“Days of Mourning and Not Joy”
New England colonists and their successors had every reason to believe that they would have the last word on King Philip’s War, because, as the saying goes, the victors get to write the history. The English, after all, had not only killed and dismembered Pumetacom, who symbolized the resistance to them. They had slaughtered, enslaved, and dispersed any Indians in arms who refused to surrender, and then seized their lands. Those Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Nipmucs who remained in southern New England would never again be able to threaten the colonies. With the completion of this bloody business, the conquerors got to telling their version of what had happened. Their triumphant histories portrayed the sachem as having almost single-handedly led his people into a misguided rebellion by virtue of his supposedly savage pride and susceptibility to the devil, only to be crushed by a superior, civilized people favored by God. They even named the war after him. Later accounts in this vein in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served as more than just chronicles of New England’s greatest contest. They also glorified the rise of white “Anglo-Saxons” and the demise of Indians all across America.1
Yet King Philip’s War was not the last chapter of the Wampanoag people. A number of Wampanoag communities persevered through the horrors of that disaster and then the next three centuries of subjugation to colonial rule, which was even more nightmarish than Pumetacom had predicted. The English used their dominance in the postwar era to engross most of what little land the Wampanoags had left, reduce the Wampanoags to debt peonage, and force them into the most dangerous, degrading jobs in the colonial economy. So merciless was their exploitation that they used the color of law to seize and reacculturate Wampanoag children to the point that the survival of the Wampanoag language was in doubt. All the while, Wampanoag people adapted to their straitened circumstances to keep their communities together, protect whatever land and autonomy they could, and pass down their values to succeeding generations. Rather than credit the Wampanoags for their resilience, white society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used their reforms under duress and marriages with non-Indians to deny that they were Indians at all and call for an end to what few official protections they still could claim. Pumetacom and his people had taken up arms against the English despite knowing the steep odds because they could not imagine colonists lording over them. The Wampanoags who survived King Philip’s War engaged in another kind of battle, which involved determining when to concede to colonial pressure, and then just how much, and when and how to push back. Surviving as a people in the face of a society that wanted to dispossess them and deny who they were was their great contest. It is a struggle—a fundamentally colonial one—that has lasted to this very day.2
Not only did the Wampanoags survive despite colonial efforts to make them disappear, but periodically they also told their own historical accounts that disputed American society’s narrative of a manifestly destined colonial ascendancy and inevitable Indian demise. In petitions, testimony, and public speeches, they echoed Pumetacom’s accusation that New England society was an ungrateful child to a generous Wampanoag father. They felt betrayed because they asserted Ousamequin’s aid to Plymouth to be their legacy, to which they added their own long track record of cooperating with the English and their successors. They have charged their oppressors with unfaithfulness repeatedly over the course of more than three hundred years.
Whereas Pumetacom’s sense of betrayal left him angry and militant, Wampanoag statements on colonialism ever since King Philip’s War have tended to express a deep sense of mourning. And no wonder. The people have mourned white society’s rejection of Ousamequin’s vision of Wampanoag-colonial coexistence. They have mourned the victors’ desecration of the indigenous natural world in which the ancestors limited their population and consumption to ensure plenty for generations to come. They have mourned how capitalism and Christianity have promoted individualism, acquisitiveness, and selfishness at the expense of traditional values such as community, giving, and modesty. They have mourned the scourges of depression and substance abuse among members of their community who felt no control over their lives. They have also mourned because so few outsiders have seemed to care. It is well past time to take heed of what they have endured and what they have said about it as a way to learn and cultivate empathy toward our countrymen and countrywomen, the First People.
COPING
Just how the Wampanoag survivors coped with the aftermath of King Philip’s War is largely lost to history. No one recorded their reflections on what the war had meant, and literate Indians were not writing about it. Perhaps it was something they refused to discuss in order to forget. Perhaps they judged it too perilous to share such thoughts, given the English propensity to seize on the slightest evidence of hostility as an excuse to send Indians into slavery or to the executioner. Perhaps the English simply were uninterested in what Indians had to say. Yet we can be sure that Wampanoag survivors on the Cape and the islands, despite their grudging support of the English during the war, would have quietly mourned the losses of their people on the opposing side. After all, Pumetacom’s followers had been the colonists’ enemies, not theirs. It is also likely that they provided refuge to some of their close kin from the mainland who escaped the English dragnet but who also went unnoticed by colonial authorities, which was how the Natives would have wanted it.
These silences reflected how dramatically the war had shifted the balance of power in the English favor. To be sure, as late as 1690, Indian and English populations within Plymouth colony remained roughly equal at 4,300 people each, largely because of the Wampanoag majority on Cape Cod. Factor in the Vineyard and Nantucket, where in 1680 there were about 2,500 Wampanoags to fewer than 700 English, and it might appear that Native people remained in charge. Yet regionally that was no longer the case. Despite English deaths from the war, the colonial population grew from 52,000 in 1670 to 68,000 in 1680, largely through natural increase. Southern New England’s collective indigenous population stood, at most, at only 15 percent of that number. Equally to the point, the New England colonies had demonstrated that they would brutally suppress any Indian resistance to their dominance. This did not mean that Native people no longer posed a danger. Abenakis operating from distant bases continued to raid outlying English settlements in western Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and southern Maine well into the eighteenth century. However, it was no longer possible for groups like the Wampanoags, living squarely among the English, to conceive of a successful armed uprising. Vulnerable as they were, they had to invent other ways to defend their families, communities, and values.3
One answer was to take up Christianity in as public a manner as possible. Even Wampanoags who were cynical about the faith could plainly see that Christianity had been critical to the Cape and island communities’ safe if uneasy passage through the war. They also understood that the church was the best way to cultivate English advocates to help them navigate colonial officialdom, protect their lands, and acquire the literacy needed to grasp colonial documents. Some of them, probably constituting a minority, interpreted the outcome of the war as a sign that the Christian god rewarded his followers and chastised nonbelievers, despite the horrors of Deer Island. For most of the rest, the protection Christianity offered from the English was the only impetus they needed. There were other options for Native people in southern New England, as evident in the fact that it would be decades before appreciable numbers of Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansetts adopted Christianity. For mainland Wampanoags, though, the most dependable path seemed to be the one followed by their Cape and island kin.4
The Vineyard Wampanoags played a major role in helping their tribesmen take this critical step. John Hiacoomes, son of the first Wampanoag Christian, Hiacoomes, left the Vineyard in 1687 to preach to the eighty-person village of Assawompset, soon to be joined by his fellow islander Thomas Sissetom. Other Vineyard Wampanoags evangelized the Sakonnets, who had reestablished themselves at various sites in their ancestral territory now claimed by the towns of Little Compton and Dartmouth. These missionaries included “worthy” John Momonaquem and his “merciful” wife, Hannah Ahhunnut, the “pious and godly” couple Jonathan and Rachel Amos, and “faithful” Japheth Hannit. All of them came from leading Wampanoag families that for decades had used church offices to buttress their status. Now they were sharing the lessons of how to incorporate Christianity into Wampanoag life with their mainland cousins. It took only until 1689 before Increase Mather was praising Sakonnet as a “great congregation.”5
The Vineyard Indians were the most active missionaries in Wampanoag country, but they were hardly alone. Joining them were a score of Wampanoag and English evangelicals from across Plymouth colony. Plymouth town’s own minister, John Cotton Jr., continued his prewar preaching circuit throughout the north shore of Buzzards Bay (including Waweantick, Sippican, and Mattapoisett), the Taunton River (including Titicut, Assawompset, and Queehequassit), and greater Sakonnet (including Acushnet, Apponagansett, and Acoaxet). On the inner Cape, the Englishman Thomas Tupper and the Natives Ralph Jones and Jacob Hedge ministered to Indians in and around Sandwich, while the Wampanoag Simon Papmunnuck (son of the sachem Papmunnuck) headed a Mashpee congregation of more than two hundred people. On the outer Cape, the Indians Tom Coshaug (grandson of the sachem Mattaquason) and John Cosens and the Reverend Samuel Treat of Eastham tended to Wampanoag meetings at Potonumecut, Nobscusset, and Monomoyick. By the 1690s, according to Mather, there were thirty-seven Indian preachers and seven or eight English preachers active in Wampanoag country, never mind Native deacons and teachers. These churchmen tended to between twenty and thirty meetings of “some thousands of souls” on the mainland, plus ten congregations on the Vineyard and Elizabeth Islands and three on Nantucket. King Philip’s War might have diminished enthusiasm for missionary work among colonists in Massachusetts, but in Wampanoag country, the postwar era was the height of that campaign, largely because of Native initiative.6
These efforts contributed to making church life one of the binding elements between Wampanoag communities, thereby enabling them to continue holding tribal gatherings without alarming the English. Certainly kinship, language, and shared values bound the people together just as they had since time immemorial. Yet now Christian ceremonies became the most visible of their public events. In 1710 the English minister Josiah Cotton reported that church services at Herring Pond, near the shoulder of Cape Cod, regularly attracted Wampanoags from “the further end of Plymouth,” by which he meant Mattakeesett (Pembroke), Nemasket, and Assawompset. The same went for Mashpee, where Native people sometimes traveled on foot from as far as ten miles away to attend Sunday services. By the mid-eighteenth century, if not before, it had become an annual tradition for “the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard and the neighboring Indians of the continent” to gather in Mashpee to “celebrate holy communion together,” just as they had traditionally marked the harvest at this time of year. When it came to the social importance of these affairs, what the participants believed and felt in their hearts about Christianity was rather beside the point. Some of them might have been genuine converts who believed they were saved, knew puritan doctrine thoroughly, and upheld Christian standards of piety. Commitment to Christianity ebbed and flowed among some other people, just as it did among the English. Still others probably went along merely for the sake of appearances while continuing to follow ancient Wampanoag rites in private. Regardless, they all came together on this public Christian occasion, some to worship, others to “frolic.”7
“South-west View of the Indian Church in Marshpee,” from Jonathan Warner Barber, Historical Collections: Being a General Collection of Interesting Facts … Relating to the History and Antiquities of Every Town in Massachusetts (Worcester, MA: Warren Lazell, 1844), 48. Courtesy of Old Sturbridge Village.
Christianity became even more fundamental to Wampanoag life after King Philip’s War as Indians sought new means to organize their people without alarming the English. Meetinghouses, like this one at Mashpee, became centers not only for worship but for regional tribal gatherings and political organizing. In other words, the Wampanoags turned the church from a colonial imposition into an institution for the expression of their peoplehood and sovereignty.
