Land, Law, Violence, and Genocide

Land, Law, Violence, and Genocide
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The 'Praying Town' of Natick, occupied by the 'Praying Indians' sat on the North and South banks of the Charles River, abutting the colonial town of Dedham. Conflict with Native Americans arose over land, as the pigs and cattle raised by the colonists often roamed onto unfenced Indigenous owned land and destroyed their corn crops. Pigs competed against the Native Americans for roots, berries, and fungi, while cows scared away big game in the area. Multiple court cases demonstrate conflict between the residents of Dedham who sought the South bank of the Charles, occupied by the Natick and their cornfields, to graze their cattle. This conflict over grazing land grew in the 1670s, with colonial beliefs developing into that of a zero-sum game—it was either a vacuum domicilium or English land, there was no room for the 'Indian'. 

Yasu Kawashima argues that these praying towns were the basis for the reservation system. As the New England economy required massive amounts of land, for activities such as fishing, timber products, livestock, and grains, the goal was always to confine the Natives to parcels of land. While Massachusetts emphasized in its charter the goal of converting the Native Americans, saving them from the devil, the structure of the society was based around corporate towns such as Dedham. As a corporate town Dedham purchased and sold land often, their culture and identity focused on a land based market economy. Thus, the structure of New England towns focused on expansion rather than religious conversion—they were economic units designed to expand and accumulate land. This left the aborigines cultures in a challenging position.

With the outbreak of Metacom's War, personal correspondence and word of mouth dominated the spread of information in New England at the time of the war. These correspondences reveal that rumors about the brutality of the Native Americans and the locations they attacked ran unchecked. Many of the residents of the Bay Colony feared the worst, allowing the rumors to run wild. The rumors increasingly began to report that the loyal Native Americans were in fact disloyal. Rumors of widespread and violent attacks by the former Native neighbors and allies led many colonists to take extreme anti-native American stances.

This climate of fear enabled and prompted the government to take drastic actions against Native Americans to remove them from society and provide the government and residents peace of mind. But the anger and fear directed at the Natives was preceded by a governmental structure that encouraged fear and distrust towards the Christian Natives. The Christian towns were an amalgamation of Christian and aboriginal traditions. Native judges and magistrates ran the towns and traditional Native interpersonal structures controlled the towns. While the Natives were integrated into the society economically, their industry was predominantly livestock, which they competed against the English in. This made them expendable, as the English preferred not to compete against someone the considered an outsider. The only English magistrates overseeing these relatively independent towns were Daniel Gookin and John Eliot, both sympathetic to the Christian Natives. This legal structured socially isolated the Natives, as they were never fully integrated into English society. They were outsiders living in English lands, competing with English merchants for their share of the market. Their competition against the English for land and the livestock market drove them away from the good graces of the English corporate identity. The Christian Native, legally separate, and economically competitive to the English was a threat to the English before the war, the war gave them the reason to eliminate this completion. The war enabled men such as Mosely to destroy Christian Natives, their property and livelihood, killed the Praying Town.

After the war began Eliot and Gookin were attacked, discredited, and in one case survived what might have been a potential assassination attempt, hurting the Christian Natives. Many of the first generation of settlers believed in the Praying Town such as Eliot, Gookin, and Gov. Endecott, who wrote a letter in support of Natick. By the time the war arrived, there was a shift, as Perry Miller notes piety was on the decline and many of the first generation of settlers had passed away. While Eliot and Gookin believed in the Praying Town project, many New Englanders seem to be much more skeptical before the war, especially as piety declined. After the beginning of the war, the rumors killed any hope at the success of praying towns.

 This generated an identity shift, that is noted by authors such as DeLucia and Nan Goodman, the idea of the ‘Praying Indian,’ already fading before the war, died. Goodman argues that already the Christian Natives were seen as outsiders The legal and economic structure of the Christian Natives made them vulnerable to attack, as they were not integrated into English society, except for economically, where they were expendable. Thus, rumors of their disloyalty ran unchecked. Men such as William Hubbard wrote about the savagery of the Natives, referring to them as “Children of the Devil.” This cultural shift enabled men such as Mosely to take unsanctioned violent action against the Christian Natives without punishment, as he had popular support driven by the Christian Natives’ isolation from society. Further, Mosely’s personal relationship with the Governor—who he nominally answered to—was familial, giving him greater independence and forgiveness in a way to attack the Natives without orders. Gookin argued the only way to save the Christian Natives from men such as Mosely was to remove them from society, leading to the deportation to Deer Island. 

While the Crown and Christian Native Americans viewed the Colonists and Native Americans as equal subjects under the King. The Massachusetts Bay Colony authorities viewed themselves as a quasi-independent state that held absolute authority over the lands they controlled. This belief in their absolute control of Native Americans and their separate roles in society cleared the way for the expulsion of Christian Native Americans. As they had full legal authority over the Native Americans, the decision to expel them was well within their legal right. Governor John Leverett believed this to be that he even wrote to the King telling him of his expulsion of the Christian Native Americans and their internment at Deer Island. Thus, the colonists’ deportation of the Natick happened because the state believed that it could do so, without consultation or protestation. This expulsion can be viewed in the larger conflict between King Charles II and the colony over authority. As in the years before the war, Charles II sought to curb Massachusetts’ claims to autonomy, especially following Leverett’s expedition into French Canada and violations of the Navigation Acts. By deporting the Christian Natives, Massachusetts Bay asserted its believed authority over the Christians, in defiance of the King. Leverett and the government’s belief in its authority is reinforced by his letter to the King stating as such.

It is a confluence of these factors that led to the deportation of the Natick to Deer Island in late 1675 and demonstrates the conflict that would be fundamental to the American Empire—Legal Colonization or Violent Subjugation? 

 

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