Wequonnoc dispossession and assimilation

Wequonnoc dispossession and assimilation shape the history of Three Rivers, from the steady contraction of the reservation to the gradual erasure of Indigenous people from the town’s accepted story. The novel makes that history visible in a cemetery beside Three Rivers State Hospital, in a classroom where Ralph Drinkwater contests a claim that Indigenous people have disappeared, and in a later economic transformation that brings the Wequonnoc Nation back into negotiations over land and regional power.

Land and the cemetery

The cemetery is a modest burial ground of a few rolling acres, marked by about a hundred gravestones and a ten-foot pyramid of rounded rocks. The monument honors Samuel, a leader of the Wequonnoc Nation who, in the seventeenth century, allied with white settlers against neighboring peoples. The narrator presents that decision as a grave miscalculation: Three Rivers was incorporated in 1653 and expanded under the law of the settlers, while the reservation steadily lost acreage and the tribe’s numbers dwindled. The contrast between a town’s legally secured growth and a reservation’s contraction makes dispossession a continuing process, not a single founding-era event.

The older stones, dating from the eighteenth century, have become so worn and encrusted that reading them requires both sight and touch. Beneath them lie people with surnames such as Fletcher, Crowell, Johnson, and Gray, described as assimilated Indigenous people. The cemetery’s stones thus preserve lives even as the names record a pressure to enter the surrounding society on terms that blur or suppress Indigenous identity. Newer markers identify Wequonnoc war dead, including veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the World Wars, and Korea. The sequence connects the shrinking community’s history to successive national conflicts without presenting military service as an end to the loss of land or identity.

War, memory, and labor

During the late 1960s, Lonnie Peck, Ralph Drinkwater’s older cousin, became the last person commemorated by a new stone in the cemetery. He was killed by sniper fire near Vinh Long in 1969. The narrator and Ralph later work seasonal jobs for the Three Rivers Public Works Department, mowing the cemetery. Ralph avoids Lonnie’s grave; the narrator trims around it, attending to the marker while recalling earlier encounters with Lonnie. The routine labor places them in intimate proximity to a memorial whose language of honor sits uneasily beside the narrator’s judgment that Lonnie’s death in Vietnam was a loss for a mistaken national cause.

The narrator’s broader view of war is shaped by both this local graveyard and the region’s dependence on military industry. Ray argues that the twins should work rather than attend college, and proposes employment at Electric Boat, where building submarines would support the war effort and provide a living. The jobs the twins eventually take with the public works department are instead seasonal and minimum-wage, but they give them paychecks and time away from home. In this setting, war, employment, and family choices are intertwined: the military economy offers work and deferments even as the cemetery records the human cost borne by local families, including the Wequonnoc community.

Erasure and the contested history

The classroom account of Indigenous history reproduces a hierarchy that places Western civilization above Indigenous peoples. Mr. LoPresto uses Samuel’s wartime history to advise students against judging Indigenous people by supposedly higher standards, while describing them in terms that cast them as primitive and fundamentally unlike the students. The narrator and his classmates quietly take notes for the test. The lesson turns an Indigenous leader into an example in someone else’s account of civilization, rather than treating the shrinking reservation and the community’s continued existence as part of the present.

Ralph directly challenges that framework when Mr. LoPresto implies that Indigenous people have disappeared. Ralph identifies himself as Wequonnoc and disputes the claim. The teacher denies having used the word, sends Ralph to the office, and then turns his absence into a joke at the class’s expense. The episode shows how an institution can deny both a community’s survival and the fact that it has denied it: Ralph’s testimony is treated as misinterpretation, then his removal is used to reinforce the original erasure.

The narrator’s later response implicates him in this pattern. He remembers having lied about Oreos, knowing that other children would believe him rather than Penny Ann Drinkwater, who had taken food because she was hungry. He also recalls collecting pennies for her and participating in a tree-planting that, in retrospect, whitewashed what had happened. Ralph’s challenge brings these memories together: the narrator recognizes that the public version of Penny Ann’s story concealed his own wrongdoing. The novel links the suppression of Wequonnoc history to this smaller act of local memory-making, in which a convenient account can displace the person most harmed.

Economic change and political return

By the post-Cold War era, Electric Boat has shed most of the workforce that once made it the region’s economic backbone. The former shipyard is known as the ghost yard. At the same time, the abandoned state hospital grounds, once part of the Wequonnoc Nation’s sacred hunting and fishing lands, may return to the tribe through a proposed annexation; tribal officials and Connecticut’s governor are negotiating. The possibility of return remains unsettled, and the land’s institutional use does not erase its earlier significance to the Wequonnoc.

The new regional economy is increasingly centered on Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort, which opened in September 1992. Its rapid expansion and employment become a source of both support and disagreement: the resort has champions and detractors, while its scale transforms the surrounding landscape and draws visitors from far beyond Three Rivers. Six years after opening, it employs 75,000 people, and the Wequonnoc Nation’s 415 members are described as millionaires. This change marks a striking reversal from the earlier account of a reservation shrinking in acreage and population. Yet the novel does not treat economic success as a simple restoration of what was lost. The continuing negotiations over former tribal land, alongside the casino’s contested reception, leave sovereignty and historical repair as live questions rather than settled outcomes.