Herring Pond Tribe Receives $145K Grant
The Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe has been awarded a $145,000 Capacity Building Grant from the Native Youth Empowerment Foundation of Massachusetts, intended to support the continued efforts of the tribe to preserve, promote and protect the cultural, spiritual and economic well-being of its tribal youth and preservation of its tribal homeland.
“The Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe is forever grateful for the friendship, generosity, and support that we’ve received from the Native Youth Empowerment Foundation,” Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe chairwoman Melissa (Harding) Ferretti said in a press release. “As a Native people who have long retained our deeply rooted connection to our homeland, we are honored to partner with a grassroots organization that appreciates and recognizes the valuable work that tribal nations in Massachusetts are doing today to support their sovereignty and self-determination.”
As a state-recognized tribe and a typically underserved community, the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe is committed to multicultural education that is genuinely inclusive of the diversity and richness of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and histories in New England.
In an email to The Enterprise, Ms. Ferretti said that the grant funds will be used not only for Native youth empowerment but also to complete some much-needed improvements to the tribe’s sacred sites, including its nearly 185-year-old Meetinghouse. The tribe’s sacred spaces also include its cemeteries, the six-acre Dina Path property deeded back to the tribe from the Town of Plymouth and the Pondville Meetinghouse located in Cedarville near Great Herring Pond.
“Our people have continued to live within our homeland, and today we continue our struggle to protect our cultural heritage and land rights as an indigenous people,” Ms. Ferretti wrote. The tribe’s historical reservation lands, she explained, previously contained three separate parcels—the Great Lot, the Meetinghouse Lot and the Herring River Lot, also called the Valley—between Plymouth and Bourne totaling more than 3,000 acres.
Built from an 1838 petition by “John Conet and the Herring Pond Indians,” the tribe’s meetinghouse was the center of tribal existence and remains so today.
“Although the original 200-acre Meetinghouse Lot has been greatly diminished, against all odds we still have care and custody of this building today,” Ms. Ferretti wrote. “To us, these are the places of our ancestors and we are obligated to protect and to preserve, for our ancestors before us, our children now, and all of our descendants to come.”
The tribe will use the grant funding to fuel its long-term vision of building organizational capacity and support while preserving community-based knowledge and promoting tribal values. According to the press release, the tribe will create “equitable access by sharing their community-based knowledge with kinship tribes and other Native youth outside” of the Herring Pond Tribe itself. The funding will also help to establish a strong partnership between the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe and the Native Youth Empowerment Foundation.
The Native Youth Empowerment Foundation, located in Ashfield, has a mission to support Native youth statewide by providing small educational grants, workshops that promote professional development, cultural engagement initiatives, networking and other resources aimed at intertribal inclusivity and youth empowerment. These funds reach across the state and will aim to aid and empower the youth of federally recognized and state-acknowledged Tribal Nations.
“We look forward to supporting Herring Pond Wampanoags’ mission as they lead efforts to advance their capacity, and equity in education for Native youth and community members throughout the region,” cofounder Larry (Spotted Crow) Mann said.