[Speaker 2] (0:04 - 4:25)
Good morning. On behalf of the Swampscott Historical Commission, I'm delighted to welcome you to this event, which is part of the Town's Recognition of Indigenous Peoples Month. My name is Nancy Schultz, and I'm chair of the Swampscott Historical Commission.

Just so you know, this event is being live streamed, so I ask that you please turn your cell phones off and be aware that it's being recorded live and streamed as we speak on Facebook. So, as I mentioned, this is an event to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Month in Swampscott, and if you haven't yet had a chance to see the exhibition on the first floor of the Thompson Administration Building, I encourage you to visit it before the end of November. In December, the commission will begin installing its next exhibition on the hotels of Swampscott, and that will be following Mary Cassidy's great talk the other night on the new Ocean House, so we'll be doing an exhibition on that.

I would like to thank Ethan Runstottler and staff, the library staff, the Town of Swampscott, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council for supporting today's event. It is my great pleasure to introduce my friend and longtime Salem State University colleague, Dr. Emerson Tad Baker. Tad Baker is an archaeologist and professor of history at Salem State.

He is an award-winning author of many works on the history and archaeology of early New England, including A Storm of Witchcraft, The Salem Trials and the American Experience, and The Devil of Great Island, Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England. He was a contributor to Dane Morrison's and my edited volume, Salem Place Myth and Memory, with his wonderful chapter called Salem as Frontier Outpost. Before coming to Salem State, Tad Baker served as executive director of Maine's York Institute Museum and Dyer Library.

A specialist in 17th century Maine history, Professor Baker has been featured as an expert consultant on the PBS miniseries, Colonial House. He has also provided historical consultation for Parks Canada, National Geographic, Plymouth Plantation, the National Park Service, Historic Salem, Inc., the Beverly Historical Society and many historic district commissions. He has served as an expert witness for archaeological matters in several court cases in Nova Scotia and Maine.

Professor Baker is a member of the Gallows Hill Project Team, which in 2016 confirmed the execution site of the Salem Witch Trials, an accomplishment that Archaeology Magazine named one of that year's top 10 discoveries in the field. He was recently interviewed by the New York Times about the exoneration of Elizabeth Johnson, Jr., who was convicted of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials and was the only remaining person whose name had not been officially cleared. Tad is an accomplished scholar in many areas, but one of the coolest could be that he co-authored an iPhone app on the witch trial crisis.

So kindly give Professor Tad Baker a warm Swanscot welcome.

[Speaker 1] (4:30 - 1:09:57)
Thank you, Nancy, for that more than generous introduction, and most of it's true, I guess. Anyhow, it's a pleasure to be with you all today, and also my good friends Mary and Neil DiCello in the audience today, too, so it's good to see old friends. So first off, not a formal land recognition, because we can talk about land recognitions if you want, but that's an interesting subject, but an acknowledgment at the very least, right, that we are on what the native peoples would call Turtle Island.

Oh, yeah, okay, sure, yeah, that's fine, turn the light, no, no, that's okay, thank you, no, thank you very much, is that better? Much better, yeah, I can see it, too, now. We're on Turtle Island, and indigenous people have been here since time immemorial, and really in that sense I guess we are honored by the fact that the two native groups to this day really claim this region as part of their traditional homeland, the Massachusetts tribe at Ponca Pog includes the North Shore in their homelands, and also, too, the Kawasak Band of the Pinnacook Abnaki up in New Hampshire include the lands north of the Charles River as Natakina, their homelands, and as we talk about this, you'll see that, okay, that probably makes sense, because native peoples have been here for a long, long time, and they moved about, and they cooperated, intermarried, et cetera, et cetera, but it does point, I think, to the complexity of this story right at the get-go, and also, too, some of a series of caveats that I have to make, and how I'll get sort of like, well, maybe this, and we think that, but even bigger than that is that this is a very difficult and complicated story. It, the language can be difficult as well, too, so for example, I will use the terms indigenous peoples, Native Americans, Indians interchangeably. I do so while recognizing that some people are not, use one of those terms as a preferred terms.

I know native peoples that like one, all of those terms, right? I know native peoples who say, don't, you know, I'm not a Native American. Native American is someone who's born here, so anyhow, but I think indigenous peoples becoming the more popular term, but I will use them all about with no disrespect intended to anybody, and also, too, as you'll soon see, I use the term squaw a lot, which, and there's other word, too, that might, some people might have concerns about that are sort of hot-button issues, and again, I use them in this case in the historical context and the utmost respect, but again, this sort of gets to how kind of difficult and politically charged this issue is.