Even normally skeptical colonial observers were mightily impressed with the level of Christian learning and civilized reforms in these communities. After soliciting letters from Englishmen throughout the missionary field, the Boston minister Cotton Mather discovered to his surprise that the Natives were “so far Christianized, as they believe there is a God, and but one God, and that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world,” providing “just foundation to hope, that they are traveling the right way [to] Heaven.” Schools run by a combination of Wampanoag and English instructors were producing equally dramatic results. A 1698 examination of all the Indian towns in Massachusetts (which, after 1691, included Plymouth colony and the islands) by the ministers Grindal Rawson and Samuel Danforth found Native people, particularly children, making impressive progress at reading and writing in the Wampanoag language at almost every stop. Twelve years later, Josiah Cotton, son of John, reported that over a third of the Monument (or Manomet) Pond Wampanoags near Plymouth could read, with the skill widely shared among men and women.8
Marks of civility, as the English defined it, were on the rise, too. Rawson and Danforth generally praised the Wampanoags as “well clothed, “diligent laborers,” and “sober.” The Natives had adopted several features of English farming, such as animal husbandry and plowing, though the English failed to notice that the Indians invariably grazed their livestock in common and that oftentimes the community sachem owned the plows and oxen and received tribute in exchange for lending them out. These features were yet more examples of how the Wampanoags were adapting their customs to the demands of colonialism. Strikingly, Indian congregations continued to require public conversion narratives for full church membership (including access to the Lord’s Supper), a high standard that many English had abandoned since the height of the puritan movement in the mid-seventeenth century. No colonial observer bothered to dwell on the irony of Indians rather than colonists upholding what was once the signature of colonial New England religious life.9
Title page of Experience Mayhew, Indian Converts: Or, Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a Considerable Number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard (London: printed for S. Gerrish, and sold by J. Osborn and T. Longman, 1727). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Despite such praise from English elites, Christian Indians tended to attract racial resentment and even hostility from colonists of lesser status. The Vineyard missionary Matthew Mayhew, writing in 1690, chastened Englishmen whose impiety disqualified them for church membership, but took offense “that Indians should be accounted worthy.” Decades later, little had changed. Experience Mayhew complained in the 1720s that too many colonists rejected the possibility of there being “sincere religion or godliness among this poor [Indian] people.” He conceded that there were some “vicious” Indians just as there were some vicious English, but that was no reason “to judge and condemn all, for the miscarriages of some among them … They are no worse by nature than others, or we ourselves,” he emphasized. In fact, they boasted “a considerable number of godly people among them.” To emphasize the point, Mayhew published a book, Indian Converts, in 1727 that contained 128 short biographies drawn from four generations of model Christian Wampanoags. Yet Mayhew was spitting into the wind. His English neighbors did not want to respect Indians as fellow Christians because they knew what came next: they would feel pressure to treat Native people with dignity.10
FALLING OFF THEIR FEET
The principle that Christianity gave Wampanoags rights the English were bound to respect was far from the practice. With every passing year, colonists increased their pressure on Indians to abandon their claims to previously shared resources and even to their independently owned lands. As the English felled the woods, they extended their fences ever deeper into the landscape, which not only physically obstructed the Wampanoags’ movement but warned them that English law considered the enclosed ground to be exclusive private property. In the absence of physical barriers to the land, legal ones met English ends. In 1680 the town of Eastham on the outer Cape prohibited the Nauset Wampanoags from gathering pine knots and tar and cutting wood on the town commons, even though they had done so customarily for decades. Thirty years later, Eastham also denied the Wampanoags access to “some particular swamps for peeling of bark,” leaving the Natives fearful “that we should be cut off and deprived of all the benefits of the land and hindered from living by the water.” The Nausets liked to think of themselves as the friends and co-religionists of their English neighbors, but such ordeals led them to conclude that “we are distressed, despised people.”11
Disputes between the Wampanoags and the colonists of Nantucket and the island of Chappaquiddick off Martha’s Vineyard centered on the Natives’ right to graze livestock on their own land. Earlier in the seventeenth century, island sachems had sold the English grazing rights without considering that their people might someday want to exercise that privilege or even that they had ceded it at all. Yet when the Wampanoags began acquiring horses and sheep decades later and putting them out to graze with the colonists’ animals, the English responded by impounding the beasts and fining the owners. The Nantucket Wampanoags warned that they “could not forbear, but must fight if these law were prosecuted on them.” They were astounded by the gall of colonists “forcing us to pay for using our own lands” and then corruptly serving as “judges of their own cause.” Though “poor in estate [and] not versed in English law,” the Wampanoags knew they had morality on their side because they were “taught wrong by the light of nature.”12
Unfortunately, the struggle for the land was about might, not right. By the early eighteenth century, the English on the Vineyard had grown so brazen as to flood tiny Chappaquiddick with more than one thousand head of livestock and then bury the sachem, Jacob Seeknout, in litigation to obstruct his opposition. They knew the only way he could afford to pay his lawyers was by selling the very land he was trying to protect. The Chappaquiddick Wampanoags were hardly alone in their concern that such schemes would force them “to flee into some remote wilderness.” Complaints about the English commandeering Native woodland, pasture, herring runs, and every other kind of resource echoed from all corners of Wampanoag country. This was how the English dismantled the legacy of joint use and demonstrated the limits of their Christian fellowship and gratitude in the post–King Philip’s War era.13
Wampanoags who lived on reservations guaranteed to them by the colonial government had the best chance of weathering these storms because the law was supposed to prevent them from selling their land. At the same time, Wampanoags quickly came to realize that when colonial outsiders, however well intentioned, claimed to know better than the people themselves what was best for them, it was a Trojan horse for the erosion of their sovereignty and, ultimately, the engrossment of their resources. It took little time for evidence to mount that when the English pressured the Wampanoags to retreat to reservations and cede the rest of their territory in hopes of cutting their losses, it was only a matter of time before the grifters came calling for more.
Nevertheless, reservations were the best of several bad options for Wampanoags faced with the threat of colonial encroachment. The prewar sanctuaries of Mashpee, Christiantown, and Titicut remained intact in the late seventeenth century, soon to be joined by several other protected territories. They included a 190-acre plot on Watuppa Pond, in what is now the city of Fall River, set aside by Massachusetts in 1701 for Sakonnets who “have been very serviceable to the crown in the late wars with the Indians.” More than just a reward, the reservation served the dual purpose of encouraging Sakonnets to relocate quietly as colonists displaced them from other land Plymouth had promised them in exchange for switching sides in King Philip’s War.14
By comparison, English authorities turned Aquinnah (or Gay Head) into a reservation of sorts out of embarrassment that one of the region’s model Christian Indian communities faced total dispossession. In 1687 the sachem, Joseph Mittark, sold all of Aquinnah to Thomas Dongan, the royal governor of New York, for thirty pounds. Just what Mittark was thinking when he made this deal is uncertain. Perhaps he imagined that he had enlisted Dongan to act like a paramount sachem and protect the land against Aquinnah’s covetous English neighbors. It is also possible, given the outrageous terms, that Mittark did not understand what the agreement meant when he signed it. Whatever the case might have been, the people of Aquinnah were unwilling to accept their sachem’s poor judgment as a fait accompli. When Dongan’s agent, Matthew Mayhew, began trying to settle tenants on the land, the Aquinnah community responded with a document written in the Wampanoag language and dated 1681 that threatened to make the governor’s purchase null and void. The people claimed it recorded a ruling by the deceased sachem Mittark (Joseph’s father) and his counselors “that no one shall sell land. But if anyone larcenously sells land, you shall take back your land, because it is forever your possession.” Any future sachem who violated this principle would lose his seat, or “fall forever,” as this manuscript put it. In other words, the Aquinnahs’ position was that Joseph Mittark never had the authority to alienate their homes in the first place.15
Signatures from the Petition of the Gay Head Indians to the Massachusetts General Court, September 5, 1749. SC1/series 45X. Massachusetts Archives Collection. Vol. 31, p. 645, dated September 5, 1749.
These signatures from a 1749 Wampanoag-language petition from the Aquinnah (or Gay Head) Wampanoags to the Massachusetts General Court seeking protection of their land reflect the central role of the church in Wampanoag efforts to combat the plague of English encroachment. The author of the petition, Zachariah Hossueit (or Howwoswee), was minister of the Aquinnah congregational church. Most of the signatures are also in his hand. The division of the signatures by sex mirrors the sex-segregated seating of Indian church services, suggesting that the community drew up and affirmed the petition after Sunday meeting.
This paper put colonial authorities in a serious bind. English purchases of Indian land often depended on recorded Indian oral testimony to verify which Native people had the right to sell and on what terms. Now the Aquinnah Wampanoags were applying the same method to block an enormous grant to one of the most powerful figures in the colonies. This was not a case of one or two Indians agreeing about what had been said or done at some past date. The entire Aquinnah community agreed that the proceedings of Mittark and his counselors had been written on the spot in 1681. Their presentation of the document some twenty years after the fact was entirely consistent with the colonists’ own example of registering deeds for Indian land years and even decades after they had supposedly been signed. Yet, if the English accepted this testimony, it would not only draw Dongan’s wrath but also open the door for Indians to contest other colonial titles. Indeed, no sooner had the Aquinnahs presented their case than other Wampanoags suddenly discovered their own archived papers challenging English claims to other sites on the Vineyard, Nantucket, the Elizabeth Islands, and Assawompset. Clearly, Wampanoags across the region had coordinated a strategy to take back their land by employing the colonists’ own technologies of writing and land deeds and by weaponizing oral testimony.16
Predictably, English authorities threw water on this fire before it grew too hot, ruling that all these papers “were not true but forged and false.” Yet before Dongan could return to the task of parceling out Aquinnah to English renters, in stepped the New England Company, the London-based sponsor of the region’s missions to Indians. With its showpiece community of Christian Indians “threatened to be ousted” and “scattered up and down the continent,” and, the Company feared, “returning to the barbarous customs of their ancestors,” the organization prevailed on Dongan to sell it his title. Practically out of nowhere, the threat of the Aquinnah Wampanoags’ dispossession had ended almost as soon as it began.17
However, there was a substantial cost. The New England Company, framing itself as a “Kind Father,” decided, over the Aquinnahs’ opposition, that henceforth it would fence off and lease six hundred acres of their territory to raise funds for the Natives’ schools and church officers. Furthermore, when the lease came up for renewal in 1723, the Wampanoags’ complaints that “the Land was theirs and their [Ancestors’] and that they never sold it” did not hinder the company from renting out the tract for another fourteen years and expanding it by four hundred acres within a rod of the people’s burial ground. The Aquinnah Wampanoags were glad to be rid of Dongan, but they believed correctly that the New England Company had taken advantage of their misfortune to assert a paternal governance they did not want and an ownership claim to their land that they did not recognize. They saw the organization for what it was: a colonial overlord. Under these conditions, they made the life of the company’s tenant miserable, killing and impounding his cattle and tearing down his fences while emphasizing their birthright at every turn.18
The Aquinnah people had a few critical advantages in mounting their defense. For one, they lived on a peninsula, so there was only one entry point and no question when the English had breached the line, particularly once they put up a bar gate. Additionally, their nemesis was a single distant company formally dedicated to their welfare rather than a disorderly array of land speculators, poachers, trespassing livestock, and expansionist towns. Wampanoags living on smaller reserves surrounded by rapacious English neighbors were less able to resist than the Aquinnahs. Take, for example, the Mattakeesett Wampanoags of east-central Cape Cod, who lived on a 160-acre reservation known as “Indian Town” between the Bass River on the east and Long Pond on the west. In 1713 they consented to this arrangement with the town of Yarmouth only because runaway English growth threatened to dispossess them entirely. Elsewhere on the eastern Cape, colonists had already appropriated most of the land of the Wampanoags of Paomet (or Billingsgate) and Monomoyick (or Monomoy), leaving just the hundred-acre Potonumecut Reservation on Pleasant Bay and a handful of scattered, individually owned parcels. Yarmouth proclaimed that Indian Town was for the Natives’ “use forever to live upon and for planting and firewood.” Yet the limits it placed on the Wampanoags’ activity all but guaranteed that the reserve would remain underpopulated and impoverished. Yarmouth prohibited the Mattakeesetts from taking in other Indians, thus handicapping their ability to address the mounting loss of their people to whaling, military service, and disease. Nor would it allow the people to lease out their land to the English, even when they were away pursuing other opportunities. Such restrictions, combined with the colonists’ increasingly exclusive claims to resources surrounding the reservation, meant that Indian Town, like Watuppa, was less a place to live and work full-time than a base from which the people fanned out to find other ways to make a living.19
A harsher example still was the Titicut Reservation on the upper Taunton River, which in its conception in 1664 was supposed to be three miles long and guaranteed to the Natives “forever.” Forever turned out to be sixty years. By 1724 the Titicut people had grown so frustrated by the English of Bridgewater and Middleboro poaching their firewood and enclosing their planting and fishing grounds that they gave up any pretense of retaining the original grant. Instead, they settled for just one hundred acres with clearly marked bounds and a renewed pledge from Boston to defend the lines. Eventually they would discover how hollow that promise was, too. It took only until 1741 before Titicut’s English advocates sounded the alarm that neighboring colonists and creditors were on the verge of gobbling up what little was left of the reserve.20
One by one, Native communities tried to stem these losses by deposing sachems who sold land without the people’s consent and transferring oversight of their territory to counsels of family representatives and church officials. After Aquinnah’s removal of Joseph Mittark, it raised no one to take his place. Likewise the Takemmy Wampanoags of the Vineyard swore off the sachem Zachariah Pooskin after he and his predecessors had reduced the Christiantown reserve to a mere 160 acres and the Takemmy sachemship as a whole to hardly more than that. Henceforth they governed themselves by what they cleverly called a “legal town meeting.” The Sakedan Wampanoags of Nantucket followed suit in 1741, agreeing as “town people and church people” to unseat the sachem Ben Abel for “selling our land from us to the English.” They emphasized that Abel had “no other power but only what he had from us.” (Their use of the past tense was not accidental.) Communities that failed to take such measures soon found themselves practically landless, as was the case throughout most of Nantucket Island, in the Vineyard sachemships of Nunnepog, Chappaquiddick, Sengekontacket, and Nashuakemuck, and in Paomet, Nauset, Momonoyick, and Satucket on the outer Cape.21
Yet the removal of the sachems could not stem the hemorrhaging of land because the sheer poverty of the common people often forced them to sell, too. It was hard enough to resist the temptation under the stress of relentless day-to-day expenses. When costly life crises occurred, as they invariably did, there was sometimes little other choice. At any given time, a household might face crippling injuries to breadwinners, steep medical expenses, the need to pay for a family member’s burial, or the threat of loved ones being forced into jail or servitude for overdue fines or store debts. Everyone knew that selling the land would make it even harder for future generations of Wampanoags to make ends meet, but sometimes urgent demands did not permit long-term decision-making.22
Too often this process is mischaracterized as Indians “losing” their land, as if their own errors were mainly responsible. No doubt, some of their own misjudgments contributed to the crisis, but the English were the primary culprits by far. They were the ones who used trespass, poaching, control of Wampanoag debt, and command of the courts to force the Wampanoags’ hand. Even territory the English were supposed to share with Indians according to joint-use agreements or that English law technically protected for the Natives’ sole use was vulnerable. Wampanoags did not lose their land any more than Indians elsewhere on the continent. No, colonists and their successors took it through every means at their disposal.
