Remembering & Reconnecting

Meet the Artists Reception
Saturday, May 16, 11 am- 12:30 pm
Great Falls Discovery Center
2 Avenue A, Turners Falls, MA in the Great Hall

Enjoy conversation and coffee with Wampanoag artists Deborah Spears Moorehead and Robert Peters in the Great Hall to view and learn more about their shared exhibit they titled All Our Relations: To Honor the Wampanoag Supreme Sachem Pometacomet on the 350th Anniversary of the Great Falls Massacre

Commemoration on Discovery Center Lawn

Saturday, May 16, 12:30 – 3:30 pm
Great Falls Discovery Center
2 Avenue A, Turners Falls, MA
Outdoors on the lawn. Rain or Shine. Donations welcome.

We live near what was once known as the Great Falls, Peskeompskut, on the Quinnehtukqut River in the Pocumtuck Homelands. For 12,000 years tribes from all over the Northeast gathered at the falls to celebrate the bounty of fish runs, to share technology, trade, find spouses, and more. These huge annual intertribal gatherings ended tragically on May 19, 1676.

This year marks 350 years since Metacom’s Resistance—better known as King Philip’s War—and the Great Falls Massacre. During that uprising, displaced people from neighboring tribes came to the Pocumtuck Homelands to seek refuge at the familiar falls. Just before dawn on May 19, 1676, a brutal massacre occurred. Colonial militia attacked one of the refugee encampments where women, children, and elders slept. The thunderous sound of the falls covered the footsteps of encroaching danger. More than 300 non-combatants were killed. Historians consider this tragedy the turning point of the war which ended a few months later in August.