I'll say this, actually, you know, as Nancy indicated in her very thorough history of me, my first historical calling and archeological calling was to be trained as an ethno-historian to study Native American history, and particularly through the lens of the fact that it is basically the surviving written record for this is all done by Europeans, not by Native peoples, so how do you interpret that complicated record, and in fact, my dissertation was on King Philip's War, but to me, it became so kind of complicated and politically charged, the fact that I had Native American friends, but I wouldn't necessarily as a scholar see eye to eye with them, and the last thing I would ever want to do is to offend my friends or hurt them in any way.

Long story short is after doing that for a while, and especially when I was hired at Salem State, I decided to really kind of stop doing Native history, because it was so complicated and I was so worried about what I might say, so I gave that up and took on the much less complicated, much less challenging, much less contentious issue of the Salem Witch Trials, okay? So this is sort of rough seas, and I thank Nancy for giving me the opportunity to dive back into it, because it has been creeping in the past few years with, I'm regularly asked by people, we need to do a land acknowledgment, what should we do? And my one comment on that honestly is, land acknowledgments cannot be performative.

If you're going to have one, it's got to be meaningful, and as a friend once put it to me, land acknowledgments need to be the first step, right? It's like first step in a 12-step plan, it's an acknowledgment that there's a problem, but then there's, the question is, where do you go from that, right? Anyhow, so this is kind of a, it's a tough story, it's hard to tell without trying to offend anybody, and it doesn't have a happy ending.

I used to teach Native American history at Salem State, and my gosh, when the end of the story is, and they get casinos, this is not a real happy ending, right? Or, I mean, the simple fact of Native American survival to some degrees is a happy ending, given the hell that they have been put through over hundreds of years. So again, honor their survival, but on the other hand, again, it's been a very tough survival.

So also too, I don't pretend to have all the answers in any ways to this, this is a big picture, scholars and Native peoples disagree about a lot of the information, and honestly, I almost made the subtitle of my talk, you'd be amazed how much we don't know. And a lot of the stuff, we will probably never know for sure, there's just no way to tell because the record is so imperfect. So, give you an example of that, yep, okay, sorry, there we go.

So, I wanted to sort of focus the talk around Nanapashmet or Nanapashmet, who was the leading sachem, sagamore of the North Shore, I use those terms again interchangeably, they seem to be of equal weight, in the early 17th century. Apparently a great sachem, but again, even there it's hard to tell exactly how great, and his family will remain important leaders in Swampscott, in this area, throughout most of the 17th century. We think, we think his confederacy stretched from the Charles River and the Mystic River, west to Concord, north as far as maybe like where I live up in York, Maine, maybe further, up the Merrimack River too.

He didn't rule all of these directly, but he had a huge confederacy of allies that he was the leader of. But again, as you'll see, there's probably a lot more that we just don't know. We don't know when or where he was born, or what his birth name was, because native peoples, particularly leaders, might have multiple names through their lives.

We don't know exactly when or where he died, we'll get to that. Don't know what precisely area he ruled over, again, don't even know his wife's name. We just refer to as the Squass Sachem of Mystic, because that's, again, meaning no disrespect, but these are the terms that we have.

And maybe worst of all, we don't know how he would describe himself, his people, his territory. We don't really know what language he spoke. We have some ideas.

But to me, that's kind of the historical 17th century puzzle that, frankly, I kind of enjoy. And also, too, what I want to try to do in this talk is to give our best guess as to where we are, again, realizing this is very much a work in progress, but also, too, to try to maybe kind of paint you a picture as best we can. So in this case, I'm going to borrow a portrait of a sachem from Rhode Island, Connecticut borderlands in the late 17th century.

And to give you an idea, this is kind of the way a leader, a sachem or sagamore in our region would have dressed at that time, with a fancy headdress and necklace made out of shell wampum, very, very esteemed objects. Though I'll point out that even in this case, there's a debate over who this fellow was. Was it an integrant II or was it someone else?

But point is, this is the idea. This is the only surviving 17th century portrait we have of a Native American leader in New England. So that just gives you an idea.

And it's funny because people are always like, Ted, you know, we want to see what they look like. Can you give us a picture? It's like, well, I'll give you a picture, all right?

So that's what we're going to try to do is to try to paint a picture. And so I want to start off by saying, why do we know so little? How is that possible, right?

And what do we know? Well, it's really a long story. It's a complex story, and it starts long, long ago.

So I want to just briefly start kind of at the very beginning. Again, the Native Americans have been here, they would say they've been here since time immemorial. And again, a very Western linear sense.

