum staff, most of them Pequots, and they run a fine, engaging museum. The casino itself, which I think is still one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere, sank into a debt quagmire around 2012 but seems to have saved itself from extinction through austerity. It might have overbuilt, and among its moments of irrational exuberance was a $225 million museum. The development of Mohegan Sun, run by another tribe, nearby didn’t help. From a distance, Foxwoods looks like Oz, but Mohegan Sun looks like Disney World, a more contemporary reference, and it’s seconds from an interstate highway. The severe early-’90s recession in Connecticut from a housing bubble, bank crisis, and defense downsizing didn’t help either.

Things are calmer as prudence is still a watchword, and the museum feels like a serious place. Galleries take us to the very distant past, 11,000 years ago, when southeastern Connecticut was a glacial crevasse. The museum’s big on life-size models of woolly mammoths, wolves, and caribou set on a sunken stage. Visitors can walk up to them at eye-level, and I swear the temperature’s colder. There’s a sound component as well. I heard cracking ice and whistling wind.

The museum’s designers and curators weren’t dumb. They understood that Earth’s climate is always changing and that Mother Nature, not Mobil and Exxon, delivered global warming over thousands of years. Four dioramas examine seasons in different time frames as the natural and human worlds adapted. “Look, Mom, no gas pumps, and no exploding EVs.” As the climate changed, an inventive people as well as flora and fauna changed with it. A big chunk of synthetic ice shows us how thick — about five feet — glaciers were as southeastern Connecticut warmed.

At first I thought a massive, staged, ersatz Native American village from around 1600 was hokey, but it’s absorbing and immersive. Yes, it seems old-fashioned as do period rooms in art museums, but it works. Through these figures, we learn about social, political, and economic organization, tools, hunting, and Algonquin language. The topless women would give it an R-rating if it were a movie. There’s also superb material on Pequot religious beliefs.

The Pequot War from 1636 to 1638 was the beginning of what would have been, sans casino, the end of the nation. Its presentation, on the whole, is fair and balanced. Early Anglos in Connecticut and Rhode Island feuded with the Natives far more quickly than did the Natives and Anglos in Plymouth Colony in the late 1670s. And Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the chief Massasoit negotiated a peace that produced 50 years of tranquility as well as what we now call Thanksgiving. But fights over trade routes and animosity among tribes in Pequot world led to a war that crushed the Pequots.

I’d challenge things here and there. “Europeans came to America not to discover a new world but to enrich an old one” might apply to the conquistadores but not to millions of others, who never looked back. Still, the Pequots could not have seemed more different from the Anglos in faith, clothing, shelter, language, and much else.

Time accelerates as the Pequots’ footprint dwindled, Natives went Yankee and moved to towns, and the colonial and state governments in Connecticut seesawed between policies of separation and segregation on the one hand and an implicit though still compelled assimilation on the other. By the 1930s, only two Pequot families lived on a reservation shrunk to 200 acres. Most young people had moved to small cities in Connecticut and Rhode Island. And, eventually, all over the country. At one point, the state barred Pequots who worked outside the reservation from living on reservation land. Most married spouses from other races. Many served with distinction in the military.

Elizabeth George, one of the last of the tiny handful of Pequots living on the reservation, preached a new language of ethnic pride. Before she died in 1973, she fought a Connecticut State plan to turn the reservation into a park. Her grandson, Richard “Skip” Hayward, the tribe’s chairman, persuaded lapsed Pequots to rediscover their heritage and move back. Each of these subjects gets a meaty section.

In the early 1970s, spurred by a nationwide Native American civil-rights movement, local Pequots petitioned the federal government in Washington for official recognition as a nation and for recovery of land swiped over the years by force or under duress. Recognition happened in 1983. Now, the reservation’s about 1,250 acres.

As a local, and Ledyard is not far from Ye Olde North Haven, my Connecticut home, I found it fascinating to know we had a reservation nearby, and I followed the slow-but-steady economic renaissance of the Pequots through a bingo parlor, a Native restaurant, a sand-and-gravel business, an early local food business selling maple syrup, and, in the ’80s, the dream of a casino.

In my previous political life, I was involved in Connecticut in blocking a private-sector casino in Bridgeport. One of the many bribes I declined was a free trip to Las Vegas to “see how vibrant and fun casinos are,” as one mogul, still living, told me over lunch. I smelled both a rat and rigged slot machines leaving me richer at the end of my visit than I was when I arrived. As a Methodist, and averse to bribery, I passed.

There was nothing that we in Connecticut politics could do to stop Foxwoods, and anyway, I like seeing beleaguered underdogs win. We blocked the Bridgeport casino in a deal with the Pequots and the Mohegans according to which they voluntarily gave the state a hefty piece of their slot-machine revenue as long as no private-sector casino was allowed in the Land of Steady Habits. Since the early ’90s, Connecticut has gotten billions of dollars.

I had an informative, engaging afternoon at the museum. Unlike the new, Wampanoag-directed, American-art installation at Maine’s Portland Museum of Art, which I reviewed a few months ago, the Pequot Museum isn’t cursed by a skirling, grasping narrative that starts and ends with “they stole our land.”

A storyline of this kind will always have passages of truth here and there, but with nuances and qualifiers as well as some inscrutability. The content in the Portland show promotes resentment among young people and doesn’t serve them at all. In pushing grudges, Native opportunists and affluent, preening white liberals make it ugly.

The Pequot Museum, by contrast, gives them no ground. It concerns itself with getting the story right and making it compelling. Compared with many Native tribes, theirs is in a good place, and Pequot Natives aren’t restless and bitter but grateful and looking toward the future.

There are lots of artifacts and contemporary art on display at the museum. It’s not all factory-produced mastodons. There’s a great video component, too. At points I found wayfinding confusing. The museum space is vast. I quibble, but the fat’s in the fire, about putting most of the museum in what I would call the cellar. Underground space rarely works for art display and as educational space. Unless it’s in a city, where people expect to be underground, it’s a downer. Of course, underground space was unknown to the Pequots during most of their history. Production values are high-end, though, without being obnoxious about it.

Nearby New London, Norwich, and little towns like Lebanon figure prominently in American history. Governor Jonathan Trumbull, who led Connecticut during the American Revolution, trained militias in Lebanon’s two-mile-long town green. Because of its huge role in supplying food and guns to the Patriot cause, Connecticut is called the Provision State. For history and culture, the Pequot Museum has to be added to the state’s top heritage sites. I’m happy to see it has a lovely program for schoolchildren, who need more good history like it and less effluvium from anti-history fads.