The hurt was profound. Colonial expansion, after all, denied the Wampanoags access to the sites where they had buried their loved ones, where their history had unfolded, where they had hunted, fished, gathered, and danced since time immemorial. The Wampanoags knew the names and characteristics of every plant, animal, run of water, and hill in these places. They believed the Creator had birthed their kind into their homeland to live in perpetuity. Even today, Wampanoag people diagnosed with depression commonly struggle with a feeling of helplessness as white society cuts them off from their territory only to ruin it through overdevelopment and pollution. Consider, too, the strident terms the Mashpee Wampanoags used in a 1752 Native-language petition protesting English trespass. They declared:
This Indian land, this was conveyed to us by these former sachems of ours. We shall not give it away, nor shall it be sold, nor shall it be lent, but we shall use it as long as we live, we together with all our children, and our children’s children, and our descendants, and together with all their descendants. They shall always use it as long as Christian Indians live. We shall use it forever and ever … Against our will these Englishmen take away from us what was our land. They parcel it out to each other, and the marsh along with it, against our will. And as for our streams, they do not allow us peacefully to be when we peacefully go fishing. They beat us greatly, and they have houses on our land against our will. Truly we think it is this: We poor Indians soon shall not have any place to reside, together with our poor children, because these Englishmen trouble us very much in this place of ours.
This English-language version of the Mashpee people’s letter can only hint at the extent of their agony. As the Wampanoag language keeper Jessie Little Doe Baird explains, a literal Wampanoag translation of “take away from us what was our land” is something closer to “fall off of our feet,” as if colonists were pulling up the people by their roots from the soil in which the Creator had planted them.23
Colony- and, later, state-appointed guardians were supposed to protect the Indians against English encroachment. Though sometimes they slowed the process, too often they used their positions to give themselves, their friends, and family members the inside track on acquiring Indian resources at a discount. The system began in 1694 when Massachusetts, which had just annexed Plymouth and the islands, authorized its governor to appoint an English guardian for each Indian reservation with the power to expel and prosecute trespassers, sell communal resources like wood, distribute the proceeds, and adjudicate minor crimes and cases of debt. The law’s intent was honorable, but its provisions were a recipe for corruption. After all, the Indians had no say in the choice of their guardians or formal influence over their decisions. Additionally, the guardians were certain to have conflicts of interest because, as elites who lived near Indian communities, their personal or family fortunes invariably included profits from Native land and labor. The abuses of the Chappaquiddick guardian Benjamin Hawes were so flagrant, including trying to get himself named as next in line to the office of sachem, that the Wampanoags charged he “had made a league with the devil” against a Christian people. Their objections grew even more furious after 1746 when Massachusetts gave the guardians discretion to assign their Indian charges to specific parcels of land and lease out the “excess” to colonists. Aquinnah protested that “before this new law came, the English had not power to do as they pleased, as to this our land,” while Mashpee added sarcastically, “We thought we had as good a right to our lands as Englishmen have to theirs.” Both peoples agreed that the guardians left them “poorer” and “do us more hurt than good” because they “hearken too much to the English who are not our friends and don’t care how much we are.”24
In 1760 Mashpee took the fight to remove the guardians all the way to London, sending Reuben Cogenhew with a list of complaints that reached the ears of the king, his Privy Council, and the Board of Trade, which oversaw the colonies. Imperial scrutiny suddenly inspired Massachusetts to respond to Mashpee, including a meeting between Governor Francis Bernard and Cogenhew—whom Bernard disparaged as “a very self-important fellow”—after the Indian’s return home. The result was legislation in 1763 to redefine Mashpee—but no other Indian community—as a self-governing district managed by five overseers chosen by the Wampanoags, two of whom (the clerk and treasurer) had to be white. Mashpee would maintain this status for the next twenty-five years. Not coincidentally, during this period, Mashpee petitions to the legislature halted. It was a sign that Indian community self-governance and territorial sanctity was compatible with colonial society, if only colonial society would permit it.25
FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES
The main problem for the Wampanoags was that, try as they might to exercise self-determination, they were subject to a political and legal system in which they had no representation but which did answer to a white populace generally hostile to their interests. Before King Philip’s War, Wampanoags had governed themselves with little interference from colonial officials. When disputes arose between the Wampanoags and English, they were typically handled through negotiation, not colonial dictate, unless an Indian happened to commit a crime in an English town. As the Chappaquiddick sachem, Seeknout, put it, Indians expected the English to abide by the principle that “your order should come to us, rather than your officer,” meaning that the English would address problems through the sachems, rather than trying to enforce their will directly on the Wampanoag people.26
Yet no sooner had King Philip’s War ended than colonial courts began persecuting Wampanoags under the guise of justice. As early as 1678, Plymouth courts sentenced three Wampanoags named Cartoonas, Simon, and Joel to lifetime slavery outside New England for stealing twenty-five pounds from Zachariah Allen of Sandwich. This ruling was no mere excess while adrenaline from the war continued to run high. Throughout the 1680s, Plymouth ordered Wampanoags “out of the country” for crimes like theft, assault, and rape to which colonists would normally receive corporal punishment and fines. Mashpee was so desperate to prevent the English from selling its own Tom Wampetuck into overseas slavery for his inability to pay court fines that in 1685 it confirmed a disputed land deed alienating some of their reserved territory. The regional balance of power had shifted so dramatically that even the islands’ English courts became more aggressive despite the Wampanoags’ vast local population majority. In 1688 Vineyard magistrates threatened three Wampanoags with seven years of slavery each if they failed to pay damages for killing English-owned oxen and sheep. A year later, the island’s court executed a Wampanoag named Pommatook, who confessed to having killed his pregnant girlfriend back in 1664. This was a projection of English power that would have been unthinkable without sachem consent at the actual time of the murder.27
The courts became even more intrusive once Massachusetts absorbed Plymouth and the islands and instituted its Indian guardian system. Though the guardians handled petty crimes committed on the reservations and debts under forty shillings, all serious Indian crimes, major debts, and off-reservation offences were the jurisdiction of regular justices of the peace and upper-level English courts, as was the case with colonists. Native people understood this change for what it was—a major blow to their self-rule, which had previously included their own Indian-run courts with the right of appeal to the English. Robbed of that autonomy under the new system, Native people stopped referring their disputes with other Indians to the courts in favor of trying to handle them informally or not at all. The leading men of several Outer Cape communities complained in 1703 that under the new order, “the young men of said Indians have imbibed an opinion that their former laws are vacated, and so will yield no obedience thereto, but everyone acts according to his own will.” Experience Mayhew reported the same results on the Vineyard, writing that the Indians “are disgusted that they have not the same authority allowed as formerly they had … and will seldom inform the English authority of such breaches of law as are among them.” Wampanoags remained willing to participate in the English system as coequals with the power to govern their own people, but not as subordinates.28
Yet they were subordinates, as demonstrated by the courts’ exploitation of its power to force Indian men, women, and even children into servitude. By the 1690s English judges had tempered the sentencing of Natives to overseas slavery, but instead they began ordering Indian lawbreakers to toil as servants locally to compensate the people they had wronged or to cover the costs of their prosecution. There were at least twenty such cases in Plymouth county courts between 1698 and 1735, with sentences ranging between one and twelve years, for an average of 4.3 years. Similar patterns could be found in the rest of the courts of Cape Cod and the islands. In 1716 the Nantucket court sentenced the Indians Jo Skinny and John Moab to eight years of labor each, on top of thirty stripes from the whip, for stealing eighty pounds from Stephen Coffin Jr. Seven years later, Vineyard magistrates went so far as to punish the Native Abraham Jonathan with a full eighteen years of bondage for stealing a storage chest containing one hundred pounds’ worth of silver and paper money. Most criminal cases produced shorter terms but with such frequency that almost any Indian who entered the courts during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries faced the likelihood of exiting in servitude. The English called this system “justice.” Natives must have had another name for it.29
Unsatisfied with the supply of cheap, bound labor produced by criminal convictions, English lenders and courts turned to the exploitation of Indian debtors and their family members. Throughout the post–King Philip’s War era, it became the norm for Wampanoag and other New England Indian families to purchase food and clothing on credit from colonial merchants because they no longer had enough territory to provide for themselves. It was also normal for colonists to carry debt because of New England’s chronic shortage of circulating currency. Englishmen, like Indians, charged what they needed at the store throughout the year, made occasional payments through barter or cash deposit, then, if they could, accounted for the rest each December. The difference was that Indians were so pinched by white encroachment and the disruption of their families by judicial servitude that they disproportionately fell into the ranks of “desperate debtors,” which meant they were unlikely ever to pay. When their creditors filed lawsuits against them the problem grew worse because court costs, jail charges, and penalties sometimes doubled or tripled the original debt. It was nearly impossible for Indians to win these cases, “both Judges and Jurors, being all parties in the cause,” as Nantucket Wampanoags put it. Unless the Native debtor had land to sell—which excluded those from protected reservations—the courts sentenced him or her to servitude until all the bills were paid. Despite contracts stipulating the length of service, in fact there was no telling when it would end because authorities added time to these sentences whenever servants fell into trouble or became pregnant. Obviously such penalties encouraged some masters to invent charges of misbehavior and sexually exploit their subordinates. In every which way, this system was a trap.30
It even targeted Indian children. Sometimes young people wound up as servants by simple virtue of accompanying their bound mothers. Such was the case with Tobias Potter of Christiantown, who spent his early childhood in a mainland English home where his mother, Elizabeth Uhquat, toiled, until Uhquat sent him at age nine to work for another colonial family because she could not afford to keep him even after her own release. Oftentimes the courts bound out orphaned Indian children, or even children who had lost just one parent, based on the prejudice that they were inherently better off in white households than in supposedly disorderly and vice-ridden Indian ones. In most cases, however, it was the parents themselves who sold the children into servitude in what can hardly be called a choice. To be sure, they crossed their fingers that their children would emerge from the experience fluent in English and literate, though colonial masters routinely shirked their contractual responsibility to teach reading and writing. Yet foreign language and literacy lessons were not enough to convince Indian parents to turn over their own children to English families who, at best, felt nothing for them. They did so because they could see no other way. Sometimes sacrificing one child to creditors was the only way to keep the parents free and earning money so the rest of the children did not wind up as servants, too. Still another factor was that so many Indian families were in disarray because of debt peonage that family and friends could not help care for one’s children in times of desperation. It was a nightmare.31