Archaeologists would say it was about 12,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated from our parts of New England, retreating to the north. And very soon afterwards, Native peoples moved into the region, initially going, migrating north, following the herds of late, what they call late Pleistocene megafauna. Big game.

When I say big game, I mean big game. The most recent evidence we now know from Vermont is that, yes, there actually were woolly mammoths occupying New England at the same time that Paleo-Indians were. So this scene could well have happened here, a big hunt.

And again, we know there's actually an archaeology site from this time period, a very famous one in Ipswich at Bull Brook. And I like to show this to sort of show that length of time, but also to sort of show how much change Native societies went through. That we start off with frozen tundra and woolly mammoths.

And they're constantly adapting and evolving to that lifestyle. Numerous archaeologists would say the numerous cultures and way of life have risen and fallen over the years. And again, we could spend a whole semester talking about New England prehistory.

But I think the key takeaways are, we are talking about people who have a pre-industrial lifestyle. They do not have factories. But in that sense, they're very much in touch with their natural world far more than I think even the most environmentally conscious of us could ever hope to be.

And they live in a delicate balance with that natural world with total respect for it. There's a reason that Native Americans are sort of like the picture of the environmental and ecological movement in the United States, right? Is because they have that deep reverence and respect for the land.

And they live off the land in its seasonal rounds of activity. In the spring, you're at the falls of the river where you're catching the migrating salmon and other fish. In the summer, you're on the beach and you're hunting birds on the marshes.

In the winter, you may retreat into the interior. Because again, too, I mean, I don't know about you folks, but I'd rather be a few miles inland from the ocean when those blizzards hit in February. Swampska is a lovely town, don't get me wrong.

But the Native people said, well, okay, we'll spend the summer in Swampska. We're going to spend the winter like maybe 10 or 20 miles inland because it's a little nicer there. We're talking about a culture where all possessions are handmade, handcrafted.

And these are Penobscot and Passamaquoddy baskets and birchbark work. But I'd like to show these to point out that pre-industrial does not mean primitive or simple in any way. We are talking about amazingly skilled craftsmen.

And if you think about carving a land out of this place without technology, you know, we have to think of what trouble we have when the lights, when they lose electricity for an hour, folks, right? Yeah. And no problem.

These people were masters of that. I think the big change really hits native New England in this area around roughly 1,000 A.D. We know this is the time when corn agriculture arrives in Massachusetts coming in from the south. Corn agriculture starts in the Guatemalan highlands about 4,000 years ago and roughly moves north at about a mile a year.

And it's kind of like a gradual process where, you know, those people, first off, it's like, those people next door, they're doing really weird stuff. And then all of a sudden, like, those people next door, they seem to be prospering. There's lots more of them, and they look healthy, and they're eating well, and they don't have to move around a lot as much, you know?

That is to say, revolutionizes Native American lifestyle. And the traditional native trilogy of corn, bean, and squash, which we know from an ecological point of view works really, really well together and also from a dietary point of view actually works really well together and allows people to have more sedentary lifestyle. Any of you that had a garden this summer understand that.

You don't even want to leave for a week for vacation because when you come home, the critters and the neighbors have gotten in there and, right? So you start to have more people, healthier populations, growing populations, larger villages, more sedentary. Because again, once you harvest all that corn, you're not going too far away because you're going to want that for your winter, and you don't want the raiders coming down the coast to take it.

And this actually really is a problem. So drastically changes things. And by the way, the pictures throughout here, I'm showing images from Plymouth Patuxet, from Hockamock's village site there.

They do a really good job of interpreting the 17th century Native American and European and their interaction. And also, there are a few images here I've shown from We Shall Remain, which was an episode of the American experience that we did a few years ago that we actually filmed at Pioneer Village. We did the first Thanksgiving, which we actually made into a buffet.

Don't think about that. So corn agriculture around 1000 AD, little ice age around 1400 AD, the weather gets colder, maybe corn agriculture isn't quite as reliable as it used to be. And then the next big change, of course, is these strange, hairy, pale, smelly people show up around 1600 in these large islands, it seemed like, the way the Native Americans described European ships with the masts, right?

These movable islands. First European explorers really reached the coast of New England in the early 1600s. And one of the first is Samuel de Champlain, who's a French explorer and pretty good cartographer who draws a series of maps of the region.

He did not draw Swanskin, but he did draw Beauport, the beautiful harbor, Gloucester, and you can see here the many native habitations, the cornfields scattered throughout the region. So imagine lots of small little sort of villages and family groupings and their fields all in close proximity. And this is what he encounters when he comes down the coast at that time.

