Giving Currency to Native American Women

Indian Country Today has proposed removing Andrew Jackson from the 20-dollar bill, on the grounds that Americans should not so honor an Indian hater and genocidaire, and recommends replacing him with a Native American leader. Though I believe many other people deserve the blame for Indian Removal, I have no brief for Jackson and no problem finding new heroes for our national currency. I do, however, find ICT's list of suggested replacements a bit dispiriting, even stereotypical: ten Indian men, mostly from the West, nearly all of them war leaders. Perhaps the authors were looking for well-known people and figured most readers could not identify Native women or civil leaders, but there is something to be said for using currency to popularize less well-known leaders who nonetheless reflect useful virtues: endurance, business acumen, organizational ability, political activism, and artistic virtuosity. To this end, let me propose the following substitutes:

Matoaka, alias Rebecca Rolfe, alias Pocahontas. Powhatan chief's daughter, endured captivity under the English, converted to Christianity, and became a diplomat and traveler – one of the first Native Virginians to visit London.

Weetamoo, or Wettimore, Wampanoag sachem, wife of sachem Quannopin, co-leader of the insurgency known as King Phillip's War (1675-77). Captive Mary Rowlandson described her as haughty but a snappy dresser, which, given Rowlandson's Puritan worldview, is probably an exaggeration.

Nonhelema, or Catherine Grenadio, Shawnee businesswoman who provided intelligence to the Americans during the Revolutionary War, sold cattle to the Continental Army, and attended the Fort McIntosh (1785) treaty council.

Gertrude Bonnin, alias Zitkala-Sa, Sioux activist who attended Earlham College, taught at Carlisle Industrial Training School, later proponent of cultural preservation and organizer of the National Council of American Indians.

Maria Martinez, Pueblo ceramicist who rediscovered the thin-walled, shiny black pottery-making technique for which Pueblo potters would become famous.

Wilma Mankiller, author, Alcatraz occupier, and first female principal chief of the western Cherokee Nation.

Mildred Loving, Rappahannock woman, identified as black under Virginia law, who became one of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case Loving versus Virginia (1967), legalizing interracial marriage. Putting her on American currency would cause Sean Hannity's head to explode.

The Late Unpleasantness in Salem

While the colonial period of American history is full of drama and violence, public remembrances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have generally bled all traces of excitement from the story. Our commemoration focuses instead on an arid narrative of pious pioneers building orderly towns on the edge of a wilderness, from which Indians occasionally emerged to skulk about and eat turkey. One well-known episode of public violence and madness interrupts this otherwise dreary story: the Salem witch trials of 1692, popularized in the twentieth century by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. The bare outlines of this story - ten teenage girls in Salem afflicted with unexplained pains and spectral tormenters, snowballing accusations by locals against other suspected witches (including Salem Village's former minister), a special court which allowed "spectral evidence," over two hundred people accused of witchcraft, 150 of them imprisoned and 20 executed - are reasonably well known today. The causes of the crisis, however, remain a matter of controversy. To a nation with a short and shallow public history, and without much of a tradition of supernatural events, the Salem crisis necessarily remains weird and fascinating. In his recent overview of New England history, Saints and Strangers (2006, pages 121-130), Joseph Conforti performs the useful task of summarizing historians' theories about the origins of the Salem witchcraft trials. I am pleased to recount, with my own observations and glosses, some of his findings here:

I. It was a social forces/conflict/thingie: Forty years ago, in Salem Possessed, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum observed that the initial accusers in the Salem cases and the people they accused lived on opposite sides of Salem Village, the inland community (now Danvers) where the witch craze began. There may have been an element of class conflict behind the accusations: the accusers lived in the poorer, western part of town, which the "witches" lived in the more commercial, eastern part of town, near Salem port and the Ipswich Road. Certainly there was social conflict within the village: westerners wanted to make Salem Village a separate town, independent of the port of Salem, while easterners preferred existing arrangements.

II. It was a gender conflict: About 80 percent of the people accused of witchcraft in Essex County were women. This was also characteristic of the smaller witchcraft trials held in Massachusetts and Connecticut earlier in the century, and of the much larger trials in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. Puritan theology held that women were "weak vessels" prone to sin and vulnerable to corruption by the Devil, communion with whom was the essence of witchcraft. Gerald Klaits observes (Servants of Satan, 1987) that in early modern Europe, theologians commonly linked witchcraft to sexual congress with the Devil, and assumed that women, whom they believed more lustful than men, were particularly attracted to the prospect of Demonic Sexytime (TM). Puritan men tended to concur with this judgment, all the more worrying since woman had by the late seventeenth century become a majority of the communicants in Massachusetts's churches.