Take, for instance, Joseph Quasson of Monomoyick, who was born in 1698 and lived with his parents for his first six years. “Then,” he recalled, “my father died five pounds in debt to Mr. Samuel Sturges of Yarmouth. I was bound out to him by my mother on that account.” Quasson remained a servant of one Englishman or another until well after he had become a man. Likewise, in 1728 Gershom Barnabus of Mashpee not only agreed to perform three years of whaling for John Otis but indentured “his two children namely Moses Barnabus, a boy of about five years old last August & a girl named Jerusha of about three years old. Moses to serve until age 21. Jerusha until 18,” in exchange for fifteen pounds a year. This money probably kept him and his wife out of bound service and kept open the slim possibility of them earning enough to buy back their tiny children’s freedom. The following decade, the Wampanoag Robin Meserick and his wife committed their young sons, John and David, to serve Gideon Holloway until the boys reached the age of twenty-one unless the parents somehow figured out a way to pay back Holloway the enormous sum of fifty-six pounds within three years. To have done otherwise would have put the parents, and by extension the boys, in servitude anyway. Imagine the heartbreak, anxiety, self-loathing, and wrath tearing at the Meserick family and so many other Wampanoag households during these ordeals.32
Though Wampanoags protested this exploitation in the most moving terms, English authorities were more concerned with protecting the interests of white creditors. As early as 1700, Simon Popmonet, George Wapock, and John Terkins pleaded to Boston that their fellow Mashpees were “a people that do own the Great Jehovah and his son our Lord Jesus Christ” and who had “demeaned ourselves peaceably at all times … and assisted our English neighbors both in former and late wars with their and our Indian enemies.” Nevertheless, creditors and the courts seized on their debts to make “ourselves and our poor children … servants for an unreasonable time.” They wanted the legislature to prohibit the English from extending Indians credit and collecting it if they did. Yet Boston would not go that far and never bothered to say why. The most it would do was require a guardian’s consent for any indenture contact, paying little regard to how simple it was to procure those signatures.
A half century later, little had changed. The missionary Gideon Hawley recalled that when he first arrived at his missionary post in Mashpee in 1757, he was shocked to discover that
every Indian had his master … Their children were sold or bound as security for the payment of their fathers’ debts as soon as they were seven or eight years old, which two Justices of the Peace with the consent of the parents was easily obtained, were authorized to do at the desire of their creditors. These Indians and their children were transferred from one to another master like slaves.
The problem was so pervasive, and the English political will to do anything about it was so weak, that in 1760 the worn-down Mashpees conceded, “We can’t at present think of any other method to prevent it.” No wonder. As late as 1794, Hawley could still report “many” Mashpee children serving as bound laborers, and thirteen years later still James Freeman counted 100 of 242 Aquinnah Wampanoags living away from home, “being children put out to service in English families, and other whale men.” As Pumetacom had once feared, the English had reduced the Wampanoags to servitude in their very own homeland.33
Earnings from whaling and fishing and, to a lesser extent, soldiering provided the best opportunities for Native men to keep their families out of indentured service. The whaling and fishing industries grew steadily from seventeenth-century origins as modest enterprises operating close to shore until, by the mid-eighteenth century, whalers were hunting the breadth of the Atlantic basin for months at a time. Nantucket Island alone hosted more than eighty ships employing more than one thousand men by the eve of the American Revolution, while New England as a whole required another four thousand shiphands, many of whom were Indian. “Go where you will from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi,” wrote Hector St. John de Crèvecour of Nantucket and the Vineyard in 1782, “and you will find almost everywhere some Natives of these two islands employed in seafaring occupations.” No sooner had he finished writing these words than the industry expanded to the Arctic, Pacific, and even Indian Oceans. The length of voyages increased from months to years, and the ships grew so large in order to accommodate onboard tryworks (or blubber boiling stations) that the epicenter of the fleet moved from shallow Nantucket harbor to deepwater New Bedford, Massachusetts. Located in the heart of historic Wampanoag territory, a mere twenty miles’ sail from Aquinnah, New Bedford’s bustling port soon hosted what one observer characterized as “a greater variety of human species than is elsewhere to be found under the bright sun of Christian civilization. Europeans there are of every flag and language; Native Yankees … Gay Headers and negroes; aboriginals and Africans; Island Portuguese as plenty as whales’-teeth; with an occasional sprinkling of Chinese, Luscars, Australians, and Polynesians, cannibals and vegetarians.” It is no coincidence that one of the characters in Herman Melville’s 1851 whaling adventure, Moby-Dick, is Tashtego, a Wampanoag harpooner from Gay Head (or Aquinnah).34
Demand for Native soldiers grew in lockstep with whaling. England was at war with France in North America on and off from 1688 through 1763, with the Lake Champlain–Lake George region, northern New England, and the Canadian Maritimes among the most active theaters for Indians serving with colonial armies. Overlapping with and sometimes outlasting these conflicts were wars between Massachusetts and the Maine Wabanakis in which the Bay Colony often employed semi-independent Indian ranger companies composed largely of Wampanoags. Then came the Revolution and War of 1812, which mobilized all of American society, including Indians. The cumulative effect of these wars on Wampanoag life was dramatic. By one count, New England Indians, particularly Wampanoags, served at twice the rate of their English neighbors during the imperial wars. The Sakonnet community, for instance, built on its tradition of service for the English in King Philip’s War to fill units led by Benjamin Church or his descendants in King William’s War (1689–97), Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), Governor Drummer’s War (1722–25), King George’s War (1744–48), and then the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Mashpee contributed a higher percentage of its men to provincial and continental forces during the Revolution than any other town in Massachusetts. Such patterns suggest that nearly every able-bodied Indian man from southern New England served in the military at least once during his life.35
Captain Amos Haskins, c. 1850. Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Captain Amos Haskins (1816–1861), an Aquinnah Wampanoag, was a rare example of a Native whaler who rose to the highest ranks of the industry. At the age of thirty-five, he captained his first voyage, on a ship coincidentally named Massasoit. His accomplishments allowed him to build a comfortable life for himself and his family in the port city of New Bedford. The vast majority of Native whalers were less fortunate. White creditors and the courts exploited their debt to force many of them into this dangerous service for most of their adult lives. It was part of a larger pattern of debt peonage that drove Indian men into the military and Indian women and children into household labor for whites.
Decent pay partly accounts for the high rate of Indian participation in maritime work and soldiering, but only partly. The whaling and fishing industries offered employees set shares of whatever profits their voyages earned. The more skilled the laborer, the greater his share, regardless of his race, though merchants usually reserved the highest-paying positions for whites. Typically a whaler’s or fisherman’s pay took the form of credit added to his individual account at the employer’s company store. If he had managed to keep his debts in check, a lucrative voyage could earn him enough to build a house and purchase some extras. Military service could also be profitable, despite its association with the most desperate elements of society. The combination of enlistment bonuses, wages, plunder, and scalp bonuses could earn a Native soldier as much as a good whaling venture, with the added incentive that recruiters sometimes also promised to tend to his family’s welfare while he was away. Not least of all, both at-sea work and military service carried manly prestige because of the danger and wide geographic range of these activities, which made them something like substitutes for the decline of intertribal warfare and hunting. Some special Indian units in the colonial military permitted Wampanoags to serve alongside friends and relatives under elite men from their communities. To no small degree, then, Wampanoags valued these activities.36
Yet most Native men did not perform this work on their own terms. Rather, white people who controlled their debts or indentures compelled them to do it. By one count, roughly three-quarters of Indians who served on Nantucket whaling crews during the 1720s and 1730s were servants whose earnings went directly to English masters. Even technically free Indian mariners were usually caught in a vicious cycle of debt peonage. More often than not, their meager shares were insufficient to pay for the work clothes and equipment they had bought on credit to perform their labor in the first place, never mind to clear the debts they had incurred to care for their families. An unsuccessful voyage meant having to sign on to another one, and sometimes a series, just to keep creditors at bay. The Nantucket Wampanoags tried to call attention to their plight by complaining that their merchant overlords forced them to chase whales even on Sunday. “How can we any ways be like Christians,” they questioned, “when we should be praying to God on the Sabbath day morning then we must be rowing after whale or killing whale or cutting up whale on Sabbath day … [O]ur masters lead us in darkness and not in light.”37
It grew darker still when merchants and authorities conspired to swindle hopelessly indebted mariners into using their children’s freedom as collateral on the gamble of a whaling share. As Hawley explained it, “First the father is forced to go whaling. The boys are put up in sureties. When whaling fails to pay the debt, the boys are given up.” And, he might have added, the father commits to go to sea again. As late as 1804 the Christiantown Wampanoags were still protesting that “our men are sent [on] long voyages to sea by those who practice in a more soft manner that of kidnapping, and when they return with ever so great success they are still in debt and have nothing to receive.” From the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, nearly every Wampanoag whaleman pursuing the leviathan was just as assuredly being chased by creditors.38
Military service was no different. The best study of this issue finds that half or more Indians in military service were indentured servants, which was seven times the rate of colonial soldiers. Most of the rest of Indian soldiers were technically free but had accumulated such unmanageable debts that they were also beholden to their creditors. Too often, these lenders or their relatives were the very Englishmen who led the Indians’ military companies and served as their guardians. For instance, Richard Bourne, a descendant of the missionary to the Mashpee Wampanoags by the same name, raised more than a quarter of his hundred-man Indian force in 1724 just by calling in his or his family members’ accounts. Another two Indians in his unit were indebted to his second-in-command, Lieutenant Jeremiah Hawes. Still other Wampanoags “enlisted” because their creditors or masters had been drafted (Indians were not subject to the draft) and demanded that they serve as substitutes. Experience Mayhew recalled the case of Samuel James of Sengekontaket, who “being pressed to go as a soldier into the war … was most grievously distressed on that account, and came weeping to me, praying me, if it were possible to get him released; telling me, that his leaving of his wife would be a greater grief to her than she was able to endure.” In all these scenarios, the Indian soldier never saw his pay, which leads one scholar to conclude that “debt was clearly the primary mechanism for the recruitment of Indian men for the army, much as it was in the whaling industry.” Indeed, Native men often shuffled between the military and whaling in alternate seasons throughout most of their adult lives. In other words, they were performing the most dangerous, brute work for the benefit of the very society that oppressed them, as they themselves realized. After serving in Massachusetts forces five times between 1725 and 1750, losing a leg, and then sinking into poverty without financial relief from the colonial government, the Christian Wampanoag preacher William Simon of Titicut rued that all his suffering extended from him having “ventured my life in defense of the English people.” Likewise, the people of Mashpee questioned why Massachusetts allowed their guardians to tyrannize them when “we have never been against the English, but united with them against their enemies.”39