And you can see here just a series of explorations down the coast, and they give us the first written accounts that we have of the native peoples here. But I would point out that it is just a brief glimpse, again, just like the summer tourists to Swanskin might leave a few notes in their diaries about what they did, but you wouldn't want to write a whole history of Swanskin from those brief summer encounters, right? But in our case, that's all we've got.

And a few good maps as well, too, and this is by far my favorite. Again, it's by Champlain, who in the circle there shows about where we are, that's all of Massachusetts Bay kind of on his map of the Northeast. But particularly, too, because of these folks here, he actually puts some native peoples in the corner, and he calls these people the Amushkwa, figure of the Amushkwa native people.

And he uses this term, Amushkwa, to describe all of the people really from southern Maine, the coastline as he travels. Remember, Champlain's in a boat, he's not going five or 10 miles inland, he's sailing along the coast, going up the rivers. These are the people that he encounters that he assumes are kind of all one people.

He's wrong, but it's not a bad initial observation when you consider that these folks have a number of things in common. First off, they're all farmers. If you go further up to where Champlain first lands on St. Croix on the currently Canadian-U.S. border, they're hunters. It's too far north to grow prehistoric corn. So he comes there and he says, wow, these people are farmers. They all live more of a sedentary lifestyle.

They all seem to speak a reasonably intelligible language to each other. They have a guide who's from the mid-coast of Maine who can understand people down here. But clearly even the term is his term.

And frankly, it's kind of a term of derision. Well, we all have words for people from other areas, and sometimes they're not polite. And this one isn't particularly polite, but it's the word we've got.

To describe these people that we now know, we're probably a half dozen different groups of people. Also, too, notice at this early, even the man there is holding a European knife in his hand. The rest of this is sort of more sort of the natural.

Obviously this was an image taken in summer. So again, all these people spoke this closely related language we now know. They had similar customs, similar life ways.

They often intermarried throughout the region, particularly amongst the elites, the leaders. And Champlain knows from personal experience, because he gets drawn into this work, most of these people, at least those living north of the Charles River, are allied together from about the Charles River up to the Kennebec against their neighbors to the north in northeastern coast of Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, the Mi'kmaq, and the neighboring Etchemen. And therein is an important part of the story that we will get to.

So Champlain's initial observation is pretty good, yeah. And again, to me, there are all kinds of issues here over, again, even like, where is this? Was this Pawtucket land?

Was this Massachusetts land? It's at a level, I think, of our generalized understanding. I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference, because the life would have been pretty much the same.

And I guess, you know, the difference between living like in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. To some people, that means a lot. To other people, it's just a change of zip code, right?

And that's kind of what this is like. Unfortunately, these early explorations with their observations depict a world that was completely lost by the time the permanent European explorers arrived in 1620 in Plymouth and afterwards. And the real big problem is a series of great epidemics, or a great epidemic, that literally almost wiped out this population between 1616 and 1619.

Now, we don't know exactly what it was. There are lots of different descriptions of it, maybe a few different vectors at work. The problem is, in the 17th century, people did not understand disease process at all.

But what's clear is that we do know now this is what we call a virgin soil epidemic, because the native population that had been isolated from Europeans and people off of Turtle Island for thousands of years had no known resistance to harmless childhood diseases like chicken pox, mumps, measles, or more serious ones like smallpox. So when these villages are exposed to these kinds of diseases, they are lethal. And as someone who got chicken pox in his mid-30s from his daughter and was delirious with a fever of about 105, I get this, right?

Some people say I'm delirious most of the time. I just had an excuse then. Lethal.

And we know the estimates are 70 to 90% of the population of coastal New England that may have been lost. And there's another round of epidemics in 1633 in smallpox that makes it worse. So again, folks, think about what even something as mildly lethal, comparatively, as COVID has done to our lives.

Think about what the Black Death, which may have killed 30 or 40% of the population, did to Europe. This is completely destabilizing. We're talking about people.

There's an account written, one of the first settlers in the early 1620s. He says, basically, you could walk through the woods and there'd just be dead bones scattered everywhere. Such massive casualty rates that there are not enough people to bury the dead.

He describes it, he calls it a newfound Golgotha. Populations have to be moved, reformulate. You know, hey, I hear my cousins a few miles away are still left.

Let's go live with them. Whole villages disappear. People come together.

People lose their faith in their gods. Why have our gods abandoned us? You can imagine, I mean, again, think what COVID did to us and multiply it like tenfold and you kind of get the idea of how this really created a society that was vastly different than what Samuel Champlain had done.

You only sort of wish that people like Champlain said, wish they'd sort of stuck around for a few years and really taken copious notes because we really, once this hits, we really lose most of our ability to understand the world before. Archeologically, we can gain some things, but it's a very impartial picture and I'll just leave it at that. If that wasn't bad enough, the same time period, there was also, as I mentioned, this major war going on between the Mi'kmaq and the Echemen and the people really from the Kennebec region down south to here.

