Native American sites along the Greenway

Note: Sites are located directly on the East Coast Greenway unless mileage from the route is noted

Maine

Calais: Wabanaki Culture Center and Museum, 39 Union St. Artifacts, historical displays, and works of art of the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot peoples. Touch tank of local sea creations, gift shop, and offices for Maine Visitors Center and St. Croix Valley Chamber of Commerce. Located right on the Greenway on the St. Croix River, the border between U.S. and Canada.

Perry: Waponahki Museum and Resource Center, 59 Passamaquoddy Rd. (9 miles from Greenway). Award-winning baskets, canoes, carvings and more from contemporary artists. One-of-a-kind grouping of full-body castings of Passamaquoddy tribal members that were made in the 1960s.

Bar Harbor: Abbe Museum, 26 Mt. Desert St. (about 8 miles from Greenway). A Smithsonian affiliate, the Abbe has grown from a small trailside museum within Acadia National Park to a contemporary museum in downtown Bar Harbor. Exhibitions showcasing the Wabanaki, activities, and space for reflection. “Centers indigenous people in their own histories, stories and futures.”

Damariscotta: Whaleback Shell Midden State Historic Site, 559 Main St. Site once contained massive oyster shell heap, or midden, formed over more than 1,000 years by Native Americans. Just a fraction of the original mounds remains, Find interpretive storyboards and walking trail.

Massachusetts

Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, 11 Divinity Ave, (.75 miles from Greenway). From towering Native American totem poles and Maya sculptures to finely woven textiles and everyday utensils, the Peabody Museum is among the oldest archaeological and ethnographic museums in the world with one of the finest collections of human cultural history.

Mashpee: Old Indian Meeting House, 410 Meetinghouse Rd. (6 mi from ECG's complementary route). Oldest Native American church in the Eastern United States and oldest church on Cape Cod. Used by the Wampanoags as a Christian church and school and moved to its current site in 1717. In 1833, served as site of Mashpee Revolt, when tribal members and their minister protested state intrusions on their self-governance and white settlers’ theft of wood from tribal lands.

Connecticut

Simsbury: Simsbury Historical Society, 800 Hopmeadow St. (2 miles from Greenway). Exhibit of Native American crafts made from porcupine quills and bark, wigwam exhibit of domestic life, and Trail of Thanks Collection.

New York

New York City: Children’s Cultural Center of Native America, 550 W. 155th St. (0.3 miles from Greenway). Enter a teepee, sit in a dugout canoe, touch artifacts, play Indian games, and enjoy other opportunities to actively learn about the life and culture of American Indians.

National Museum of the American Indian, 1 Bowling Green (0.77 miles from Greenway, in Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House.) A Smithsonian affiliate, the museum features permanent and temporary exhibitions and programs to explore the diversity of Native Americans in the Americas.

Drums Along the Hudson, Inwood Hill Park, 218th St. and Indian Rd. (1 block from Greenway).  Annual Native American and multicultural festival, free to the public, includes the city’s only open-air powwow. Free bicycle valet for attendees who bike to the park.

Maryland

Baltimore: Baltimore American Indian Center & Heritage Museum, 113 S. Broadway (0.7 miles from Greenway). Founded by Lumbee Indians (originally from North Carolina, they emigrated to the Baltimore area decades ago), the center functions as a hub for the local American Indian community’s social and cultural activities and as a gallery for artwork. 

Suitland: Cultural Resources Center, 4220 Silver Hill Rd. (3 miles from Greenway). The archive building for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the center is home to the museum’s extensive collections and research programs. Labs and workrooms for conservation, registration, photography, film and video, and collections management, and indoor and outdoor spaces. Open to researchers by appointment

Washington, D.C.

National Museum of the American Indian, Independence Ave. SW Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum is committed to advancing knowledge and understanding of the Native cultures of the Western Hemisphere—past, present, and future—through partnership with Native peoples and others. The distinctive building houses one of the world’s most expansive collections of Native objects, photographs, and media.

Virginia

Williamsburg: Powhatan Indian Village, Jamestown Beach (on complementary route, Virginia Capital Trail).  Re-created village features reed-covered houses, crops, and a ceremonial circle based on archaeological finds at a site once inhabited by Paspahegh Indians, a tribe of the Powhatans.

North Carolina

The Greenway passes through traditional territories of Tuscarora and other tribes in North Carolina. and through present-day tribes of the Meherrin, Haliwa-Saponi, Coharie, Lumbee, and Waccamaw Siouan.  

Snow Hill: Nooherooka Monument, (20 miles from Greenway, west of Greenville). Monument to colonial war with and massacre of Tuscarora Indians, who had controlled most of the land between the Neuse and Roanoke Rivers. 

Bolton: Annual powwows (10 miles from Greenway, halfway between Fayetteville and Wilmington). Waccamaw Siouan and Coharie tribes host annual weekend-long powwows worth a side-trip off the main Greenway.  

South Carolina

Charleston: Charleston Museum, Lowcountry gallery, 360 Meeting St. (0.3 miles from Greenway). Yamasee pottery from the 16th and 17th centuries is featured, from recent and older archaeological digs.

Florida

Miami: Miami Circle, 2 blocks from Greenway across the Miami River). Tequesta Indians’ “Miami Circle” with Tuesday night vigil/smudgings

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