Hello, Hivers!!!
Some of you may remember WEDA Pokes Paridgms, which focuses on my other passions: archaeology, paleontology, history, and human evolution. I think I only did one post that poked paradigms. As part of my new plans here on Hive, I will have Monday be the day for the Weekly News Round-Up and Tuesday the day for poking paradigms.
After double majoring in anthropology and history for four years and obtaining my degrees, I learned a lot about how much of the archaeological and historical records are being rewritten in our lifetimes. However, one of the most frightening things I learned is how powerful paradigms are and today we will attempt to shatter a big one, the indigenous history of America.
It's common knowledge that indigenous people lived and thrived for thousands of years in places many of us now call home. If indigenous people lived for thousands of years in America, what happened to their history? Although the colonization of indigenous lands was prevalent all over the United States, this research paper on the indigenous history of Western Massachusetts and the interactions between European colonizers and indigenous people from the 1500s to the 1800s.
I focused this research paper on the indigenous history of Western Massachusetts and how this history was distorted. My research question involves answering whether Sheldon distorted the history of the Pocumtuck people, and if so, what impact did this have on how we view their history today? The best way to form this question into an argument is to change the focus from historian George Sheldon to the indigenous history of Western Massachusetts. George Sheldon wasn't the only historian to distort or erase indigenous history; some people feel this is a political argument, not an academic one. Marie Bruchac and Siobhan Hart have written extensively on George Sheldon's erasure of indigenous history.
The mainstream historical narrative surrounding the history of Indigenous people in New England is myopic, outdated, and longs for revitalization. From glaciation to colonization, the only people to inhabit Western Massachusetts were indigenous Abenakis, and the archaeological record is abundant with evidence of their presence in Western Massachusetts being clear and undebatable.
The historical record of Indigenous people in Western Massachusetts is incomplete, inaccurate, and intentionally distorted; historical archaeology can help historians resurrect Indigenous history.
Historical archaeology has been used to research New England many times before, perhaps made the most famous by James Deetz. For example, a French knife sword was found at the site of the infamous Bloody Brook attack in 1665, and this artifact could be used to prove French involvement in the Bloody Brook attack. The Pocumtuck Fort site in Deerfield is an archaeological site where stone axes, hoes, and tree bark mortars for storing corn. Archaeological evidence like this directly refutes historical sources who claim Deerfield was an empty, uninhabited meadow.
The Pocumtuck people played an essential role in the history of Western Massachusetts because they were the most powerful group in the Connecticut River Valley. When the English, French, and Dutch came to Western Massachusetts in the 1600s, they dealt with the Pocumtuck people. Mount Greylock, a well-known mountain in Western Massachusetts, is named after an infamous Pocumtuck warrior who the Mohawks, English, and French wanted dead, but he was never killed or captured.
There is also Pocumtuck Mountain in Heath, Massachusetts, and the Pocumtuck are the indigenous people who sold the land known today as Springfield to English Puritan William Pynchon in 1636. Historians like George Sheldon claimed that the Pocumtuck people met their fateful end after their fort was attacked by Mohawks. Not only did Sheldon grossly overstate the dramatic end of the Pocumtuck people, but he distorted indigenous history and supplemented his own biases to cement Deerfield history and erase Pocumtuck history. What impact did the work of historian George Sheldon have on erasing and distorting the history of the Pocumtuck people and how can historians correct the historical record?
Sheldon’s family home was built on an indigenous burial ground, and in the 1800s, Sheldon oversaw numerous archaeological digs on his property. Sheldon sold indigenous artifacts to Europeans and through trade networks down the east coast until the market became saturated with indigenous artifacts because of the rapid expansion of settlements throughout New England. What George Sheldon did to the history of the Pocumtuck people could be written off as a microcosm of a pattern that repeats itself throughout American history, which is why it is an important answer the question as to whether Sheldon intentionally distorted history or he was adhering to the political environment around him.
In A History of Deerfield, Sheldon writes of the Pocumtucks in a very dismissing tone because he is not acting like a historian or a chronicler of events but pushing a narrative, which is when history is distorted.
Sheldon wrote:
"Thus fell the powerful Pocumtucks. In one fatal day their pride and strength were laid in the dust. The survivors were scattered, some to Canada and some to the Mahicans, on the Hudson. A feeble remnant, renouncing their independence, sought the protection of the English. The enervated remains of the Pocumtuck Confederation--rebelling against English domination--appeared for a few months in Philip's War. At its close the few miserable survivors stole away towards the setting sun and were forever lost to sight. Never again do we find in recorded history a single page relating to the unfortunate Pocumtucks.”