It is a pretty lethal war. Folks down here are on the losing end of that war as the Mi'kmaq and the Echemen are constantly raiding down here, basically looking for food and other goodies and trade goods because also trade has exacerbated this region as well too. So again, Native Americans made a huge impact on this region almost unwittingly through disease and through trade, almost really without trying and then of course there will be deliberate efforts to impact populations that we'll get to.

So here's a map by Mark Lescarbeau who was actually one of Champlain's, he was a lawyer actually who came up with Champlain, a personal lawyer probably in North America at least. Suriqua is Champlain's term for the Mi'kmaq, then you have the Echemen, again these groups today, Echemen and Suriqua, Jalisco, Armusheqa too, maybe some of them, would be part of the Wabanaki Confederacy, today Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mi'kmaq, et cetera. And then you can see down here, the Armusheqa, or Almusheqa, Armusheqa, and the Kennebec River there, Mary there's the Saco, she okay, and Malbar down here, that's Eastham on Cape Cod.

So you get the kind of idea of where we are there, that this is, he said, oh no, this is clearly the land of all those farming folk, yeah, and they're the ones that are getting attacked all the time from the north. War casualties are severe too, as we'll see, Nana Peshmet is one of the people who dies in that fight in 1619, so one reason we don't know much about him. So then on top of that, okay, then the Europeans decide they're gonna settle here.

Wow, that's a lot for any society to take in, change, location, death, disease, and of course the only accounts we have of this are from those settler colonists, who are not trained cultural anthropologists, and frankly, sometimes aren't even all that interested in telling the truth, frankly, and again, that's another story there too. So we don't have a lot of information, and what we do have is the sources we have to sort of be very careful about. And of course, even here, I love to show this image, because of course it is the famous statue in Salem of a Salem witch judge.

No, no, wrong. That's what people think it is. It's actually supposed to be a representation of Roger Conant, who was the leader of the first English settlers to Nahumkeag, or Nahumkeag, basically means the eel fishing place, and it's what we now would refer to as Salem, or Salem and Beverly, and of course we have no idea what he looked like at all, right, so again too, representation of Roger Conant.

I just want to push ahead though, and let's pull back now, and don't worry, we'll come back to Nana Peshment and the family, but also to sort of talk about what life was like for these people, the numbers, a little bit of who they were, maybe, try to focus on that. Daniel Gookin was the Massachusetts agent, if you will, or representative to the native peoples, particularly to the praying Indians, a group of native peoples who have been Christianized, really, at the encouragement of the Puritans. They give them what we would today consider almost like reservations.

We're going to give you towns way out on the edge of the woods, and you don't want to live in Swampska anymore, you really want to go to Natick or up to Lowell, and we'll let you be up there, and you have to adopt our clothing, our dress, you have to become good Christians, and become farmers, but this is where you can go. And Gookin's kind of the superintendent of this, and he knows the native peoples very, very well, and writes one of the best accounts of them in 1674, and at the time, he talks about the different groups and the populations, and he describes really six different groups, starting with the, in our eastern New England kind of region in the south, the Pequot or Mohegan, the Narragansett, the Poconoket or the Wampanoags, Massachusetts, of the south coast of, really, the south shore, and greater Boston, then to the north of them, or to the west of them, the Nipmuc, Worcester County, and then to the north, this group known as the Pawtucket or the Pinnacook.

So, having said that, this is just the Handbook of North American Indians, one of the leading authorities, suggests what these boundaries were and these groups were. I'll tell you this, these boundaries are completely open to sort of interpretation, and are sort of constantly debated by scholars, by native peoples, by everybody, to this day, and I could show you five different maps that would have five different boundaries, right? And particularly, those ideas of what's going on vary a lot over time, and they vary depending on who you ask, what questions you ask, and how you interpret this thin line of evidence gets confused really easily for a number of ways.

It gets confused by the fact that, again, Native passionate appears to have ruled over Confederacy, okay, but how much of that was actually his territory? Issues of alliances, intermarriage, and confused by place names. The name Pawtucket, you're going, hey, wait a second, Pat, Pawtucket, that's in Rhode Island.

Well, here's the problem, folks, there's more than one Pawtucket, there's more than one Nahumcag, Renownke, right? There's more than one Kennebec River. I remember driving through the Trans-Canada Highway in Ontario, and there I am crossing the Kennebec River.

