Wequonnoc Nation

The Wequonnoc Nation is both a living political community and the subject of a local history that repeatedly tries to make it disappear. In Three Rivers, its presence runs from a cemetery crowded with generations of graves to Ralph Drinkwater’s insistence on his identity and, later, a casino whose success transforms the regional economy. Through Dominick Birdsey’s changing understanding of Ralph and their shared ancestry, the Nation’s resurgence also exposes the violence and omissions embedded in the town’s inherited stories.

Identity and Historical Setting

The Indian cemetery beside the grounds of Three Rivers State Hospital gives the Nation’s history a physical, unresolved presence. At its center stands a ten-foot pyramid of fist-sized stones commemorating Samuel, the Great Sachem of the Wequonnoc Nation. In the seventeenth century, Samuel fought neighboring Nipmucks, Pequots, and Narragansetts before siding with white settlers—a decision the narrative treats as a grave miscalculation. Three Rivers was incorporated in 1653 and expanded under laws made by settlers, while the reservation steadily lost acreage and the Wequonnoc population dwindled.

The cemetery records both assimilation and continuity. Some of its oldest eighteenth-century markers have become so eroded that reading them requires touch as well as sight. Beneath them lie families whose names have become part of the town’s wider population, while newer stones commemorate Wequonnoc veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the World Wars, and Korea. The last stone described in the account honors Lonnie Peck, Ralph Drinkwater’s older cousin, killed by sniper fire near Vinh Long in 1969. The graveyard is thus not merely a remnant of the past: it records service, family loss, and a continuing presence that the surrounding history has repeatedly obscured.

Erasure and Resistance in Three Rivers

The Nation’s apparent disappearance is reinforced by the way local history is taught. In Mr. LoPresto’s class, Ralph challenges the claim that Indigenous people have vanished, identifying himself as a Wequonnoc. Rather than address the substance of his objection, the teacher denies having used the disputed wording, writes Ralph a disciplinary referral, and sends him from the classroom. Dominick’s notes confirm that Ralph’s objection has a basis. The episode makes institutional authority part of the erasure: a living student’s testimony is treated as misbehavior while a story of extinction is presented as settled history.

The same classroom helps show how the past is interpreted to preserve hierarchy. Mr. LoPresto recounts Samuel’s history through a contrast between Indigenous people and Western civilization, presenting the Nation’s ancestors as fundamentally different from the society that judged them. The cemetery’s surrounding landscape further complicates that lesson: the hospital grounds themselves were once part of Wequonnoc hunting and fishing lands. When the hospital eventually closes, tribal officials and the Governor of Connecticut negotiate over whether the abandoned grounds might return to the Nation. The outcome remains unsettled, but the discussion makes clear that historical dispossession is also a present question of land and authority.

Ralph Drinkwater and Shared Ancestry

Ralph’s challenge at school is part of a longer effort to claim an identity that others have minimized or mocked. His ancestry is mixed: his mother, Dulce Ramos, was Creole and Portuguese; his father, Nabby Drinkwater, was Wequonnoc, African, and Sioux. Ralph’s family account identifies four children who survived: Henry, Minnie, Lillian, and Asa, Ralph’s father, whom the family called Ace. Lillian died of encephalitis, Henry Drinkwater was killed in the Korean War, and Asa died after driving drunk. Asa had not married Ralph and Penny Ann’s mother; the twins were three when he died in a car accident. Minnie, the only one of the four siblings still living, maintained contact with Ralph and later returned east from California.

Ralph tells Dominick that he and Penny Ann were cousins of the Birdsey twins. As children at River Street School, he resented the way adults grouped the two pairs of twins together while treating the Black pair as inferior to the white one. After Penny Ann was murdered, Ralph also believed Dominick’s public remembrance of her concealed a denial of their shared family and ancestry. That history helps explain why Dominick’s later betrayal of Ralph in the state-police interrogation room was not an isolated slight. The two men eventually speak openly about it, and Ralph tells Dominick that he believes he has already forgiven him. They also recognize a shared loneliness in being the surviving twin after a twin’s death.

Political and Economic Renewal

The Wequonnoc Nation’s resurgence takes visible form in the Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort. When Dominick reads that the Nation is praying to its ancestors and breaking ground at the casino site, he welcomes the project and hopes its prosperity will answer centuries of dispossession. A later newspaper photograph shows Ralph celebrating at the site in traditional dress. The caption identifies him not through the troubled childhood Dominick remembers, but as Swift Wolf, tribal pipe-keeper of the Wequonnoc Nation. Dominick recognizes that Ralph had tried to claim both his African and Wequonnoc heritage throughout their lives, even when Dominick and Leo turned his insistence into a joke.

The casino also becomes a focal point for arguments about who should benefit from economic change. As Electric Boat, long the region’s economic backbone, sheds workers in the post–Cold War era, Leo predicts that the casino could help those left unemployed. Mr. Anthony objects to the idea that the Nation should receive public or economic advantages, framing the project as an unfair benefit. Dominick answers by pointing to the historical exploitation of Indigenous ancestors. The argument reveals how the casino’s future cannot be separated from the history that made land and opportunity unequal in the first place.

The project exceeds even optimistic expectations. Wequonnoc Moon opens in September 1992, and the resort expands continuously, rising among the woods off Route 22. Its complex employs 75,000 people, draws visitors around the clock, and prompts consideration of ferry and high-speed rail connections from New York and Boston. The account describes all 415 members of the Wequonnoc Nation as millionaires. That prosperity marks a striking reversal from the shrinking reservation of the earlier history, though it does not erase the unresolved negotiations over the former hospital land.

Leadership and Continuing Presence

The Nation’s presence in the later narrative is not limited to commercial success. Minnie returns from California a month after the casino opens and becomes an Elder on the Tribal Council, known as Princess Laughing Woman. She helps Dominick fill gaps in his family history by recalling that his mother and Henry were deeply in love. Her account confirms that Dominick and Thomas were born of that relationship, joining family memory to the larger recovery of Wequonnoc ancestry.

Ralph, meanwhile, becomes a tribal leader whose work includes calming contentious Tribal Council meetings. Dominick sees him as fair and even-tempered, a sharp contrast with the boy he once dismissed or helped expose to harm. Ralph also leads a campaign to remove a casino-floor desk where gambling addicts had been able to sign away the titles to their cars and the deeds to their homes. The detail places responsibility for the casino’s consequences within the Nation’s own political life: renewal brings wealth and regional employment, but leadership also has to respond to the people endangered by its institutions. Together, the cemetery, land negotiations, recovered family histories, and Ralph’s public role establish the Wequonnoc Nation not as a vanished people or a symbol of casino prosperity, but as a community whose historical continuity and present-day decisions remain active in Three Rivers.