Never again do we find in recorded history a page relating to the unfortunate Pocumtucks Sheldon proclaims in A History of Deerfield as if it is a historical fact and we know now that there is plenty of archaeological evidence and historical sources to prove Sheldon wrong, but there is evidence that even Sheldon knew he was being misleading when he tried to write the Pocumtuck people out of history.
One of the researchers that worked with Sheldon on A History of Deerfield named Josiah Temple found historical documents pertaining to the Pocumtuck people from the French, Dutch and the state of New York. Instead of including this historical evidence of what happened to the Pocumtuck people once they went to New York and Canada Sheldon chose to mention that some survivors of the Mohawk raid on the Pocumtuck Fort in Deerfield migrated to New York and Canada. The only reason we know about Josiah Temple’s research work being ignored by Sheldon is because fellow historian Michael Batinski documented how a political rival of Sheldon and historian named John Pratt engaged in an open debate with George Sheldon as the two historians traded jabs in the Greenfield Gazette & Courier newspaper in the summer of 1867.
Pratt used harsh words in his attacks against Sheldon and he use a pseudonym, “Pocumtuck.” Sheldon signed his responses as “S” as if both historians were a bit embarrassed about their public fight. In one entry Pratt refers to Sheldon as a "dead bone disquisitor” and states that he is so completely buried in antiquity that he now knows nothing else. Sheldon was able to brush off this public attack because outside of the Greenfield Gazette & Courier John Pratt was not popular and Sheldon was very popular. When Pratt accuses Sheldon of ignoring evidence found by Josiah Temple, Sheldon responds and claims he omitted the information about the Pocumtuck people’s migration to New York and Canada because he was focused on the Pocumtuck history in the Pioneer Valley and was not focused on indigenous people outside of the valley. Sheldon’s logic seems to be that since the Pocumtuck people left Deerfield and fled the Connecticut River Valley they were no longer Pocumtuck. Researching Pocumtuck history in the late 1800s must have been like pecking at a wall the size of Mount Everest with a chisel and hammer because indigenous people native to New England were scattered after King Philips War with little or no paper trail.
Sheldon’s deliberate distortion was taking his lack of knowledge of the history of the Pocumtuck people and choosing to state that their history ended on specific day after a specific Mohawk raid. Pocumtuck is more than a group of indigenous people, Pocumtuck was an actual place that can be found on early maps of New England and even the French, Dutch and English called the area now known as Deerfield, Pocumtuck until Deerfield was settled by the English. The Deerfield River was known as the Pocumtuck River, the name Pocumtuck derives from the Algonquian language and loosely translates to a place beside a "narrow, swift river," or a "short, shallow, sandy river. Sheldon refers to the Pocumtuck Confederacy when he mentions that some members of the Pocumtuck Confederacy were involved in King Philips War. The Pocumtuck people were about 5,000 strong before European contact in the 1600s but they were not all Pocumtucks. The Agawam lived in villages in the low-lying meadows of Springfield and Agawam along Connecticut River. The Woronoco, “where the river winds around the land,” had villages in modern day Westfield along the Westfield River and the Nonotuck had villages at the mid-way point of the Connecticut River in Northampton and Hadley.
The Handbook of Native American Tribes North of Mexico claims that the Pocumtuck people were the most powerful tribe in the Connecticut River Valley and that they ruled over all other tribes in the region. In the Pynchon Papers, Volume I, Letters of John Pynchon, 1654-1700 (Boston, MA: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1982) William Pynchon writes about what he observed after arriving in Western Massachusetts in 1658, “no one Sachim doth Rule all”, and what Pynchon meant by this statement is that the indigenous groups that occupied the region governed themselves independently. This was not an abnormality to indigenous people who lived this way for over 12,000 years, but the English fur trader who was raised in a monarchy was flabbergasted that indigenous people in this region were ruled by no one. The Pynchon Papers are an extraordinary cache of first-hand information of how Europeans viewed indigenous people when they arrived in the mid-1500s.