Wampanoags knew the answer was that whites typically stereotyped them as lazy drunkards incapable of civilized living and even of caring properly for their children. This characterization remained constant even amid otherwise important changes in white New Englanders’ racial depictions of Indians. During the century after King Philip’s War, when Indian-colonial warfare remained a constant feature of colonial life, it was common for whites to dehumanize Indians and call for their destruction, even as white elites promoted missionary work to prepare Indians for eventual incorporation into white society. Consider a New London publisher’s decision in 1721 to reprint Wait Winthrop’s 1678 ode to the English veterans of the Great Swamp Massacre. Winthrop, scion of New England’s most prestigious family, compared the Natives who defended their homes on that bloody day to “a swarm of flies, they may arise … yea Rats and Mice or Swarms of Lice.” It was but a small step from calling Natives vermin to advocating their extermination. During the Seven Years’ War of the 1750s, there were multiple incidents of white New Englanders, in taverns and even in church, declaring that the only way to convert Indians was by “powder and ball,” or, in other words, by deadly force. No wonder that later in the century an anonymously authored broadside published in Boston under the title “The Indian’s Pedigree” half joked that the race of Indians descended from the mating of the devil and a hog.40
When not likening Indians to demons and beasts, white racial rhetoric tended to cast them as pathetic, attributing their poverty and subordination to their supposedly inherent shortcomings rather than to exploitation by a more powerful colonial society. As the Massachusetts lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, admitted in 1764, “We are too apt to consider the Indians as a race [as] being by nature inferior to us, and born to servitude.” Thirty years later, Samuel Badger, minister to a white congregation in what had once been the thriving praying town of Natick, told the Massachusetts Historical Society that Indians “are generally considered by white people, and placed, as if by common consent, in an inferior and degraded condition, and treated accordingly.” He added that whites felt free to take “every advantage of [Indians] that they could, under color of legal authority, and without incurring its censure, to dishearten and depress them.” The same white people trafficking in these racial aphorisms had Christian Indians as neighbors and sometimes as fellow parishioners during Sunday worship, though they always consigned them to seats at the back of the meetinghouse. Clearly they did not see Indians, Christian or not, as either equal in the flesh or before God.41
By the nineteenth century, what little sense of responsibility eastern whites had once accepted for Native people’s troubles was gone. The ugly business of Indian-white warfare had shifted west, and the rhetoric of violent extermination along with it. Now it became possible to muse that Indians’ supposedly innate savagery fated them to recede and disappear in the face of white expansion. Supposedly, Indians absorbed only the worst qualities of white people, like drinking and debt, and none of the best ones, like thrift and hard work. Thus they deteriorated through contact with whites and then eventually disappeared. Over the next few decades, whites developed these ideas to convince themselves that God destined Indians for extinction to make way for a superior, Christian, enlightened, democratic, white civilization. This thinking, which eventually morphed into a white conquest ideology known as Manifest Destiny, and, for that matter, the Thanksgiving myth, conveniently allowed whites to abdicate responsibility for their murderous conquest and oppression of Native people. They attributed it to just the natural, divine order of things.42
Americans today so closely associate Manifest Destiny with the Mexican-American War of the 1840s and the Plains Wars of the mid- to late nineteenth century that it is easy to overlook how eastern whites had propagated some of its tenets, too, in the context of dealing with local Indians like the Wampanoags. Take, for example, the Boston writer William Tudor, who in 1820 cited the Wampanoag example to contend that it was “hopeless” to civilize Indians and that the “unfortunate race” faced “inevitable destruction.” The Atlantic Monthly made the same point in an 1859 account of Aquinnah, which concluded that “the Indian” was simply incapable “of exchanging his own purely physical ambitions and pursuits for the intellectual and cultivated life belonging to the better class of his conquerors … Civilization to the savage destroys his own existence and gives him no better one—destroys it irredeemably and forever.”43
Native people rarely told whites about how such treatment made them feel, but when they did, their statements were filled with pain and sorrow. The Pequot William Apess, who ministered to Mashpee in the 1830s, reflected that though he descended from a family of sachems, “this availed nothing with me; the land of my fathers was gone; and their characters were not known as human beings but as beasts of prey. We were represented as having no souls to save, or to lose, but as partridges upon the mountains. All these degrading titles were heaped upon us. Thus, you see, we had to bear all this tide of degradation, while prejudice stung every white man, from the oldest to the youngest, to the very center of the heart.” “Why should I try?” a Christiantown Wampanoag put it differently to state authorities in 1849. “The prejudice against our color keeps us down.”44
One reason whites were able to treat Native people so cruelly was that their population continued to grow by leaps and bounds, while Indian numbers plummeted. Massachusetts had expanded to more than 235,000 people by the eve of the American Revolution, with local Indians representing barely 1 percent of that figure. Even on just the Cape and islands, the non-Indian (and overwhelmingly white) population of 22,470 in 1776 dwarfed that of local Wampanoags by a factor of at least ten. Following King Philip’s War and well into the 1800s, Wampanoag men tended to live short lives because of their perilous work as whalers, fishermen, and soldiers. For instance, between 1750 and 1779, Nantucket lost 38 ships and 494 sailors, which, given that an estimated 5 of 13 whalemen were Native, would put the number of Indian dead from that port alone at about 190. The wide-ranging travel of Wampanoag mariners and soldiers, and labor of other Wampanoags in port towns with international traffic, exposed their people to an endless succession of deadly diseases that ground down their already thinned populations. In 1730 smallpox decimated the Wampanoags of Monomoyick on the outer Cape, “so that there is scarce any grown person of the Indians left in this Town.” Six years later, another smallpox epidemic killed up to half of the Yarmouth Wampanoags, while in 1738 an unnamed sickness carried off large numbers of people at Mashpee. The worst case on record from this period was an outbreak of yellow fever in 1763–64, which slayed more than two hundred Wampanoags on Nantucket, including nearly all the adults, plus some thirty-nine Vineyard Wampanoags, mostly at Chappaquiddick, and an unknown number at Mashpee. In the American Revolution, twenty-five of the twenty-six Mashpee men who served in one Barnstable regiment died before returning home and the one who did survive brought back with him a camp disease that took the lives of seventy people from a total population of less than three hundred. This was a demographic crisis by any measure, made infinitely worse, let it be remembered, by white society taking advantage of its overwhelming strength to degrade Native people in ways great and small.45
INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
The premature loss of their people to disease and work-related deaths on top of whites’ appropriation of Indian land and labor made it nearly impossible for families in the smallest Wampanoag communities to make ends meet. By 1815 there were only six Native households at Indian Town in Yarmouth, eight at Potonumecut in Eastham, eight at the head of Buzzards Bay, and six at Sengekontacket on the Vineyard, all of which had nearly twice as many women as men. Even more depopulated were the Wampanoag hamlets of Mattakeesett (Pembroke), Sippican (Rochester), Betty’s Neck (Assawompset), Wareham, Acoaxet, Apponagansett, and Acushnet (near Dartmouth). Some of the people had relocated to larger Wampanoag communities, where it was sometimes possible to make a reasonable living and find marriage partners. Such places included Mashpee (about 400 people in 1800), Aquinnah (some 250), Herring Pond (about 100 people), and, to a lesser extent, Chappaquiddick (some 90) and Watuppa (50 to 75). Others had gone to live with the Narragansetts of Rhode Island or the Mohegans or Pequots of Connecticut. Otherwise, most young people who managed to escape bound servitude sought opportunity and companionship in the “colored” wards of New England seaports and cities. Whites considered the “mixed” population of these neighborhoods to be black, but the people had a more nuanced sense of themselves. As the supposedly black representatives of Nantucket’s “New Guinea” neighborhood wrote in 1822, “there are among the colored people of this place, remains of the Nantucket Indians, and that nearly every family in our village are partly descended from the original inhabitants of this and neighboring places.”46
The challenge of maintaining the larger communities included integrating male outsiders whom Native women had married because of the shortage of Wampanoag men. These newcomers came from a variety of backgrounds, as captured by Mashpee’s white missionary, Hawley, who detested the trend as “miscegenation.” In 1787 he complained that Mashpee “has been an asylum for the poor Natives and their connections … for we have had an East Indian, a native of Bombay, married to one of our females, and another from Mexico, besides several Dutchmen from [the British] General [John] Burgoyne’s army … From Mohegan and other places in Connecticut, from Narragansett and other places in Rhode Island, as well as from various towns in the Massachusetts.” The “Dutchmen” were Hessians (German mercenaries) who had fought for Britain during the Revolution. Hawley also counted a number of black men at Mashpee. As the New England states phased out slavery after the Revolution, the free black population often found work in the same places as Wampanoags because white society consigned both groups to low-status jobs. Romantic relationships between black men and Wampanoag women developed in turn, with the couples sometimes moving to the reservations to settle down. At Mashpee, such men included Sepney Pollards, “a negro from near Boston”; “Negro Cuff”; “Drover a Negro”; a “Portugal Negro” (or Cape Verdean); “Fornnis a Negro from N[ew] York”; and “Newport Mye Negro.” There were twenty-six black men on the reservation in 1800. More than just love matches, Wampanoag women who wanted to get married often had no choice but to bring in partners from the outside. As for the newcomers, they could hardly believe their stroke of luck in successfully courting women with access to land. Yet these relationships introduced profound tensions into how Wampanoag communities operated internally and dealt with white society.47
Dorcas Honorable. Collections of the Nantucket Historical Association.
Dorcas Honorable (née, Esop; ca. 1770–1855) came from a prestigious line of Nantucket Wampanoags and lived out her long life on the island. White Nantucketers seized on her passing in 1855 to proclaim her the last of the Nantucket Wampanoags, part of a broader trend of white New Englanders insisting that Indians were disappearing as if by nature. Such talk was an extension of the national ideology of Manifest Destiny and of a colonial racial logic in which Indian identity diminished through mixture (the better to make Indians vanish and open their land to whites), whereas blackness spread (the better to expand the servile workforce).
