A forgotten forest remembered

Last year in when Native Land Conservancy received an unrestricted gift of 54 acres of mountainscape in Leverett we hardly imagined such generosity could be matched, let alone so soon on the heels of passing the papers on the deed to Nepesoneag in December. That such an act of unselfish devotion to the land could be repeated in less than a year’s time is remarkable but true.

In July Sienna Valente-Blough and Eddie Anderson turned over the 54-acre land in Hawley, MA known to them as “the Forgotten Forest” to the Native Land Conservancy cleanly and unencumbered by restrictions of any kind.

“We knew that something was missing in our relationship to the land. It was something that we as a society, in a colonized world, had forgotten,” she said. Rematriating the land to Indigenous people was important to both Sienna and Eddie with a desire to heal centuries of injustice. The couple sought nothing in return, not even potential tax benefits.

Historically and for many thousands of years the region had been home to eastern Algonquin tribes including the Abenaki, Nipmuc, and Pocumtuck peoples until they were removed or eliminated by disease, colonization, war, and oppression. Few if any of the tribal descendants of those tribes remained in Hawley where they seemed almost forgotten. But their ancestral presence was not lost on Sienna and Eddie.

Naming their lands “the Forgotten Forest” was their way of calling attention to what should be remembered about the place. The idea that the land itself holds a memory and contained an unwritten history of people who lived upon it and nurtured it like a relative.

Nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, Hawley is among the smallest towns in Massachusetts. With a year-round population of barely 350, the town in Franklin County is known for its hills, rocks and bears, and a particularly large and rare natural bog, Hawley was historically an Algonquin ancestral homeland. Colonized by settlers from Hatfield in 1760 it was incorporated as a town in 1792, named for an otherwise forgotten Revolutionary War patriot and Whig Party leader Joseph Hawley.

During the summer the land is flush with flora, notably marsh marigold, Solomon seal, hobble bush, and Jacobs ladder from the wetlands to the meadows to the woodlands fragrant with cedar. A series of stone walls and large swaths of white quartz dissect the many maples of sugar, red, striped and moose varieties and a healthy population of yellow birch. It is a habitat for many animals including fox and deer, and some rather cute porcupine that lumber slow and unassuming of the bard owls overhead. The overgrowth of the summer obscures many natural pathways but fall peels back a curtain leading to a black bear highway that cuts across the top of the property and is common to the good-natured beasts.

Donations great and small are meaningful to us, but that such generous and visionary people like Devora Eisenstein and Lorelie Bond in Leverett, and now Sienna and Eddie in Hawley exist, putting the needs of the land ahead of potential significant personal gain puts Native Land Conservancy on the map in a way that cannot be ignored, or forgotten.