Well, the issue is Native American place names describe things that happen there. Nahumcag, good place to fish eels at the outlet of the river. All of these names, then, and again, it's kind of like I'm saying, like, suppose I would say, like, hey, afterwards, let's go have lunch at Five Guys, or let's go to Dunks.

We could show up at 10 different places, right? Same thing with place names, and also, too, again, we don't know how Native Americans use these terms. We tend to refer to them by those place names, the Pawtucket, the Nahumcag.

You know what? I don't think they would have called themselves that. They had a whole different set of terms we don't usually know, but they usually mean some version of the people, or us, or, right here, Donlanders.

And even here, you can see how close in proximity the language is, because you have, for example, the Wampanoag of southern New England. You have the Wabanaki of northern New England. It's the same word.

Wapanoag, Wapanak, basically means Donlanders, people of the first light, with an accent. So imagine, you know, someone from Texas trying to talk to someone from Southie, right? You understand, but sometimes you're going, like, you speak kind of funny.

And that's the way it would have been in New England, as well, too, where a little bit different accents, you know? I'll never forget when, years ago, when my brother-in-law from Maine was in Boston at the bus station trying to get home, and he kept on saying he wanted a ticket to Leuston. And I'm like, we don't go to Leuston.

We don't know where Leuston is. No, Leuston, L-E-W-I-S-T-O-N. Oh, Lewiston!

Right, okay. All kinds of, and by the way, sometimes in the documents you can sort of see where I don't think they're quite speaking the same language, because you can see almost like there's differences there, right? Anyhow, as far as terminology, let me say, too, again, we're talking about groups and bands, not tribes.

Tribes are an anthropological term, and of course today they're a legal term, whether people have official tribal status or not, but from an anthropological point of view, a tribe is a large group that is pretty hierarchical and will involve hereditary chieftainships and will involve people of certain ranks in society, usually like an official priestly class, etc. Native people in New England are not like that. They are, first off, they tend to be smaller populations, they're much more egalitarian, less social hierarchy, and also, too, along those lines, so we don't use the term chief, we would use the term, again, more like a satrium or sagamore, because these people, yes, they are drawn from the leading families, but they don't necessarily inherit the right, and as we'll see in this case, sometimes even women can inherit the right to be the leader. Of course, the English are talking about, well, I went and visited the queen of this or the king of that, and they see this hierarchy, but guess what, folks?

That's what they're used to, right? As observers, they're looking to find, take me to your king, right? No, we don't have a king.

Well, we all kind of, what was it, Monty Python, we're an Anarcho-Syndicas commune, right? No, it wasn't quite like that, because you do have leaders, and they lead by example, they lead by, they show their military skills, their diplomacy, their ability to cajole, convince, get people to go along with them by consensus, so it's not like, hey, we're all gonna do this. Someone says, well, I'm not so sure about that.

So, it takes great skill to be someone like Nana Pashmet, who could rule over this large, we believe, confederacy. And by the way, that was our buffet at Pioneer Village during the first Thanksgiving. Goukhat also gives population estimates, which kind of confirm just how horrible this was, and of course, at the time, what are they really interested in is, how many fighting men do you have, right?

And he estimates that before these epidemics hit, the Pawtucket could have fielded about 3,000 warriors, and the Massachusetts about the same. If you use a 5 to 1 ratio, 4 to 1, 5 to 1 ratio, that gives you an idea that he might have had as many as about 15,000 people of each, so. But then in 1674, he's estimating, yeah, you're more like 1,000, 1,200.

You are talking about 90% casualty rate. So, you think about, again, just what that would do to our society, right? Really is, as many have described it, a widowed land.

Which gets us to Nana Pashmet, who we rarely get to know, and in fact, actually, and I may be wrong, and I'm happy if anyone knows better, I've only been able to find his name in one 17th century contemporary document. Now, having said that, you'll hear all about him and all of the things, and five different things describing what his confederacy looked like and who he ruled and what his ethnicity was. Folks, we really don't know.

Again, we can try to sort it out. He's only mentioned in a couple of paragraphs of Morton's relation, which was actually written by Edward Winslow. They used to think it was by this guy, George Morton, but we know we're pretty sure it was Edward Winslow, who was one of the leading of the Plymouth colonists, and he describes Plymouth from about a year, from November 1620 to 1621, and it's the document that includes the count of what they call the first Thanksgiving, which was really more of a harvest home, but again, that's a whole other Thanksgiving lecture. In this account, Nana Pashmet has recently died, but I just want to show you how little we know. Here's what it says.

