Reflections written in 2021 for the first Indigenous Peoples Day in Easthampton, MA where I live. 

As a product of the Massachusetts public schools of the 1970s, I am shaped by the myths of the state’s history, perhaps most especially its founding. I learned about the Pilgrims escaping religious persecution arriving in Massachusetts and after a difficult winter being added by the Indians to learn how to grow crops in this new world. The first fall there was a Thanksgiving feast, and Squanto, who taught them how to plant corn, seems to have been the guest of honor. There are other Indians beside Squanto in pictures of this Thanksgiving feast, but because I didn’t learn their names they didn’t make much of an impression on my young mind. 

After Squanto, Indians seem to disappear from the history I learn about Massachusetts—or I didn’t pay much attention to where they do. My textbooks jump quickly from Thanksgiving to the American Revolution. After the Revolution, there is the settingling of the West and I learn about the Plains Indians and the conflicts in those far away places. But the Indigenous people of Massachusetts are gone from the story. I didn’t choose this story, but still it directs my awareness in conscious and unconscious ways. With this story directing me, I don’t have to grapple with how land that didn’t belong to the Pilgrims became the state I live in or the homes my family and I have owned. I didn’t have to wonder what happened to the nameless Indians at the Thanksgiving feast.

But starting in 2014— and in large part  from history I was exposed to working at Mass Humanities—I have learned that despite attempts to exterminate, displace, and erase them the Indigenous people of Massachusetts have remained, resisted, and preserved by:

• The Wampanoag have continuously inhabited Aquinnah on Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard). They have reclaimed their language that had for 150 years not had native speakers and are educating a generation of native speakers through the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project
• In 1833 the Mashpee Indians submitted an Indian Declaration of Independence to the Governor to resist encouragement on their land, writing that they would not “permit any white man to come upon our plantation to cut or carry our wood or hay . . . without our permission.” The declaration led to the Mashpee regaining the right to govern themselves rather than be supervised by white outsiders.
• The Nipmuc Nation have continuously inhabited land in the central and western part of the state including the Hassanamisco Reservation in Grafton that is their ancestral home. 
• The Nolumbeka Project protects sacred sites and has created a Heritage Three Sisters Circle Garden on projected land in the Connecticut River Valley.
• The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican may now be living in Wisconsin, but they still call the Berkshires home. 
• Ohketeau, which means ‘a place to plant and grow’ in the Nipmuc language, is a Native founded and run cultural center right in the Connecticut River Valley where I live. Their Living Presence of Our History Series and Indigenous Peoples’ Day web pages are rich with resources. The information about Native presence is not hard to find.

So myths like Indians being “gone” are dangerous, but because they are out in the open can be dispelled.  

But more insidious and corrosive may be the papered-over and buried stories. The stories that are taboo because their truth doesn’t fit the simplistic, untroubling narrative being offered.

The Pilgrims first encounter with the Wampanoag is such a story. (David Silverman’s This Land is Their Land is the source for the history I am summarizing. For the full details, do check out this book.)

The first encounter was not a direct encounter. In November 1620 the Mayflower landed at what is now known as Provincetown Harbor. The Wampanoag did not winter on the Cape and had left their summer villages to head inland. The Pilgrims entered these villages and one of the first things they did was dig up and take stockpiles of corn left for the next season’s planting.

We modern viewers looking back on the Pilgrim’s theft are rightly appalled by this. We want to disassociate ourselves from their actions. But I can’t make them totally Other. Because I am shaped by the founding myth with them at center, they are in my head. They could even be in my DNA. At least one of my six grandparents (adoption accounts for the extra set) descended, if not from this original band of Pilgrims, those who came soon after. 

So I didn’t take the corn, but maybe I am alive today because of one of my forebears ate it that first difficult winter. The corn connects me to the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags from whom it was stolen. Recognizing this connection I can then choose to be part of the repair and return of what was stolen. The historian Aurora Levins Morales in her book Medicine Stories offers this provocative way of thinking about our problematic ancestors and our relationship to them:

For people committed to liberation to claim descent from the perpetrators is a renewal of faith in human beings. If slavers, invaders, committers of genocide, inquisitors can beget abolitionists, resistance fighters, healers, community builders, then anyone can transform an inheritance of privilege or of victimization into something more fertile than either.

