Outdoor Film Screening | Pakachoag: Where the River Bends

Telling a Native American story of the land where Holy Cross now resides, Pakachoag: Where the River Bends is a documentary produced by faculty, staff, and students at The College of Holy Cross about the transformation of this area over the last 400 years. The film takes viewers on a tour of key sites on Pakachoag Hill (now commonly known as College Hill or Mt. Saint James) and discusses them through a Native American perspective and through the stories they tell of environmental change. It covers Nipmuc relations with colonial settlers and the Jesuit community from the 1500s to today.

We are particularly excited to show this film for the first time at (and indeed on!) the Prior Center, whose site is featured at the start of the film. There was a time when all Holy Cross students knew of Pakachoag, but that knowledge has been lost. This film seeks to revive a widespread knowledge of the indigenous identity and significance of Pakachoag Hill and today’s larger Worcester region.

The documentary brings together primary resources from the American Antiquarian Society, the Holy Cross Archives, the Worcester Historical Museum and other repositories, with perspectives from three narrators: Cheryll Holley of the Nipmuc Nation, Thomas Doughton, Nipmuc historian and Senior Lecturer at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Holy Cross, and Colin Novick, environmental historian and Executive Director of the Greater Worcester Land Trust.