On the morrow, we went ashore. All but two men and merchants are now, this is, I should explain. This is an expedition from Plymouth, Miles Standish and the gang, Captain Shrimp, as he was called by Thomas Morton, and they've come up to explore Massachusetts Bay, greater Boston area, and they meet the leader of Shawmut, that is Boston Neck today, and then they decide, let's go see what's on the north shore there, across the rivers, across the Charles, the Mystic, somewhere up there, but again, we're not really sure where, but they get up there, they land somewhere on the coast, and having gone three miles, we came to a place where corn had been newly gathered.

A mile from hence, Nana Pashmet, their king in his lifetime, had lived. You know, folks, I have a difficult time trying to figure out where he was living, don't you? And again, people will tell you all over the map, from Medford to Salem, hard to say.

His house was not like the others, but a scaffold, basically palisaded. This was, they're talking about, they were fortifying themselves for this war. Not far from hence, in a bottom, we came to a fort built by their deceased king, Nana Pashmet, and he describes the fort, and then in the midst of the fort, the palisado, think of Fort Apache, right?

Wooden palisades, 10, 12 feet high. A house wherein he being dead, he laid buried. Here, Nana Pashmet was killed, none dwelling in it since the time of his death, and yes, little do they realize that they're actually defacing and defiling his burial site by even entering the house, right?

Native peoples would have been horrified by this, that their leader's resting place was desecrated by even Europeans entering the house. But that's all we got on him, folks. I don't see a lot of descriptions here about anything.

And again, when you study this stuff, you have to take, you have to start, again, to try to sort of put the picture together, but I just want to show you how little we're starting with. So, but assuming Edward Winslow got it right, and he's a pretty sharp guy, fairly astute observer, actually understood native folks and got along quite well with them, Nana Pashmet appears to have been killed in one of these attacks, these raids coming down from the Mi'kmaq and the Etchement. Apparently a village somewhere on the Mystic River.

Again, most people think Bedford, in part because there were some excavations and discoveries of Native American graves in this vicinity in the late 19th century that might confirm with what they found in Mort's relation. And we think, again, it sounds like it happened not long before pilgrims arrived. So maybe 1618, 1619, somewhere generally around there, but we don't know when.

So that's kind of all we got, folks. And again, in some degrees we know frustratingly less about his family. Again, we don't know the, even though she's mentioned in probably several dozen documents, we don't know the actual name of his wife or where she was from.

She's described as the Squashachum of Mystic. She is described, and again Squash just meaning really the wife, but Squashachum, this is unusual that a woman would rule so clearly. She is from an important, powerful family in her own right.

The question is we can't say for sure where. She's also described actually, as you'll see later on, as a Massachusett. They have five children that we know of that lived to adulthood.

They have two daughters, Yowata, who's often referred to as Sarah. They have another one who we don't know her name, but is the wife of Nanishkow. Three sons, the oldest son, Wunahokwan, Sagamore John, who rules after his father's death at Mystic, Chelsea, Charlestown, that neck of the woods.

Second son, Mon Potoway, Sagamore James, as the English call him, who rules around Saugus and Swampscott, this area. Then the youngest son, Wunahokwan, known as Sagamore George, later known as George No-No's, because apparently he had some sort of either illness, disfiguring illness, or combat injury, who ruled Saugus area. I mean, ruled at Namtig or Salem, as far as we can tell.

Again, this is all kind of like basically ruling in concert with your mother, who still is the Squassetian, is still keeping the boys in line, quite clearly. And in fact, actually, it's clearly her operations that try to basically use the process of intermarriage to bolster the alliances that they had, to try to maintain that large alliance of the family. Oldest son, John, marries the daughter of Maskanamit, who's the Sagamore of Agawam or Ipswich.

James marries the daughter of Pasakanaway, the chief sachem of the Merrimack. Now both of these men had both been sort of clients, allies, of Natapeshmit. But now they're kind of becoming more equals.

And in fact, actually, eventually it would be Pasakanaway who becomes the lead sachem. And in fact, there's a whole sort of, after James marries Winohu, there's actually this whole sort of contest between them, where Winohu wants to go visit mom and dad. So she goes back home, and James sends a large delegation of his warriors to protect her and arm her in their feast when they get there.

And then when they finally, word gets back, like, so, hey, James, come get her. You know, she wants to come back. And they're going like, no, no, no, no, no.

You should, you're disrespecting me. You need to bring her back with lots of warriors, and then we'll have a feast. No, no, no, no, no.

That was your dad. I'm, sonny boy, I'm in charge here now, really. So at this point, we're kind of Pasakanaway.

This is in 1631, where Pasakanaway is sort of saying, you know, loved your dad, respect your mom, you are not your father. And I'm like the supreme big shot here now, right? Again, to read between the lines of this, but it's a really interesting account of what happened in this back and forth.

