Ezra Stiles, Census Making, and Indian Erasure in New England - Mondays at Beinecke, Nov. 1, 2021

A presentation drawing from the Ezra Stiles Papers. Jason Mancini is the Executive Director of CT Humanities. He was previously the Executive Director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, and was with the museum in different capacities from 1995 to 2017. He is a lifelong Connecticut resident. Mancini has a Ph.D., as well as an M.A., in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut. For more educational resources and bibliography on Native America, visit https://www.akomawt.org/educational-resources.html Abstract: By the end of the American Revolution, southern New England’s Indian population had essentially been declared extinct through popular literature and prevailing opinion. At the same time, there were nearly 4,500 Indians documented in census records in southern New England, 50 percent of whom lived in nonreservation English towns. Mancini has used ethnogeography as an analytic tool for exposing colonial epistemologies and discourse about Indian “disappearance” and elucidating hidden Indian histories in southern New England. His work uses census records to illustrate major population trends as tribal land dispossession and changing notions of tribal citizenship reshaped Indian communities on and off the reservations during the colonial period.