It was difficult to ease newcomers into the communal practices of large reservations like Mashpee and Aquinnah, where people could enclose as much open land as they needed for as long as they wanted, so long as they did not sell any of it to outsiders. This custom left white observers stunned that “while one proprietor has but half an acre, and another has over a hundred acres, there is no heart-burning, no feeling that the latter has more than his share.” Local “stinting committees” fenced off certain tracts of land for the people to graze their livestock in common, and Aquinnah even operated a common planting field that it plowed at public expense. Otherwise, woodland, cranberry bogs, hunting grounds, fishing spots, clay deposits, berry bushes, and medicinal plants were available to everyone. The people sometimes gathered as a community to harvest and sell these resources in bulk to fund public services like poor relief. One Massachusetts official, assuming that jealousy and selfishness were naturally the dominant features of all human societies, marveled that these places were “almost realizing the wildest dreams of the communists.”48
Yet communalism was not the wild dream of most of the males who married into Native communities. They associated manhood with independent decision-making, including capitalizing on the value of their labor and property on the market. These were particularly sensitive issues for black men recently emancipated from slavery, who defined freedom, in part, as the right to enjoy the same liberties as white men. Yet Indians did not consider the issue open for discussion. As early as 1784, some Aquinnah Wampanoags began to denounce “the new comers the strangers,” while at Mashpee the people worried that the “Negroes and English who have happily planted themselves here … unless they are removed will get away our lands & all our privileges in a short time.” To guard against such a risk, these communities started to keep censuses that distinguished between “proprietors” with economic and political rights and “non-proprietors” who lived there as guests of their wives, and not always welcome ones.49
A common problem involved male outsiders dropping off their destitute Wampanoag wives and children for the community to support and then going to sea, even when the woman’s only link to the community was through her parents or even grandparents. Aquinnah judged such behavior to be “not right,” emphasizing that “we are willing to do all we can for Gay Head poor; but we are not willing to maintain people that do not rightly belong on Gay Head, for we have no means of supporting them.” Tensions between insiders and outsiders reached a pitch when absentee Indians from mixed marriages tried to claim land rights in the community and even to sell these parcels to fund lives elsewhere. In 1823 Christiantown found itself embroiled in two lawsuits over such issues. With less than three hundred acres fully divided among forty or fifty people, the community argued that if it lost these contests, “we are undone.” Yet, given the large number of descendants who lived off-reservation in desperate conditions, married to outsiders who viewed land as a commodity, troubles of this sort were constant. In the 1840s Christiantown suffered through two more legal cases, “which arose in consequence of negro men marrying women amongst them.” Similar “difficulties” and “unhappy contention” led Chappaquiddick to call for a renewed ban on the sale of its land to any outsiders and the state legislation requiring “that when a foreigner shall marry and settle among us, he shall be subjected to the same law to which we are.” Without such vigilance, the reservations were in real danger of dissolution.50
One way Wampanoag communities responded to the threat of newcomers and indigent returning absentees was by elevating Wampanoag women to the political fore, a position that they have held ever since. Sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century, Mashpee and then Aquinnah decided that only the Indian wives of mixed marriages, not the husbands, could represent their families in the town meeting and lay claim to land. As the Aquinnah minister Zacheus Howwoswee explained in 1860, “We the proprietors on Gay Head wish to conduct our own business separate from the foreigners & strangers. We never have allowed them any poll [voting] right on Gay Head, therefore they have not any in our land but work on their wife’s portion of land.” Not coincidentally, in the nineteenth century white observers began remarking for the first time about Wampanoag women “taking the same liberty of speech” as their men in public settings. This change corresponded to a dramatic rise in the number of Wampanoag women signing petitions to white authorities between 1750 and 1850 at a rate even higher than their proportion of the total adult population. Of course, the Wampanoags had a tradition of elite women sometimes serving as sachems. Additionally, oral traditions contend that women’s councils had always influenced community decision-making, and women had always governed their households. Yet it took the challenge of integrating newcomers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before everyday Wampanoag women played such an assertive public political role.51
A more subtly detected but no less profound effect of these mixed marriages was the further weakening of the people’s use of the Wampanoag language. The century-long pattern of whites forcing Native children into indentured servitude, and then young adults into whaling, soldiery, or household service, had removed countless individuals from Wampanoag communities for most of their formative years, thus robbing them of the experience of acquiring the language through face-to-face exchanges. When they returned to their communities as adults, often they had little or no command of their ancestral tongue. Another, more minor destructive influence was the New England Company’s cessation of Wampanoag-language publications in the 1720s, with the express purpose of encouraging Native people to learn English. Yet the real hammer blow to the language came after the Revolution in the form of mixed marriages. Doubtless some outsiders and their children learned to speak Wampanoag, but with English already on the rise, most mixed households probably spoke it as their first language. If and when the children of these relationships left the reservation to work for whites, it all but ensured that they would be English-only speakers.
Creeping damage to the Wampanoag tongue accumulated throughout the eighteenth century before turning dire in the early nineteenth. Consider the following sequence: in the 1720s Experience Mayhew judged that Vineyard Wampanoags understood their own language “much better” than English. This was also the case at Mashpee, where in 1724 the Reverend Joseph Bourne could not get the people to assemble “unless he will preach to them in their own language.” As late as 1753, the Mashpees complained in a letter written in Wampanoag that they “had no need” for the schoolmaster provided for them by the New England Company because he spoke only English and “we cannot understand him, only a few can.” Yet just four years later the Mashpees asked Hawley to preach in English alongside the Native minister Solomon Briant because “some of us did not understand the Indian dialect fully.” Likewise, a 1767 celebration of the Lord’s Supper involving the Natives of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard included a morning service in Wampanoag and afternoon worship in English because though “the Indians are fond of retaining their own Language … they generally however understand English, especially the younger ones among them.”52
A generation later, English had clearly spread at the expense of the Wampanoag tongue. In 1802 Hawley estimated that at Mashpee “the English language is now more copious perhaps than any of the old language, and is enough for an Indian to know.” The Vineyard missionary Frederick Baylies, who was as familiar with the island Wampanoags as any outsider, judged in 1823 that there were only “six Indians who can talk Indian” and “not one who can read Indian.” By the same token, when Samuel Davis went to Mashpee in 1838 to compile a Wampanoag vocabulary, he was told by an unnamed “half blood” informant, aged forty, that “in his infancy he learned the English tongue. These specimens there, of the aboriginal, he has acquired, from the old Natives of whom scarcely any more remain that speak it.”53
Certainly these overconfident pronouncements by white outsiders were shaped by the racial ideology of Indian disappearance and failed to capture the full complexity of Wampanoag-language use in these communities. There must have been Wampanoags who knew more of their ancestral language than they would reveal in public, even to other Indians, as part of the tradition of keeping sacred knowledge guarded until the appropriate time. Mashpee Wampanoags tell that their last fluent speaker, before the recent revitalization of the language, was still alive in the early 1950s. A greater body of people continued to drop whatever Wampanoag words and phrases they did know into predominantly English-language conversations, thereby signaling their solidarity with other Wampanoags past and present. Nevertheless, fluency in the language was so rare by the 1830s that it could no longer function as the people’s public speech.
To many Wampanoags, the growing dominance of English at the expense of their natal tongue felt like loss, not just change. Over the generations, Wampanoag people had made a host of cultural adjustments to the demands of colonization without compromising their sense of who they were. After all, they had adopted Christianity by infusing it with their own beliefs and values and running their churches with their own officers. They had taken up animal husbandry to compensate for the colonists’ encroachment on their hunting grounds and the decline of wild game. They had opened schools and taught their children literacy in Wampanoag and English both to access the Bible and to exercise control over the written documents that were part and parcel of colonial life. They had incorporated manufactured clothing into their wardrobes and certain foreign foods into their cuisine for reasons of taste and declining access to wild resources. Yet all along they had continued to identify themselves as “Gay Head Indians,” “Mashpee Indians,” “Herring Pond Indians,” and the like, because they continued to live on their ancestral lands, with their own people, telling their own special stories, passing down time-tested values, and, not least of all, speaking their own language.
The Wampanoag language had been like a barrier of beachfront dunes holding back the raging colonial sea. Its erosion seemed as permanent as the loss of shoreline, leaving the people feeling empty and vulnerable. In the late nineteenth century, the botanist Edward Burgess visited the Wampanoag community of Aquinnah, where elders told him stories about Zachariah Howwoswee, who was the last Indian minister to preach in Wampanoag until his death in 1821 at age eighty-three. The elders remembered that whenever Howwoswee switched the language of his sermons from English to Wampanoag, “there were but few of them could know what he meant … and they would cry and he would cry.” Howwoswee knew his listeners could not understand his words, but hearing their people’s speech fostered a sense of their collective history, suffering, and anxiety about the future. As Howwoswee put it, speaking Wampanoag was a way “to keep up my nation.” Hope could be found in a prophecy—which turned out to be true—that the language would awaken after seven generations, but as it slept the people felt its absence deep in their hearts.54
WHITE INSISTENCE ON INDIAN DISAPPEARANCE
Local whites twisted the knife by seizing on the Wampanoags’ marriages with outsiders, particularly blacks, and the weakening of the Wampanoag language to contend that the Indians were on the verge of disappearance. This was New England’s own regional twist on the national racial idiom of Manifest Destiny. It held that Indian “blood” was weaker than that of other races, meaning that the child of an Indian and a non-Indian became a “half-blood,” the child of that “half-blood” and another non-Indian became a “quarter-blood,” and then, eventually, all trace of the Indian vanished, which is precisely what whites who coveted Indian land wanted to happen. By contrast, white Americans thought of black blood as polluting, so that any degree of African descent made one black. It was not coincidental that such a formulation expanded the servile black labor pool to the benefit of white people. In other words, whites’ inconsistencies in reckoning Indian and black racial identities were not illogical at all. They were entirely in line with white colonial desires.55
The Wampanoags constantly endured the weight of these white racial judgments. For instance, in 1818, when the white Vineyard missionaries Joseph Thaxter and Frederick Baylies reported to Boston on the problem of Indian whalers and debt, they included an editorial that there were few “pure” Natives left: “they are a mixture of everything.” Baylies tried to prove his point in 1823 by compiling a “blood quantum” census of every Vineyard Native he could identify, which involved breaking down their ratio of Indian, black, and white “blood” into halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths. Just how he came up with these figures, he did not say, but he used them to confirm his predetermined conclusion that “it is not probable there ever will be another Indian child born on the island.” Baylies certainly was a white man of his times. A committee appointed in 1827 to survey all the Indians in Massachusetts concluded that “those of the full blood do not probably exceed one hundred” and “exhibit little of the characteristics of their race, except the power of patient and silent sufferance.” Another committee twenty years later took this idea a step further by concluding that “the admixture of African blood” was “the only one common to all the different tribes.” Some of the Wampanoags’ less sophisticated white neighbors had cruder ways to express the same sentiment. According to the Atlantic Monthly, white Vineyarders often used “nigger” to refer to “these half-breeds.” By the twentieth century, and perhaps earlier, country whites in southern New England derided local Indians as “monigs,” meaning “more nigger than Indian.”56