A foundation for the repair doesn’t even require action. It requires us just to stop taking what doesn’t belong to us. We’ve taken and continue to take Indigenous peoples’ corn, land, children, sacred places, culture, spirituality … it’s a long list. This is not history past, but present day. Today, for one example, we white people feel and act like we are entitled to access Indigenous spiritual beliefs and practices as well as enter into their sacred places when and how we want to. After we stop actively taking, Indigenous artist and activist Lyla June suggested a next step at a White Awake training for becoming an ally or accomplice is to ask Indigenous people/organizations/tribal groups: “What, if anything, would you like me to do?”

Since this I’m writing the on Indigenous Peoples Day, an action that Indigenous activists in Massachusetts are asking for is that the whole state replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day as one of five legislative goals. All the goals and specific actions are here. There is also a campaign underway for state-owned land in Belchertown, the Lampson Brook Farm, to rematriated to the Nipmuc for agriculture using Indigenous land use models.

I’ve saved the worst for last of the buried stories of history. The very first thing the Pilgrims did—even before they looted the corn—was desecrate the graves that they discovered at the Wampanoag’s summer villages. They do not give a reason for doing this in their writings. To grapple with this disgrace, we could try to imagine that it wasn’t their intent to dishonor and violate one of the most sacred acts of any people: tending to their dead. But intent doesn’t matter to the one who is impacted. Impact is what must be acknowledged not intent. 

Mistreatment of the indigenous dead becomes a continuous thread through Massachusetts history and a weapon of control and attempted erasure:

• Metacomet and Weetamoo—leaders of King Philip’s War/Metacomet’s Rebellion— are beheaded and their heads left on spikes at the end of the deadly conflict. (There is so much more to this history that you can find in Lisa Brooks’ Our Beloved Kin.)
• In Massachusetts and throughout New England, indigenous peoples who died in the 19th century were eulogized as the last of their people, including even engraving this on to their tombstones, despite their having families and tribal groups defining membership with their own criteria (This is attempted erasure and denial of modernity are covered in detail in Jean O’Brien’s Firsting and Lastings.)
• Keeping the remains and burial goods of Indigenous peoples in museums despite the calls by native peoples to have their ancestors returned to them. But on a note of hope, in 2017 the Wampanoag were successful in having the remains of the sachem Ousamequin returned to them to be returned to their original burial site. Ousamequin is the sachem who made the first treaty with the Pilgrims and allowed them to begin settlement.

This is a horrifying history of trauma, but we can only move through it by acknowledging it. Secrets and hidden histories will assert themselves in explosive ways if not attended to.

There is one final part of the story that I am looking to as a guide for moving through. This is the story of one of the graves the Pilgrims dug up. This person in it appears to have been a European, a man buried with a sailor’s canvas cassock and still showing blond hair. Perhaps he was a shipwrecked sailor or left behind from one of the exploring expeditions sent from Europe. He was buried with a child and grave goods to assist in rebirth in the afterlife. It seems that had a son with one of the Wampanoag women. It seems that he became enough part of the community to have a traditional burial. 

For this European to have been accepted into the community, he had to orient to the customs, traditions, language, and systems of the Wampanoag. He’d have learned that his European ways were not the only ways to live by. He may not have given up his beliefs or ways, but he learned to live by the Wampanoag’s. He must have made mistakes and so also made amends. He must have responded to prompts, requests, or demands about what contribution he could make to be part of the community.

This figure long hidden from history offers a glimmer of hope from that past for us white people that we can behave differently, that we can learn to live as equals in the multi-racial democracy that I see as the most inspiring vision—if yet to be realized and now very much under attack—of what the United States can be. He guides us to see our beliefs and systems as just one of many, to be curious about other ways of being in community. To change how we live in order to be part of a larger community. And as we do, to accept—to expect!—that we will make mistakes, but know that we can make amends. And once we’ve worked actively to make amends to be patient—we’ve 500+ years of making mistakes and so much worse—and while we wait to keep doing what we can do to be part of the work of repair rather than destruction. 

The stories that have been kept secret are surfacing now. It’s time to listen to and learn from them. I’ll end with the words Lisa Brooks offers in Our Beloved Kin after she describes the death of Weetamoo and the search for the place where it occurred, the Quequechand River, now Fall River: 

Walking through Fall River today, Quequechand is nearly impossible to find. Yet that water has a memory of falling, an overpowering resonance. Today, you can find the river only in the sound of its name. The story, too, is just a trickle, lying beneath hundreds of years of print. Yet water has its own mind, its own course to take. Despite all efforts to dam and control it, it can not be contained.