On June 13, 2026, the local Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) chapter honored 173 Revolutionary War veterans buried in Northampton’s Bridge Street Cemetery. Other cemeteries in Northampton include the graves of other Revolutionary War veterans, who equally deserve recognition. But one local Revolutionary soldier, Joseph Maminash Jr. — a Native American man — has been mostly forgotten. He lies in an unmarked grave elsewhere in town.
Joseph was born in Northampton in 1753. His father, Joseph Maminash Sr. (from the Wangunk tribal nation), was also an American military soldier. He lived in Connecticut and served in Nathan Whiting’s Company during the French and Indian War, before moving with his wife Elizabeth Occum (from the Mohegan tribal nation) to Northampton in the 1750s. Joseph Sr. died in 1767 and was buried beside a pine grove not far from where the family was living near present-day “Village Hill.”
A decade later, on Jan. 15, 1777, Joseph Jr. joined Capt. Daniel Shays’ company, in Col. Rufus Putnam’s 5th regiment. Joseph Jr. enlisted for a three-year term, but died the following year at the age of 25, ending his military pay and leaving his family impoverished. He was buried alongside his father, and in 1783, his mother and younger brother were buried beside him. Although the site was marked by a stone with a turtle carving (the family totem), the stone was stolen during the 19th century and, until recently, the location of the burial site was unknown.
After Joseph Jr.’s death, his sister, Sally, orphaned by these losses, converted to Christianity, and was invited to live with the family of Sophia and Warham Clapp. She took up the occupation of an intinerant weaver, never left town, and never married. When she died at age of 88, she was buried in the Clapp family plot in Bridge Street Cemetery, where her gravestone identifies her as the supposed “last Indian” in Northampton.
Public programs about the American Revolution rarely focus on the strategies that Indigenous people were forced to devise in order to survive during the tumultuous social and military chaos of revolutionary times. Although many Native families were poorly documented in local records, those who chose military service are visible due to their integration into white communities, where they and their kin joined churches and provided services (basketry, herbal medicine, itinerant labor, etc.) to their neighbors. Their life choices were, however, often constrained by circumstances beyond their control. The Maminash family is one such case in point.
In collaboration with Historic Northampton, I am currently working with Jasmine Rochelle Goodspeed (Hassanamisco Nipmuc) and Drew Lopenzina on a research project looking more closely at the histories of local Native families, living here in the aftermath of a century of inter-cultural warfare, from King Philip’s War, through the French and Indian Wars, into the American Revolution. That project — titled “Native Strategies: Indigenous Families in Western Massachusetts During the American Revolution,” — is funded by grants from Mass Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the SCP Foundation.
This coming fall, Historic Northampton will host several public lectures and two short plays drawing on this research. We will ask audiences to consider how and why Indigenous people in the region were impacted, not just by colonialism, but also by the revolutionary moment. For Native Americans, here and elsewhere, the promises of the American Revolution mattered little when their options were constrained by the beliefs and prejudices of their neighbors, regardless of which governmental body was in charge.
Margaret M. Bruchac (Nulhegan Abenaki) is Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania and director of the “Native Strategies,” project in Northampton.