The Wampanoags did not take these slurs lying down. Proudly self-identifying as “Indians and people of color” of particular Native communities, they spent the first decades of the nineteenth century pressing for the removal of their guardians and state recognition of their right to self-rule. They emphasized that the land had belonged to their people since ancient times, giving them an inherent right to be free from the guardians’ power to lease out and even sell tribal territory. Hannah Perry of the Watuppa reservation added that her people’s guardians did not treat them with the “kindness and humanity to which they think they are entitled” but “with contempt.” By 1833 the Mashpees had reached the limits of their patience not only with their guardians but with their white minister, Phineas Fish, who preached to a congregation made up almost entirely of whites from neighboring towns despite collecting his salary from a charitable fund for evangelizing Indians. Most of the Indians attended Baptist services led by one of their own, Blind Jo Amos. Yet Fish prohibited them from using the Mashpee meetinghouse. Daniel Amos lambasted Fish: “We do not believe in you trying to make us believe that we have not as good a right to the table of the Lord as others, that we are kept back merely because our skin is of a different complexion, and we find nothing in so doing to justify you in the scripture.” Declaring “that all men were born free and equal; that as a tribe they were determined to rule themselves,” the Mashpees took back possession of their meetinghouse and obstructed a party of whites from hauling away firewood cut on the reservation. Barnstable County officials responded by declaring the Mashpees to be in a state of “riot,” then arrested their new preacher, the Pequot William Apess, and another of their leading men on charges of trespass and assault.57
Apess made them pay, rhetorically at least. Following in the footsteps of the Mohegan Indian minister Samson Occom, who in the 1760s and 1770s became the first published Native American autobiographer, hymnist, and poet, Apess already had several publications under his belt by the time he arrived in Mashpee. Yet the so-called riot gave him fresh material with which to work and a receptive Yankee audience. For years, New England had been the epicenter of white opposition to President Andrew Jackson’s inhumane removal of the Cherokees and other southern Indian tribes from their ancestral lands to territory west of the Mississippi. Now the Mashpee protest awakened those same critics to the fact that there were Indians in their own backyard to whom New England state governments denied basic rights. Apess seized on the moment. With the support of the abolitionist William Garrison and other members of Boston’s progressive literati, Apess delivered a series of public lectures (subsequently published) highlighting the troubles of Mashpee and Indians everywhere at the hands of self-righteous, hypocritical white Christians. He also provided a pointed lesson on New England’s colonial history that continues to influence debate over the stories Americans tell about Thanksgiving.58
Apess’s Eulogy on King Philip reversed the emerging myth of the pious Pilgrim Fathers to transform the Wampanoags into heroes and the English into villains. In Apess’s hands, “Massasoit” (Ousamequin) was a model of kindness “that would do justice to any Christian nation or being in the world” because he patiently suffered “the most daring robberies and barbarous deeds of death that were ever committed by the American Pilgrims.” Apess meticulously laid out all the foul details of English misbehavior in the founding of Plymouth, including the kidnappings, grave robbing, theft of Wampanoag corn, and unprovoked massacre of Indians at Wessagusett. The same men who committed these crimes had the impudence to turn to Massasoit for help, and the chief, to his moral credit, obliged. “No people could be used better than they were,” Apess intoned about the Pilgrims. The Wampanoags “gave them venison and sold them many hogsheads of corn to fill their stores … Had it not been for this humane act of the Indians, every white man would have been swept from the New England colonies.” Apess even considered Massasoit to be a better Christian than the Pilgrims who called him a savage. After all, the self-styled saints returned Massasoit’s generosity by attempting to reduce the Wampanoags through every foul means they could contrive.59
Apess also declared Massasoit’s son, Philip (or Pumetacom), to be “the greatest man that ever lived upon the American shores” for leading his people in resistance against this exploitation. Apess went so far as to rank Philip above George Washington, white Americans’ Father of the Country, because he fought against a darker tyranny and for greater freedom with far fewer means at his disposal. Additionally, Philip always treated his enemies with honor, quite unlike white people’s barbarity toward Indians during King Philip’s War and in every war against them since. Yet Apess’s most important political point was that Philip was a sage for taking up arms rather than submitting to white people’s indignities. Apess invited his listeners to imagine Philip coming back from the dead to discover that Indian life under colonial rule was just as unbearable as he had feared it would be. “How true the prophecy,” lamented Apess, “that the white people would not only cut down their groves but would enslave them … Our groves and hunting grounds are gone, are dead are dug up, our council fires are put out.” Whites like President Jackson were intent either on “driving the Indians out of the states” or, like New Englanders, “dooming them to become chained under desperate laws.” Either way, there was no justice for Indians in white America, which was the outgrowth of “a fire, a canker, created by the Pilgrims from across the Atlantic, to burn and destroy my poor unfortunate brethren.”60
“Mr. William Apes [sic], a native missionary of the Pequot tribe of Indians,” frontispiece to William Apess, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apess, A Native of the Forest, Comprising a Notice of the Pequot Tribe of Indians, Written by Himself (New York: published by the author; printed by G. F. Bunce, 1831). From the Collections of the New York Public Library.
While serving as preacher to the Mashpee Wampanoags in the 1830s, the Pequot William Apess helped lead a movement by his people to take back control of their local meetinghouse from an indifferent white minister, and control of their land from ineffective state guardians. His campaign included speeches and publications in which he introduced the idea that the Fourth of July and anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing were “Days of Mourning” for Native people because of the evils of colonization.
For that reason, Apess declared, “let every man of color wrap himself in mourning” on the twenty-second of December, which was the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing in Plymouth, and on the Fourth of July celebrating the founding of the United States. In Apess’s view, Indians should treat those dates as “days of mourning and not joy … Let them rather fast and pray to the great Spirit, the Indian’s god, who deals out mercy to his red children, and not destruction.” Apess’s message would continue to resonate among the Wampanoags long after he was gone.61
Unfortunately for Wampanoags everywhere, the Mashpee revolt also convinced a number of white authorities that it was not only strange but wrong to have Indians subject to state law without the status of citizenship. In the short term, their empathy helped Mashpee get much of what it wanted, insofar as Massachusetts turned Mashpee into a self-governing district with most of the powers of other towns except the right to send representatives to the state’s General Court. There would be no more guardians, just popularly elected town officers. Furthermore, Fish was fired and Mashpee received half the amount of his annual salary to use at its own discretion. These were real victories. Yet, in the longer term, Apess’s campaign had the unintended effect of prompting the state to explore whether it should revoke indigenous people’s special status, including the legal protection of their lands, and put them on a purportedly equal legal footing with whites.62
To most Wampanoags, citizenship tied to the elimination of their legal status as Indians did not represent a gift, but a culmination of two centuries of colonial exploitation. When Indians, including the Wampanoags, demanded their rights, they did not mean the same thing as African Americans who wanted the same freedoms, protections, and responsibilities as whites. To Indians, “equality” of that sort was subjugation, because it would require them to pay taxes to a government that did not heed their voice. Furthermore, it would subject them to courts officiated by whites and expose their lands to confiscation when their taxes, fines, or debts went unpaid. This was not what they meant when they called for justice. They meant sovereignty, the sanctity of their lands, and recognition as the First People. In the case of the Wampanoags, that respect also meant honor for their historic role as welcoming hosts and allies of the English.
That opinion rang through loud and clear when Massachusetts authorized commissioners in 1849 and 1861 to evaluate all the Indian communities in the state for citizenship. Expecting to find squalor, drunkenness, and dysfunction, the investigators were surprised to discover that most Wampanoags led dignified lives. They were economically self-sufficient through a combination of wage work, animal husbandry, farming, fishing, and the sale of common resources like berries, wood, shellfish, clay, and pasture. All but a few lived in comfortable framed houses, sometimes with multiple rooms, decorated “with pictures and curiosities collected in the eastern and southern seas.” They were churchgoing people, mannerly, and, contrary to stereotype, “temperate and chaste.” Their values included an emphasis on formal education. “Many of the parents are very desirous that their children and youths should become as well educated as the white people among them,” the commissioners boasted. Consequently, “about every native can read and write.” Most remarkable of all was the effectiveness of the Indians’ town meeting government, the infrequency of litigation between them, and the people’s generous support of the poor. In nearly every respect they seemed perfectly qualified to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.63
Yet most Wampanoags did not want it. Though white authorities hoped to find Indians complaining their special legal status and receipt of state aid made them no more than vassals, the majority felt nothing of the sort. At Chappaquiddick, elders lectured the commissioners that, since whites had swindled them out of nearly “the whole island … they feel that they have the right to expect protection in the enjoyment of the few acres left to them.” Citizenship would rob them of that security because “most of them would soon become the prey of shrewder and sharper men outside, that the little property they possess would soon be wrested from them and that they would be turned out, destitute, upon the cold charities of the world. The community would be consequently broken up, and scattered among those who would have no particular sympathy with them.” The same opinion echoed through community after community, as did a belief about the people’s entitlement to outside funds for the support of education, religion, and poor relief. The commissioners found it puzzling that Native people “have a vague idea that the state has large funds drawn from the sale of lands which would have been theirs … so that whatever they receive is but a just due.” After all, the Wampanoags had once been the “great father” to the “little child” of Plymouth.64
Jane Wamsley, from Harper’s New Weekly, September 1860, 451.
Aquinnah’s Jane Wamsley and Deacon Simon Johnson were leading voices in the mid-nineteenth century against the efforts of Massachusetts to force citizenship on the Wampanoags and divide their common lands into taxable, sellable private-property tracts. Despite the majority of the Wampanoags sharing her opinion, the commonwealth forced these measures on the Wampanoags in the late 1860s and early 1870s as something of a northern iteration of southern Reconstruction.
Deacon Simon Johnson, 1861. Courtesy of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.
One reason whites found this thinking so odd was that they did not see the Wampanoags as bona fide Indians in the first place. Whereas the Wampanoags defined their Indianness in terms of belonging to families and communities of Indian heritage, whites used the racial notion of “purity” and adherence to a timeless “traditional” culture as the standards. This was a double bind if ever there was one, because Indians could either disappear by keeping their Indian identity but refusing to meet the challenges of their times, or they could adapt and thereby sacrifice their status as Indians. Given that the Wampanoags had survived the vagaries of colonialism for more than two centuries, they clearly fell into the latter category, as whites would have it.
