[Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 5: Land Theft & King Philip's War
Reid L
reidhlewis91 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 12 17:03:05 EDT 2020
*Land Theft & King Philip's War*
In Week 5 of the reading group, we continue to explore the themes of
erasure and land theft through the violent history of King Philip's War.
This war, fought between 1675 and 1676, is known as the biggest and
deadliest conflict between Native peoples and English colonizers in New
England. It is also known as the final major attempt by Natives to stop
colonizers from Western expansion and land theft in the years following
English occupation after the Mayflower's arrival. This week, while we
cannot cover this history in its entirety, we will present aspects of this
war and the people and places that were involved.
In today's historical accounts of the war, August 12th marks the
anniversary of King Philip's death and the end of the war in 1676. However,
as Lisa Brooks writes in Our Beloved Kin: Remapping a New History of King
Philip's War, the war "did not come to a definitive end, as has been
represented by traditional historical accounts. Rather, the threads of
relationality and conflict that shaped the wartime era continued to weave
through the lives of people in the Northeast."
If you're from New England, or have lived here, we ask: How familiar are
you with the history of tension and conflict between Wampanoag, Nipmuc,
Pocumtuck, and Narragansett peoples and colonizers in the Indigenous
territories we now know as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut?
How much do you know about the violence colonizers inflicted upon Natives
in order to occupy their land–with hungry eyes on the most fertile and
cultivated areas–and to fracture and erase Native relationships, ties of
kinships, and traditions with one another and their homelands?
>From what point of view have you learned this history and the history of
the land you occupy? How can you commit to reshaping the way that these
histories are told in the future? Join us as we explore aspects of this
war, its geographies, its peoples, and its legacies through varied points
of view of Native peoples and their accounts.
Who was King Philip and what was his war?
No, King Philip was not a European monarch. He was Metacom, Wampanoag
sachem (male leader) and son of Massasoit, the sachem known for negotiating
with the first English colonizers who disembarked the Mayflower, offering
them diplomacy and peace. Metacom's English name reflects the Wampanoags'
initial relationship with the English, one that dissolved with the
colonizers' relentless expansion and occupation outside of Plymouth.
Increased tension led to the killing of three Wampanoags, setting off a war
led by the Wampanoags and their Native allies against colonial advancement
on their homelands.
The history of Massasoit, Metacom, and the ensuing war against the
colonizers is captured in the PBS American Experience docuseries "We Shall
Remain: Episode 1, After the Mayflower." Master's student Tiana
Wilson-Blindman brought this series to the Yale School of the Environment
through her project "Beyond the Land Acknowledgement." Tiana pulled
Indigenous histories to the forefront of our environmental studies and
educated fellow students about the land that we live, work, and study on
and the Native peoples who have long relationships with that land.
Resource 1: We Shall Remain: Episode 1, After the Mayflower
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/weshallremain/
Where, and by whom, was King Philip's War fought?
King Philip's War was fought in Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Pocumtuck, and
Narragansett territories, in what were referred to as the United Colonies
of New England (Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut) by English
settlers. Metacom was not the sole leader of King Philip's War. Lisa
Brooks, an Abenaki writer, scholar, and Associate Professor of English and
American Studies at Amherst College, re-examined the history of King
Philip's War in her book Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War.
To do this work, she drew from Native sources and navigated the landscape
by canoe to reclaim the places where the war took place and demonstrate
Native resistance. She writes: "These stories reserve the narrative of
absence and reveal the persistence of Indigenous adaptation and survival."
We encourage you to meander with us through Brooks' digital companion to
her book, which sheds light on the obscured history of the war through
Native stories of both people and place. In the Abenaki perspective, she
writes, these sources "are part of a cycling or spiraling of ôjmowôgan
(history), which refers to a process of telling a collective story, an
ongoing activity in which we are engaged." This resource contains a vast
amount of information, and we hope that you will take some time to explore
it on your own. As an introduction, we'll spend the next few sections
highlighting several people and aspects of the war, with a focus on Nipmuc
territory and areas near Yale-Myers Forest.
Resource 2: “Our Beloved Kin: Remapping A New History of King Philip’s War”
https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index
Weetamoo and the erasure of Native women
Weetamoo was Metacom's sister-in-law and a central leader in the
resistance. Along with other women, she is generally erased from history
because of the patriarchal culture of the colonizers. Weetamoo, a saunkskwa
(female leader) was devoted to the collective rights and survival of the
tribes of the Kteticut River basin, especially through distributing food
and resources. Weetamoo cultivated the connections, negotiations, and
kinship of families using trails, canoe routes, and the contours of the
land itself. English colonizers disregarded the labor of Wampanoag women in
cultivating gardens to feed the tribes. At the same time they sought to
divide this land into private parcels and turn gardens into cattle pasture.