III. The Puritans really believed in witchcraft: The witchcraft trials reflected not only underlying material conflicts but a common, widespread Puritan belief in supernatural forces. David Hall, in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1990), described the seventeenth-century Puritans as far more "Elizabethan" than modern in their religious beliefs. Those beliefs included the notion that God communicated with his People through meteorological signs, numerology, dreams, and unusual events (such as earthquakes and comets). The Puritan elite thus believed that one could ascribe strange occurrences to the supernatural. Since they also believed in a Devil, it is unsurprising that they attributed some of their misfortunes to him. In the case of witchcraft the Devil had to work through human agents, such as women, or Indians.

IV. It was the Indians' fault: Apart from the Pequot War, the Puritans had a fairly peaceful relationship with their Indian neighbors for half a century after the start of the Great Migration. Puritan land theft, legal discrimination, and other provocations progressively strained Puritan-Indian relations until finally, in 1675, Wampanoag sachem Philip led a confederacy of Indian warriors against the English colonists. "King Philip's War," which burned on in northern New England until 1678, killed seven thousand people and persuaded many second- and third-generation Puritans, like captive Mary Rowlandson, that Indians were not only barbarous but intrinsically devilish. The Abenaki Indians reinforced this view during King William's War (1689-97), when then raided several English settlements in Maine and New Hampshire. Refugees from those raids came south to Massachusetts, bearing frightful accounts of attacks on civilians. The residents of Salem, according to Mary Beth Norton, would have been primed to view the witchcraft outbreak in Salem and the Indian attacks on the Maine frontier as part of a single demonic conspiracy against New England. One of the accused witches at Salem, Abigail Hobbs, had recently moved to that town from Maine, where she confessed that the Devil persuaded her to recruit other witches; witchcraft accusations in Salem rose dramatically after she gave her testimony. Several of the "afflicted" girls in Salem were refugees from the Indian war in Maine, and some said they had seen a spectral "black man" whispering to some of the accused witches; New Englanders of the era assumed that this man was an Indian. (See Norton, In the Devil's Snare [2002].)

V. Good government could have prevented the crisis: When the Salem witch trials took place, Massachusetts Bay did not actually have a legitimate government. King Charles II had condemned the overly-independent colony's charter in 1684, and a year later his successor James II merged the New England colonies with New York. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 Massachusetts's magistrates arrested James's unpopular governor, Edmund Andros, and sent him back to England. The province had no charter and only an interim government until 1693. If Massachusetts had had a legitimate governor and legislature, its government might have shown more restraint and confidence in dealing with the crisis in Essex County, instead of deferring to the judgments of a special court of oyer and terminer. When Massachusetts's new governor, William Phips, finally assumed office he was quick to dismiss the remaining 50 or so witchcraft cases still pending and free those still in jail.

In sum, historians can't fully explain what happened in Salem and the surrounding towns in 1692, but they can use the witchcraft crisis as an excuse to talk about other subjects that interest them more - and which may, in fact, be more important.

**

And, no, it wasn't ergot.

Happy Leap Year

Given its rare appearance on the calendar, it is unsurprising that February 29th was seldom a day of great moment in American history. However, there are two significant events that occurred on Leap Year during the colonial era, both involving Puritans and Indians. The first (1692) was the formal filing of a legal complaint by Thomas Preston, Joseph Hutchinson, and Thomas and Edward Putnam of Salem Village against three women whom they accused of injuring their daughters and servants by witchcraft. The accused were Sarah Good, a woman "previously suspected of witchcraft by her neighbors," Sarah Osborne, a middle-aged woman involved in a land dispute with the Putnam family, and Tituba, a Native American slave. The three women set the pattern for what would become known as the Salem Witchcraft Trials or the Essex County Witchcraft Crisis, a crisis originating with legal disputes in Salem Village, actual belief in witchcraft, and fears of "devilry" left over from the Indian wars of the 1670s and early '90s. Before they was over, the trials would implicate 185 defendants (mostly women) from 22 towns and result in deaths of 20 people - all so that Salem could become a happening place on Halloween thenceforward. (Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare [Vintage, 2002], 8, 21-23, quote 23; see also Joseph Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America [Johns Hopkins, 2006], 124-127.)

