Indigenous Peoples Day: Preserving Cultural Sites and Restoring River Habitat
Indigenous Peoples’ Day offers an opportunity to recognize Indigenous communities and their lasting connections to the places where we live and work. In Mashpee, Massachusetts, we are collaborating with the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe & Town of Mashpee on projects that support the preservation of cultural sites and restoration of natural resources.
Attaquin House Restoration
The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe retained our team to provide structural engineering for the restoration of the historic Attaquin House, also known as the Mashpee Wampanoag Parsonage. Our structural engineers are working with Catalyst Architecture & Interiors on the project. Believed to have been constructed in 1849, the two-story, wood-framed building served as a homestead, housed visiting clergy, and later became the first headquarters for Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, Inc.
Mashpee Parsonage Traffic Evaluation
The Tribe also engaged our transportation engineers to evaluate the feasibility of a safe pedestrian crossing across Main Street (Route 130) between the Attaquin House and the Mashpee Wampanoag Museum. The study will inform potential improvements to pedestrian access between these cultural and historical destinations.
Mashpee River Habitat Restoration
Our water and environmental engineers are supporting restoration efforts along the Mashpee River, which flows through ancestral Wampanoag lands. The river is central to the Tribe’s culture and history, including its traditions of hunting, fishing, and gathering.
Working alongside the Tribe, the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, the Town of Mashpee, and other project partners, our team is contributing to work aimed at improving diadromous fish passage in the upper river, restoring a former cranberry bog near Washburn Pond to natural wetlands, and informing future restoration actions to support ecological health and community resilience.
Through its partnership with the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, the Tribe plays a key role in the restoration effort, with Tribal staff supporting restoration planning, project management, and monitoring.
Additional project partners include the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Cape Cod Conservation District, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, MassWildlife, Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, and NOAA’s Restoration Center.