According to Brooks' research, Weetamoo–fearing the oppression of white
men–used the tools of the colonizer to draft land deeds and boundaries,
which she had a Native man present in her stead. The first ambushes against
the colonizers occurred in her homeland of the peninsulas of the
Narragansett Bay. From there, she headed south to Narragansett territory
for safety, and then on to Nipmuc territory, a key Native area of the
southern front.
Here are two of the pages about Weetamoo, and how she has been
misrepresented in colonial histories, in "Our Beloved Kin":
https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/writing-weetamoo-to-death?path=pocasset
https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/re-placing-the-narrative?path=pocasset
Nipmuc "Praying Villages" and Involvement in the War
Yale-Myers Forest, the school-owned forest we Forest Fellows manage and
engage with most, is located on Nipmuc territory. Nipmuc (meaning
"freshwater") territory was known for its corn fields, fruit orchards, and
meadows, as well as the intersections of essential trails such as the
Nipmuc Path and Connecticut Path. At the time of the war, colonizers
claimed this area as part of the Massachusetts Colony. They had already
established "praying villages" or "praying towns," which were small
reservations where Nipmucs were assimilated to English customs under
colonial law and converted to Christianity by Harvard Divinity reverends.
One of the major "praying villages" was Webquasset (or Wabaquasset;
Woodstock, CT), which is the town directly east of Yale-Myers Forest Camp.
Nipmuc leaders of these communities signed agreements and alliances with
the colonizers rather than join Metacom's forces, but other leaders like
Weetamoo opposed these reservations, seeing them as suppression of women.
Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, also opposed this colonization adjacent to
Mohegan territory. Colonizers consolidated and enforced stricter rules on
the villages as the war went on. Those Nipmuc who opposed the English and
captured by them were put in internment camps or sold into slavery in the
West Indies.
Menimesit (New Braintree, MA) in Nipmuc territory served as a key refuge
for Nipmuc, Wampanoag, and Narragansett leaders, including Weetamoo. An
island within marshes and riverways, Menimesit was a sanctuary, only
invaded by colonizers with the help of Indian scouts.
Here is one of the pages about praying towns, as well as an interactive
map, from "Our Beloved Kin":
https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/hassanamesit
https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/praying-towns-map
End of War, Continuance, and Further Learning
The end of the war is commonly marked by the capture and killing of Metacom
on August 12, 1676 in Mount Hope (Rhode Island). However, Brooks writes
"King Philip's War did not come to a definitive end" because this legacy of
conflict continues to mark the lives Native peoples. She also calls us "to
learn more about the continuance of Native nations in New England." Find
her recommendations for further learning here:
https://www.ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/continuance?path=navigate-by-path
If you are interested in engaging more with Lisa Brooks and her work, we
recommend registering for her upcoming virtual talk "The Connecticut River
Valley as Native Space." This event is the first in the Karuna Center for
Peacebuilding’s series Erasure and Restoration: An Understanding of Past
and Present in the Kwinitekw Valley's Indigenous Communities. The talk is
next Wednesday, August 19, at 5pm Eastern, and you can register here:
https://www.karunacenter.org/erasure-and-restoration/
In addition to the resources mentioned here and those recommended by Lisa
Brooks, there are numerous other sources for learning about King Philip's
War and Indigenous communities in the Northeast. In addition to "We Shall
Remain" and Our Beloved Kin, we drew upon and recommend the following
resources:
-
"Re-thinking King Philip's War"
https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2018/4-2018/re-thinking-king-philip-s-war
-
Native Northeast Research Collaborative (formerly The Yale Indian Papers
Project) for Native primary sources
https://www.thenativenortheast.org/
-
Nolumbeka Project: Honoring Northeast Tribal Heritage
https://nolumbekaproject.org/
-
Memory Lands by Christine M. DeLucia
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300201178/memory-lands
--
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We would like to express our deep gratitude for those leading the
interrogation of the history and continued impacts of Native land theft and
violence against Native peoples. We are deeply grateful to learn and
benefit from the work shared here, especially Lisa Brooks' re-examination
of King Philip's War. We are exceptionally thankful for Tiana
Wilson-Blindman's efforts to center Native voices in our school, and for
both Tiana and Meghanlata Gupta for sharing resources with us.
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