The other noteworthy event which took place on Leap Year in colonial New England was the Deerfield Raid of 1704, wherein a war party of Abenakis, Hurons, and Caughnawagas attacked the Massachusetts town of Deerfield, killing 50 people and taking another 100 captive. The raid led to one of the most famous captivity narratives of the colonial era, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (1707), written by the most prominent of the ransomed prisoners, Rev. John Williams. It also resulted in the decision by Williams' daughter Eunice to stay in Canada, convert to Catholicism, and marry a Mohawk man. Her grandson, Eleazar, led an equally famous life in the nineteenth century: educated by Congregationalists in New England, he went to Oneida country in 1816, successfully converted a number of Oneidas to Christianity, and became an advocate for voluntary removal of the Oneida nation to a new homeland in Wisconsin. Williams also asserted, later in his life, that he was the lost Dauphin of France, demonstrating that outrageous self-pronouncements were not merely the province of Anglo-Americans. (Conforti, 131-32; Karim Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal [University of Massachusetts Press, 2011], 135-144.)

What I Saw of the 2011 Ethnohistory Conference, Part Two

Continued from my previous post, here are summaries of or excerpts from nine more papers I attended last month at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory:

Evan Nooe argued that violence, as employed by the Red Stick Creeks in 1812-13, was part of the Creeks' judicial system, and that their targets in the Fort Mims attack of 1813 tended to be white women and children because Creek men were attacking lineages, not individuals.

Elena Vega Olivera revealed that the children's novel Island of the Blue Dolphins was based on the story of a real person – a California Indian woman stranded on San Nicolas Island, who was "rescued" in 1853 and died of illness almost immediately thereafter.

Kristalynn Shefveland reminded her audience that the Chesapeake colonies were major players in the seventeenth-century Indian slave trade, and observed that the enslavement of Native Americans, particularly children and those convicted of crimes, continued in Virginia well after a 1691 statute banned the practice.

David Silverman argued that if the New England Algonquians had maintained their access to the trading center of Albany, they might have been able to prevail in King Philip's War, but their exclusion therefrom by the Mohawks cut off their supply of powder and ammunition.

Christina Snyder observed that elite Choctaw students at Richard Johnson's Choctaw Academy behaved rather like the sons of white planters, breaking into Johnson's house and holding "drunken orgies" with the (perhaps not-entirely-willing) daughters of Johnson's slave "concubine" Julia Chinn.

Jessica Stern explained something I'd been wondering about for ages – why British trade regulations stipulated that traders in the southeast had do business in Indian towns (answer: so that chiefs could supervise the trade) – and then noted that Indian hunters routinely ignored these regulations.

Carl Strong gave an ill-considered paper about John Collier's efforts to disprove the "Indian-ness" of the Unkechaug and Shinnecock Indians of Long Island and the Lumbees of North Carolina.

John Troutman told the story of Neal "Pappy" McCormick, an Creek musician who led a Hawaiian/hillbilly/gospel band (one of whose performers was Hank Williams, Sr.), and later became an activist for federal recognition of the remaining Georgia Creeks.

And Susan Wade talked about the evolution of maple sugar into a valuable commodity in the Great Lakes Indian trade; the Ojibwe sold this former "starvation food" (Larry Nesper's words) to the American Fur Company, which in turn shipped it by the ton and marketed it in Cleveland, Detroit, and other Great Lakes towns where cane and beet sugar were expensive.

Thanks to all for their presentations, and for making this a stimulating conference.

Nourishment Spiritual and Temporal

While we're on the subject of Mary Rowlandson:

I recently asked my U.S. History survey classes to read most of Rowlandson's captivity narrative, and to check whether any of them had actually done the reading, I asked which book of the Bible Rowlandson most frequently cited in her memoir. (Mrs. Rowlandson wrote that one of her captors gave her a Bible he'd plundered from an English settlement, and that it provided her with much solace during her ordeal.) The correct answer was Psalms - 15 citations in all. In the process of determining the answer, I calculated that there were 42 direct quotes or paraphrases of Judeo-Christian scripture in "The Sovereignty and Goodness of God," as follows:

Psalms: 15
Isaiah: 5
Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Job, Luke, Micah, I Samuel: 2 each
Corinthians, Exodus, Genesis, Hebrews, Hezekiah, Judges, II Kings, Proverbs, II Samuel, II Thessalonians: 1 each

That most of Rowlandson's citations (all but five, by my count) were from the Old Testament need not surprise us. Quite apart from its length relative to the New Testament, the first part of the Bible impressed the Puritans because they saw themselves as the new Children of Israel, to the extent that they described their relationship with God as a covenant, viewed their American settlements as a new Zion, and modeled their first law code after passages from Exodus.