When comparing the language of historians from the 1800s like George Sheldon and how they wrote about indigenous people to the first impressions of indigenous people from English Puritans like William Pynchon there is a clear contrast. Pynchon developed a good relationship with the Pocumtuck people because they were expert hunters, and he was a fur trader. Between 1658-1659 interpreter Samuel Marshfield documented direct communication between the United Colonies Commissioners and Pocumtuck Sachem Onapequin. The Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote to the Pocumtuck Sachem and stated that they have never done them or any of the people any wrong since arriving and that they only seek peace for succeeding generations. Onapequin responded and not only agreed that the English haven’t done them or their people harm since their arrival, but asked the English to send “sober men” to deal with them and not liars.
Onapequin wrote:
"What was said against us about them was out of mistake, for they understood not us nor wee them as it is usuall for the English to speake much to us that come though they understand little wee desire that if any Messengers bee sent to us from the English they may bee such as are not lyares [liars] and tale carryers, but sober men; and such as wee can understand."
The correspondence between Onapequin and the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies proves that about twenty years before King Philips War indigenous people in New England had a copasetic coexistence and even the first land deeds for Agawam, Springfield, Deerfield, Westfield and Northampton had language that solidified the coexistence between indigenous people and arriving Europeans. The land deals included indigenous people reserving the right to farm and hunt the lands they sold, but it is not clear whether indigenous people understood the land deals as the English land buyers interpreted the purchases.
This mutual lack of understanding is the main reason for contention between indigenous people and early settlers like Sheldon’s family. Metacom’s Rebellion or King Philips War happened because indigenous people were tired of having their land taken from them and they were being forbidden to hunt or fish in areas were they have done so for generations. George Sheldon was born into an atmosphere where propaganda against indigenous people was featured in everything from books and newspapers to political speeches and religious sermons. Propaganda against indigenous people was commonplace throughout the colonies and surrounding settlements that dotted New England, but Deerfield in particular took a completely different tone against indigenous people with a very noticeable “us” against “them” mentality.
In 1704 hundreds of Pocumtucks and a mix of New York and Canadian indigenous people teamed up with French troops to attack England’s most northern settlement in the New World, Deerfield, Massachusetts. Sheldon blames this attack entirely on the Pocumtuck people and fails to mention that the French would have the means and motive to attack an English settlement in 1704. Sheldon states that this attack was committed simply because the Pocumtuck are savages who knew nothing but war and violence. Sheldon was indoctrinated by an anti-Indian environment showing a blatant and blunt hatred for indigenous people in A History of Deerfield. Sheldon reserved hundreds of pages showing his genealogical links to Deerfield and relegated less than five pages to the history of the Pocumtuck people.
Sources
Bruchac, Margaret M. “Historical Erasure and Cultural Recovery: Indigenous People in the Connecticut River Valley,” 2007.
The Pynchon Papers, Volume 2: Selections from the Account Books of John Pynchon from The New England Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 296-299.
Wilson, Robert J. The New England Quarterly 60, no. 2 (1987): 296–299. https://doi.org/10.2307/365616.
“Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704.” Raid on Deerfield: the Many Stories of 1704. http://www.1704.deerfield.history.museum/.
“James D. DRAKE. King Philip's War: Civil War in New ENGLAND, 1675–1676. (Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1999. Pp. Vii, 257. The American Historical Review, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.4.1294.
(Hart, S. M. (2018). Colonialism, community, and heritage in Native New England, 298–302. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvx07445)
Julie A. Fisher, and David J. Silverman. 2014. Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts : Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=671284&site=eds-live&scope=site.
King, H. R., & DeForest, J. W. (1965). History of the Indians of Connecticut: From the earliest known period to 1850.
Ethnohistory, 12(3), 262. https://doi.org/10.2307/480516
Sheldon, George. History of the founding of Deerfield Academy: With biographical notes. Gazette & Courier, 1878.
Acknowledgements
The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association played a pivotal role in my research paper because I was able to review the Pynchon Papers and documents from the United Colonies Commissioners. The Pynchon Papers provided firsthand information about the interactions between indigenous people and European colonizers this information was crucial in answering my research question because I was able to decipher George Sheldon inherent bias towards indigenous people and Sheldon’s intentional distortion of the history of the Pocumtuck people. The Lyman and Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History is known for its local history research facilities, and I was able to view the original land deeds for Springfield, Northampton and Deerfield. I am forever grateful to the museum volunteers who guided me through the ocean of archives to find documents relating to the Pocumtuck people. Peter Anik from the New England Antiquities Research Association responded to my request for documents and academic journals relating to indigenous people of New England which led me to the work of Siobhan Hart and Marie Bruchac, I cannot thank you all enough.
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