Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge is on the homelands of the Peskategwa People. The Peskategwa (or Piscataqua) were Abenaki and members of the Pennacook Confederacy, which developed under the leader Passaconaway in response to colonial expansion into what is now New Hampshire and Maine. The community was devastated by the 1620 smallpox pandemic and then by Kind Philips War, despite being neutral. The confederacy officially came under British sovereignty in the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1713, but the land had likely already been sold by Passaconaway in one of the many less formal Indian Deed sales.

When we talk about defined communities of people that are no longer around, it is important to remember that there are still descendants of the Pennacook today. The merging and renaming of communities and nations was common as tribes in the east tried to consolidate after the devastating impacts of colonialism. The insistence by some historians that a tribe is “extinct” is part of the colonial project, designed to legitimatize settler ownership of the land and invalidate any rights and sovereignty the Indigenous communities had retained in treaties and sales. For example, some original deeds from the area protect the right of tribes to farm, hunt, and gather on sold land - a right that disappears if the tribe is dissolved. Today, the unrecognized Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook-Abenaki People represent the contemporary Indigenous communities of the area.