While noting Mary Rowlandson's dependence on the Bible for spiritual sustenance, I suspect my students were more impressed with, or at least moved by, her description of the earthly foodstuffs she and her half-starved Indian captors choked down. These included tree bark broth, horse liver, peas, cornmeal mush, acorns, horse's guts, chestnuts, bear meat, biscuits, and horse's leg broth. "Many times," Rowlandson wrote in her memoir, "they would eat that that a hog or a dog would hardly touch," and she herself recalled that "now that was savory to me that one would think...[would] turn the stomach of a brute creature." Hunger is the best sauce.

The Indian College Discovered?

Via the History News Network: archaeologists have discovered the probable location of Harvard's Indian College, the first school for Native Americans in British North America. The specific find was a trench containing brick, tile, and stone, likely the foundation of one of the school's walls. The trench also contained ceramic remains and some pieces of type from Massachusetts Bay's first printing press, also housed at the College - perhaps the same press used to print John Eliot's Wampanoag translation of the Bible.

As Harvard's own webpage on the Indian College makes clear, the institution was (like Dartmouth College a century later) a fundraising device designed to pry money out of the evangelizing New England Company. The principal residents of the brick College building were white students, and only a few of the seven Algonquian Indians who attended Harvard in the seventeenth century resided there. Most of these students, incidentally, came to bad ends: three died before graduating and one, John Sassamon, was murdered in 1675, setting off the chain of events that led to King Philip's War.

What Cheer!

I've begun reading Susan Moore's 2007 book Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home, a study of 600 Puritan colonists who left New England in the mid-seventeenth century and returned to old England. I've come across two anecdotes of personal interest:

1) Many of the returnees were drawn back to England by the lack of economic opportunities in Massachusetts, whose economy stagnated in the 1640s and '50s, creating a shortage of work for those in specialized trades. This included Harvard graduates, who after completing their training for the ministry found a distinct shortage of open posts in the colony. Nearly half of the college's students left for England after graduation, including seven of the nine members of the first graduating class (56, 70). (One of these students, George Downing, fought with Cromwell in the English Civil War, changed sides in 1660, became a baronet, and is now remembered as the namesake of Downing Street in London.) The Puritans and their nineteenth-century descendants were quite smug about establishing the first college in British North America, but apparently they opened it a few decades too soon.

2) To illustrate the "alien and mysterious character" of early Massachusetts, Moore tells the story of John Dane, who while walking from Roxbury to Ipswich (north of Salem) encountered a party of 40-50 Indians (probably Wampanoags). Startled, Dane "stuttered out" the old English greeting "What cheer." The Indians thought this was hilarious. "What cheer! What cheer!" they repeated, until "the woods rang with the noise" (p. 45). I think I may experiment with this greeting myself.

Pine Trees and Penobscots

In my post of June 9th, I discussed Mark Peterson's article on the Pine Tree shilling, the first coin minted by an American colonial government, and its significance as a symbol of Massachusetts's imperial ambitions. A couple of weeks ago I discovered another historical use of the Pine Tree shilling: as an ad hoc medal given to Indians to display (and to secure) their friendship to the colony.

In January 1714 General Francis Nicholson held a peace conference (most likely in Nova Scotia, of which he was the governor) with 5 sachems of the Penobscot, Norridgewock, and Kennetuck divisions of Abenakis. The general presented each man with two Pine Tree shillings, placing one in the recipient's hand and the other in his mouth, that he might never act or speak against the English Crown or its subjects. He declared that the pine tree on the coins symbolized the unity of the English and Abenakis - "they and the English should be like that tree - but one root tho' several branches" - and noted that it was always green, symbolizing truth. (James Baxter, ed., Documentary History of the State of Maine [23 volumes; Portland, ME, 1869-1916], Vol. 23, pp. 53-54.)

Nicholson did not record the Abenakis' reaction, but it's likely that they understood what they were receiving - the Woodland Indians were sufficiently familiar with coins by the early 18th century that some were learning how to counterfeit them. (Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All [Baltimore, 1997], pp. 47-48.) It also seems likely that the sachems were unimpressed with the display: shillings were not valuable coins and Nicholson's metaphors were ersatz.