North Stonington — About three dozen people embarked on a rare 3.5-mile hike through the heavily wooded and hilly Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation reservation Saturday for a close-up look at more than 300 years of natural and human history on the land.

Katherine Sebastian Dring, chairwoman of the Tribal Council, said the tribe decided to host a tour of the 130-acre portion of the reservation where active forestry management is ongoing to show the work to the public and explain the tribe’s development plans. The tribe hopes to bring its tribal offices to the reservation in the near future and has filed a petition with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs seeking a review of the tribe's application for federal recognition.

The tour, included in the annual Walktober series of hikes and events in eastern Connecticut, brought participants from throughout the region to learn about early Native American presence on the land.

“It’s a beautiful day!” said Kathleen Flaherty of Danielson, who admitted she got lost on the way to the remote reservation location. “I’ve always been interested in the Native American history of the area, and they’re still here.”

The 225-acre reservation was established in 1683, and has been occupied continuously by the tribe since then, Sebastian Dring said.

Several Tribal Council members greeted the hikers, and Tribal Member Juan Hazard, called White Fox, of Providence, “smudged” the hikers with smoke from burning sage, sweet grass and tobacco in a traditional ceremony. He sent them off on their journey with a song in the tribal language.

The hike took participants in what Hull Forestry Products forester Christopher J. Casadei called a unique landscape for eastern Connecticut. Hull Forestry Products was hired by the tribe to do selective cutting to both harvest timber and improve the health of the forest by clearing out large groves of ash trees threatened by the emerald ash borer insect and to encourage healthy “uneven growth” of trees of differing ages and sizes.

News that the Eastern Pequots were engaged in forest management spread to other tribes in the New England region and caught the attention of the Wampanoag tribe in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard. The tribe asked for a large tulip poplar tree to make a traditional ocean-going dugout canoe. Tribal representatives spent an entire day examining numerous trees before settling on their choice. The Eastern Pequots gifted the tree to the island tribe, and the canoe construction is underway.

Sebastian Dring said she hopes the Wampanoags will teach Eastern Pequots the skill in return.

Hikers stopped at the stump of the “canoe tree” during the hike, and April Beaulieu, 10, of Lisbon was given the task of counting the rings to determine the tree’s age — 103, she declared.

While Casadei pointed out natural and manmade changes to the landscape — from pre-residential hunting grounds to cleared farmland and now back to forest land with about 20 tribal residences — Stephen W. Silliman, a University of Massachusetts professor of anthropology, described several archaeological digs done on the reservation over the past dozen years.

The tribal nation has a 12-year partnership with UMass Boston to “locate and preserve historical artifacts and cultural sites on the reservation,” Sebastian Dring wrote in a two-page summary of tribal activities handed out Saturday. UMass is holding the artifacts uncovered for future display, Sebastian Dring said.

The tour took hikers to the remains of fieldstone foundations and collapsed fieldstone chimneys of several homesteads throughout the wooded hillside. Some included possible barn or animal stall remains and some mysterious foundations not yet identified.

Some date to the 1700s, and an older wigwam site that could have housed 30 to 40 people occupied a ridgeline location. Snaking stone walls likely followed flowing water of streams in one area, Casadei said. An archaeological dig at one fieldstone foundation uncovered a leather button dated to the 1850s. In another spot, a coin from the 1740s was discovered.

Several burial grounds also dot the landscape, and Sebastian Dring asked walkers to be respectful and cautious when traversing those areas, and not to take photographs of the few upright gravestones discernible.

The tribal habitation of the land followed a succession not unlike that of the trees and shrubs. Early Native Americans likely didn’t live there, but did controlled burning each spring to maintain the forest as a fertile hunting ground. Charred cedar trees still bear those marks, Casadei said.

Early inhabitants lived in wooden wigwams that have not survived over the centuries and likely cremated their dead. As European settlements encroached on the area and the Eastern Pequot culture, wood-frame homes with fieldstone foundations not unlike those of the early settlers mixed with the wigwams. Forest land was cut for farmland and pastures for livestock.

Silliman said uncovered food remains included the bones of cows, chickens and even passenger pigeons. Other artifacts included thousands of shells, showing a clear link to the Long Island Sound shoreline, along with pottery from colonial-era and later markets.

“We spent a lot of years looking at life on the reservation, a few hundred to a few thousand years old,” Silliman said.

c.bessette@theday.com