The orange Mã’eekanik koomhinã, or Mohican Homelands, sign is hanging in Paresky, again, and it’s hard not to feel a sense of disappointment when it returns. Each time it goes up, it gestures toward acknowledgment, a signal that the institution is aware of the land’s history. But that’s where it stops. The sign comes and goes, and for most people, it fades into the background, noticed briefly, if at all.
Since spring 2023, I’ve been working on a signage project at Hopkins Memorial Forest to create a permanent interpretive display about the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. The project started with former forest director Drew Jones, who spent more than 20 years at the College before retiring. When I worked with him as an outdoor educator, he would tell me he wished the College would move beyond just a land acknowledgment. He had already taken a small but controversial step by putting one of the temporary Mohican homelands lawn signs in front of the Rosenberg Center, which is at the entrance to Hopkins Forest.
He believed that if we are going to tell the history of Hopkins Forest — which, according to the 36-by-24-inch sign at the entrance to the main trail, begins in 1753 with the founding of the Town — then we also need to tell the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee, who lived on this land long before it became the College’s forest. That seemed straightforward to me. So when I started my project to create the display as a Center for Learning in Action community outreach fellow, I thought, “How hard could it be to install a sign the Forest Director himself supported?” Three years later, I have my answer.
I’ve worked with three forest directors who support this project. I’ve collaborated with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO). I’ve done research in the College’s archives and with the Williamstown Historical Museum. And still, the sign is not up. Instead, it is stuck, held in limbo by the Hopkins Forest User Committee, which is comprised of faculty and local community members. At this point, it feels less like review and more like indefinite delay.
The Committee says I need to provide more evidence of the College’s connections with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. But the evidence is not new, and it is not hard to find. These histories are already publicly acknowledged. The Williamstown Historical Museum has a permanent exhibit on the community, and Williams Special Collections had a similar exhibit in 2017. In 2022, the Williams College Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office and the THPO collaborated with Mirabai Dyson ’24 to create a pamphlet on this history.
Even Ephraim Williams Jr., the College’s founder, originally established a yearly fund to support the education of the Stockbridge Mohicans in his 1748 will. By 1755, the will was altered by Ephraim Williams Jr. before going off to war, officially removing his financial commitment. Since then, the role of Ephraim Williams Jr. in the broader timeline of the community’s displacement has been publicly downplayed.
So the question isn’t whether the history exists, but why acknowledging it in a permanent, public way is still being treated as optional.
This is part of a larger pattern. When students push for change, especially relating to marginalized stories at the College, the response is often to create another committee, ask for further review, or request more evidence to convince everyone without a doubt that this is necessary work. The timeline stretches and, eventually, the students graduate. The issue, no longer attached to the same voices, becomes easier to ignore.
We’ve seen this before. As Dyson wrote in a 2022 Record op-ed, a land acknowledgment is just the start. And yet, four years later, we are still stuck at the start — circling the same conversations, relying on the same banner that appears and disappears, instead of committing to something permanent.
The proposed forest sign is not radical, it does not introduce new claims. It builds on work the College and its partners have already done. It brings forward the Indigenous roots of maple sugaring — a story that the THPO has been pushing to highlight, yet remains largely absent from Hopkins Forest programming, even during events like Maple Fest and its outdoor education program. Altogether, this sign simply asks that we tell a fuller, more honest history in a place dedicated to education.
I know I will graduate and leave the gap in the forest’s history unaddressed until the next student happens to stumble across this project. That is part of what makes this moment feel urgent. Because the system, as it stands, is built to outlast student advocacy. It assumes that if it waits long enough, the pressure will disappear.
If this project ultimately joins the long list of unfinished student efforts, deemed unsuccessful because it was “not the right time,” I ask that it not be forgotten because this is bigger than my sign. More broadly, this is about how the institution engages with marginalized histories and voices. We cannot continue to highlight them symbolically — through banners, land acknowledgments, and diversity pictures — without a deeper commitment to acknowledging that the College has not always been, and for many still is not, a safe or equitable place to exist.
We do not need more delay. We do not need another layer of review. We need the College to follow through on the work it has already started, and to treat this indigenous history as something worth making permanent.
Emily Flores ’26 is a philosophy major from Elgin, Ill.