The Reconstruction period following the Civil War provided the impetus and political cover for state authorities to impose this supposedly natural demise on viable Wampanoag communities. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, granting citizenship to all natural-born Americans and the right to vote to all citizens, did not affect the Wampanoags technically because they exempted “Indians not taxed,” which in the New England context meant Indians living on reservations. Nevertheless, in practice the new constitutional order signaled the end to the people’s separate legal status, including their protected reservations. One factor was that white authorities denied that the Wampanoags were really Indians. As Governor William Claflin put it, the Natives’ protective status “should exist no longer” because “these persons are not Indians in any sense of the word. It is doubtful that there is a pure-blooded Indian in the State … A majority have more or less of the marked characteristics of the aboriginal race, but there are many without a drop of Indian blood in their veins … the characteristics of the white and negro races have already nearly obliterated all traces of the Indian.” Another influence was that a vocal minority within Wampanoag communities believed that they had the ability and should have the right to compete in American society on the same footing as everyone else. Composed mostly of “foreigners” and those Indians who had succeeded in the outside world, including within the colored ranks of the Union Army, members of this faction wanted the chance to profit from their own land, vote for the officials who governed them, and escape the degradation of being state supervised like lunatics and wards. Most Wampanoag people opposed such a change, fearing that “by being incorporated as a town we shall soon lose our identity as Indians.” Yet the national tide was too strong to hold back.65
Massachusetts was determined to force citizenship on the Wampanoags even though the majority of them did not want it. Legislation passed by the state General Court in 1869 and 1870 declared all Indians within the commonwealth to have the same rights and duties as everyone else. In turn, it ordered the division of the people’s common lands into private property tracts. Mashpee and Aquinnah (then called Gay Head) were incorporated as independent towns. Smaller Wampanoag communities, such as Christiantown and Chappaquiddick on the Vineyard and Herring Pond on the mainland, became part of their surrounding white-majority municipalities, which posed a dire threat to them as distinct Indian places. Thereafter, the pressures of taxation and debt forced some families off the land, the search for employment lured others away, and the desire to live among an Indian majority brought others to Gay Head and Mashpee. A few resolute families remained in the smaller hamlets, conscious that they symbolized their people’s historic connections to the place and anchored the community’s dispersed social network, but sometimes even they had to give way. In 1907 for instance the city of Fall River forced the last Wampanoag family living on what was left of the Watuppa reservation to vacate in order to make way for a reservoir. Even amid such displacement and diaspora, the people generally stayed in touch, held periodic community and tribal reunions, and visited their ancestral territory, but their fears that citizenship would lead to their dispossession had materialized.66
“INDIANS HAVE ALWAYS LIVED HERE”
Mashpee and Aquinnah nearly fell into the same trap. By the early twentieth century, whites had obtained title to most of the land in these communities, and the year-round Indian populations had declined significantly. State census returns (admittedly an imperfect measure of a people who tended to evade white officials) show Aquinnah’s Wampanoag population dropping from 204 in 1861 to 162 in 1900, to 98 in 1940, and Mashpee’s population following a similar regression. Yet these were still Indian places. Most white landowners used their properties only for summer vacation homes or bases for seasonal hunting and fishing, typically with Indian guides. The remoteness of Mashpee and Aquinnah and their reputation as “colored” towns discouraged all but a small handful of whites from living there full time. Indians remained in charge of local government, which they used to turn their towns into de facto tribal organizations. They held town meetings in winter, when they knew their people would be the only ones around to vote. They elected and appointed their own people to town offices, thereby enabling them to monopolize otherwise rare salaried positions. They underrated the assessable real estate of their relatives and friends and permitted taxes to go uncollected when their people were unable to pay (a practice that occasionally drew state scrutiny). They protected town common lands like the Gay Head cranberry bogs and clay cliffs so they could continue to hold tribal ceremonies there. In so many respects, the Wampanoags had figured out how to make town and tribe indistinguishable while keeping white authorities out of their business.67
The people’s local dominance enabled them to infuse their community life with Wampanoag values. Wampanoags treated practically all the land in Gay Head and Mashpee, whether individually owned or not, as a tribal commons that everyone could cross to hunt, fish, and gather. There were few fences and no NO TRESPASSING signs. The widespread practices of allowing any relative or friend in need to settle on one’s land, and of leaving the land to several heirs and then neglecting to record these arrangements, meant that the individual private property tracts created by the Enfranchisement Act became a jumble of overlapping claims that obstructed outsiders from acquiring clear title. As had been the case for centuries, these places remained bastions of Wampanoag communalism and safe havens for relatives returning from their ventures abroad among outsiders. “Indians have always lived here” was how the people explained these practices.68
Amelia Watson, The Road to Gay Head, 1888. Courtesy of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.
This painting of the road to Gay Head captures the remoteness that helped the Aquinnah Wampanoags retain control of their territory long after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts divided it into private-property tracts and incorporated it as a town.
The people also periodically expressed a broader Wampanoag and even pan-Indian identity and political solidarity. Local celebrations in 1920 of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing in America inspired a number of Wampanoags to participate in order to highlight their ancestors’ role in this historic event. Eight years later, Mashpee’s Eben Queppish, a veteran of traveling Wild West shows, and Nelson Drew Simons, an alumnus of the Carlisle Indian School, drew on their experiences in these diverse Indian settings to call for a revival of the Wampanoag tribe. Their organizing included a 1928 powwow held at the Old Indian Church at Herring Pond, which united Wampanoags from throughout the region. The event’s insignia was of an Indian in a Great Plains–style headdress and the saying “I Still Live.” It was a pointed response to the pathos of white tercentenary orations lamenting the extinction of the New England Indians even as those same occasions frequently had Wampanoags serving as honorary “chiefs” and “princesses.” The revived Wampanoag Nation chose as its supreme sachem the Reverend Leroy C. Perry of Pocasset, who took the name “Ousamequin.”69
The Wampanoags’ insistence that they remained a people with a birthright to their homelands and a moral right to respectful treatment by American society took on added urgency after World War II, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, as the economic vibrancy and suburbanization of the Cold War United States produced a flood of whites to Mashpee and Gay Head. Many of the outsiders wanted seasonal vacation homes by the ocean, but a critical mass were retirees, self-employed, or long-distance commuters who planned to live there year-round. Almost overnight, the newcomers seized control of town government and began erecting physical and legal barriers to lands the Wampanoags had enjoyed for countless generations, most glaringly in the form of the New Seabury condominium complex on the coast of Mashpee. At the same time, the federal government, at the urging of the Massachusetts senator, Ted Kennedy, was considering designating a vast stretch of Cape and island territory, including a portion of Gay Head, as a protected wildlife preserve, which would have obstructed the Wampanoags’ access to their cranberry bogs, clay cliffs, and fishing and gathering places. For a century, the people had been fending off privatization and the atomization of family that accompanied it, contrary to long-standing white predications that their extinction was inevitable. Now they confronted the very real possibility of their total dispossession.70
Like Ousamequin, who saw the English alliance as a means to help his people assert their independence from the Narragansetts, like the generations of local Wampanoag leaders who drew on the resources of missionary organizations to steel their people against hostile colonial forces, Mashpee and Gay Head responded by seeking the intervention of the federal government. In this, their model was the Passamoquoddies of Maine, who in 1975 had sued their state in federal court for the recovery of tribal territory ceded since the passage of the Trade and Intercourse Acts of the 1790s. The Passamoquoddies’ contention was that the Trade and Intercourse Acts had given the federal government the sole power, exclusive of the states, of negotiating with Native people for their land. Thus any cession to which Washington, D.C., had not been a party (which was to say, all of them) was null and void. The politically charged proceedings resulted in a settlement awarding the Passamoquoddies, Penobscots, and Houlton Maliseets $81.5 million, including a buyback of hundreds of thousands of acres that became federally recognized tribal reservations. Since the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had similarly dispossessed the Wampanoags of Mashpee and Aquinnah in the nineteenth century without federal approval, these communities saw an opportunity to restore their historic rights and protect their threatened lands.71
Mashpee Indians, 1929. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.
The Wampanoags continued to hold tribal social and political events, including powwows, long after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts declared their Indian legal status to be over. Sometimes these events drew Wampanoags and other Indians from throughout the region. This kind of organizing often coincided with other local and state commemorations of historical events in which the Wampanoags feared they would be ignored or misrepresented, such as the 1920 three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Plymouth colony. As media, especially Hollywood, increasingly trafficked in stereotyped images of Plains Indians, the Wampanoags adopted this dress, such as elaborate feather headdresses, as part of their ceremonial regalia. Some of it appears in this picture.
They were also inspired to take this course by the Red Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, which called for a recovery of Indian sovereignty and dignity and for the United States to honor its historic treaties with Native people. Though some conservative Wampanoags found the Red Power AIM organization (or American Indian Movement) too confrontational and showy, a great many others, particularly young people, considered it a model for Indians to stand up for themselves.72 Organizing locally as tribal communities, regionally (through the Federated Eastern Indian League), and nationally (through the Coalition of Eastern Native Americans and American Indian Congress), they worked as never before “to build Indian pride and unity.”73
The path was not easy or, at first, clear. A federal judge quashed the Mashpee Wampanoags’ initial attempt to recover their lands based on a ruling that they had not maintained their status as a tribe throughout their history and therefore did not have proper legal standing to bring suit. This judgment drew on the very assumptions of Indian racial purity and unchanging Indian culture that whites had used for nearly two centuries to try to make Indians disappear. However painful and insulting this decision was for the Mashpees, it carried the benefit of demonstrating that a successful legal strategy first required Wampanoag communities to obtain federal recognition as tribes through procedures newly defined by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1978. The application process was numbingly bureaucratic and more than a little degrading, for, as many Wampanoags commented, they did not need outsiders to tell them who they were in an existential sense. Furthermore, debates over the ends of obtaining such recognition led to sometimes divisive politics between family members, friends, and neighbors. Yet those arguments were an outgrowth of newfound opportunity. When the Gay Head/Aquinnah Wampanoags finally received federal recognition in 1987, followed by Mashpee in 2007, it represented a bold new era in Wampanoag life.74
The Wampanoag people are currently experiencing a revival by any definition. One might characterize this period as one of decolonization in the sense that the people are reasserting their sovereignty and cultural and economic self-determination. Federal recognition has permitted the tribes to recover portions of their ancestral territory and put them in federal trust to create what are currently a 481-acre reservation at Aquinnah, a 170-acre reservation at Mashpee, and another 151 acres for the Mashpees at Taunton. The status of the Mashpee Wampanoags’ reservation, however, has recently been thrown into peril by a decision from the Department of Interior that the federal government did not have the authority to take land into trust for the tribe in the first place according to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. The issue currently lies with the federal congress. One hopes that it will rule in the Mashpee Wampanoags’ favor, because reservations serve as sites of tribal government, social activities, and, in the case of Aquinnah, an affordable housing complex built on indigenous architectural principles. Federal grants have provided opportunities for educational, medical, cultural, and entrepreneurial initiatives, which, among other results, have allowed greater numbers of Wampanoag students to follow the path of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Hiacoomes to college. At the time of this writing, the Aquinnah Wampanoags are moving forward with a plan to offer high-stakes bingo on their reservation, while Mashpee is seeking congressional approval for a full-fledged casino in Taunton, Massachusetts. The decision to take up gaming has produced contention within tribal communities and between the tribes and surrounding towns. Indeed, it spurred the lawsuit that led to the Department of the Interior’s adverse ruling against Mashpee in the first place. However, these ventures, if successful, have the potential to raise the fortunes of communities that have long ranked among the poorest in Massachusetts and that once had generations of their children seized from them on the basis of their financial indebtedness.75
Most poignantly, modern Wampanoags are increasingly able to speak back to colonial power and, more important, to each other, in the Wampanoag language. The story of how this came to be will someday be considered as fundamental to Wampanoag history as Ousamequin’s outreach to the Pilgrims or Pumetacom’s resistance movement. In the early 1990s Mashpee’s Jessie Little Doe Baird had a series of dreams in which Wampanoag ancestors spoke to her in a language she could not understand. Her interpretation of this vision with the assistance of elders led her on a historic mission. Despite shouldering the responsibilities of a family with four young children and a job as a social worker, she entered the elite graduate program in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for years of painstaking work driven by a sense of sacred duty. Combing through Wampanoag-language materials from the colonial period, including the Bible, sermons, instructional tracts, letters, petitions, and court records, she compiled vocabulary lists of thousands of words and identified grammatical patterns. She then compared her findings with Algonquian languages closely related to Wampanoag, such as Passamaquoddy and Delaware. Once she had a firm command of the language, she went on to teach it to others, holding nighttime language classes, summer language camps, and eventually an immersion school for Wampanoag children. Such efforts won her a 2010 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” in addition to numerous other accolades, which have further contributed to the pathbreaking grassroots work of the Wôpanâak Language Revitalization Project. Wampanoags are now teaching the language in Mashpee High School to permit the tribe’s young people to continue this education. In awakening the Wampanoag language from a sleep that so many outsiders characterized as death, this movement has captured the historic resilience of the Wampanoag people and their determination to chart their own future as a sovereign people in their own homeland.76
A number of the Wampanoags known by this author continue to mourn the suffering wrought on their people by colonists and their successors who arrived calling themselves friends only to become conquerors and exploiters. Yet for the People of the Dawnland, the sun is rising again. As it does, it will cast light on the resting place of Ousamequin, whose remains and funerary offerings the Wampanoags reclaimed in 2017 from museum archaeological collections after a dogged twenty-year search. They then gathered in a special ceremony on a bluff overlooking Narragansett Bay to restore those materials to their original burial site. There, in the heart of Wampanoag country, a people who other Americans insisted had vanished honored their history and prayed in their language.77