“A portion of land that was part of Nipmuc Territory”: Tufts University and the Grafton Land Struggle Unavailable

IN 1977, Zara Cisco Brough sent a petition to Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts. As tribal leader for the Nipmuc Nation, based in the town of Grafton, she carried an important legacy. She was the great-great-granddaughter of Harry Arnold, one of the seven individuals who sold 7,500 acres of land in Grafton to the English in the 1720s and retained his own parcel, which included what would become the only four-and-a-half acres remaining in Nipmuc hands a century-and-a-half later. Her family, the Arnold-Ciscos, had shaped this small piece of property into a cultural hub and political center for Nipmucs in the surrounding areas. Her mother was Sarah Cisco Sullivan, who dedicated a great part of the early twentieth century to the fight to reclaim their nation's lands. In the 1970s Zara Cisco Brough sat on the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs and the Grafton town planning board, regularly welcomed...