Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Indian Fields

Indian Fields is a Montaukett homeland at Montauk with evidence of long Native occupation, homesteads, ponds, bluffs, and coastal lifeways. The place is central to Montaukett history before and after the Benson-era dispossession that pushed many Montaukett families west while community identity and memory continued. Encompassing twelve hundred acres of rolling grassland and coastal bluffs, Indian Fields sustained an unbroken Montaukett occupation from the early Paleo-Indian period until the community's forced removal in 1885. Preserving the memory of this specific landscape challenges the myth of early Indigenous disappearance, standing as a powerful testament to thousands of years of continuous Native adaptation and survival on eastern Long Island. From Gaynell Stone, History and Archaeology of the Montauk Maria Pharoah, one of the remaining Montauketts living in Indian Fields during...