“Hold Onto the Land”: Maintaining the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation Through Identity, Culture, and AutonomyThe revitalization of Mashantucket can only be understood through a throughline of continued identification with the label of Pequot and connection to the land of Mashantucket. At every stage, returns to Mashantucket came at a cost of the lives that were being lived off the reservation, yet in three separate eras, Alice Brend, Skip Hayward and his immediate family, and a large group of more distantly related Pequots all chose to move to the reservation because the benefit of community and connection to land was worth it for them. Every development at the reservation over the course of the century was done in the interest of making life livable at Mashantucket for those already there and those to come; the building of infrastructure, the establishment of an economy independent from the state and federal ones, and the obtainment of rights through political means were each pursued in order to ensure that a community that had previously been repeatedly and continuously separated by a low quality of life, lack of economic opportunity on the reservation, and persecution by the state was not unnecessarily fractured again. In each stage of development, individuals deliberately chose to return to Mashantucket and work to enhance what it could offer to others through whatever they themselves had to give to the community.Clarke, MarycreatorFisher, Linfordthesis advisorBrown University. Historysponsor2026text_resourcesborn digitalEnglishSenior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2026HistorythesesIndigenous peoplesOral historyKinshipTwentieth centuryIdentityIndian reservationsCultural preservationConnecticutFederally recognized Indian tribesLand claimsPequot IndiansAll rights reservedIn CopyrightAll Rights Reserved10.26300/zkyp-8043