George also first marries the daughter of Pasakanaway, and then a daughter of Poquanam, Duke William, or sometimes known as Blackwell of Nahant, who's a local sachem in Nahant, not a big shot, who has a sad fate, who's actually killed by Englishmen up on the coast of Maine, and actually, he's being misrepresented or mistaken for someone else. Yawada marries the Sagamore of Neshoba, and her sister marries the teacher there. So again, they're intermarrying.

You can see here, this family from the, this North Shore family is marrying all throughout, you know, from the Merrimack River all the way out to central Massachusetts. And I think that's happening on a regular basis, you see, but again, we don't know. I couldn't tell you about those marriages in 1550, could I?

But they were happening. Anyhow, we do have William Wood's map of 1634, which shows us some of this, and here's the detail on it. You can see here, Sagamore John, Mystic, and Winnisimot, Chelsea, Revere, and then Sagamore James, Sagus, S-A-G-U-S, and then Salem, which is where George will come to rule.

He's a little bit younger. We're not quite sure when he took over. He wasn't an adult when his father died.

And again, they rule sort of together with their mom, who's really keeping the fellows in order. The sad thing is, though, by the time this map is printed in 1634, James and John and most of their followers are dead. That smallpox epidemic wipes them all out.

We're close to it, close to it. I never want to give the impression that there isn't a Native presence here, because there is, but as far as them, you go down from maybe, you know, 30, 40, 50 people to maybe a half dozen or something like that. And again, we don't really know, but that kind of destruction, on top of what happened previously, just lethal, lethal stuff.

As if that wasn't bad enough, a few years later, relations with the English change drastically. Initially, hey, nice to have you here. We could use some help against those really unpleasant people who keep attacking us from the north, and you have all kinds of really cool stuff, like sharp steel knives and gunpowder, and wow, yeah, of course, of course we'll let you settle here, absolutely.

Right? Yeah, let us welcome you here, because frankly, we're, you know, understated thing there, we're weak, we could use some help. Unfortunately, you know, it's, what do they say, like, guess after fish after three days, right?

Start to smell? After a while, it becomes clear that, wait a second, you mean there are lots more of you? And you're rapidly reproducing and planning on staying, like, forever?

And by 1637, those tables have kind of turned, because it's that year that there will be a war down in Connecticut, where Massachusetts and the other English colonies, again, largely destroy the Pequot Nation. And we, actually, this is a pretty good, accurate description of the attack on their fort at Mystic, again, there's another Mystic, yeah. And basically, it is a slaughter, including, you know, they surround the village, and they kill everybody they can, including women and children.

And they basically write the Pequot out of history. Now, of course, again, they've always been there, and they finally have tribal recognition, but for a while, basically, their name didn't exist legally, even, right? I mean, that's how bad it was.

At which point, I think the people around here are going like, we don't want that treatment here, do we? I mean, it was really, and by this time, the native population is so low after that smallpox epidemic, they have to tread very lightly. And by this time, too, these English that they've sort of let, yeah, come on in, make yourselves at home, have really done that, right?

And have kind of taken over the land. And in very few cases, has there actually been, shall we say, recognition of Native American rights and land ownership here. It's kind of like, yeah, we'll deal with that later.

But that becomes an issue, right? And in fact, actually, violence against Native peoples continues after the Pequot War, to the point where, in 1644, the Squassatium and other leading sachems of the region basically agreed to be, reach allegiance of Massachusetts Bay and of King Charles. They really become subjects.

Now, again, we could have all kinds of debates about what it meant. I think in this case, again, too, I think they probably knew what it meant, and they probably knew that this was the way they were going to survive, and I don't think they were all happy with the idea. In other places, the dynamics is very different, and I'll talk about that, because the place that I study more in Maine is a very different dynamic going on here in this case.

We do know the Squassatium, though, sells a few pieces of land, and again, this is the deed right here to Charlestown. She also claims land in Cambridge. She doesn't receive much for this land.

21 coats, 19 fathom of wampum. Wampum shells are currency for Native Americans, but they're also religious objects in many ways. They tend to be made down in Long Island Sound.

Fathom is six feet. Six feet of wampum is supposed to officially be 360 wampum beads. There's an exchange rate at the time where six wampum beads equals one pence, so in other words, you're probably talking just about maybe four or five pounds worth of money.

She's getting about enough wampum there to maybe buy a cow. Three bushels of corn. Basically, what's she getting out of the deal?

She's providing basically winter coats for her family and her people, but not much more. Did she understand what she was selling? Well, unfortunately, she did, because the deed says, she retains the land she lives on and the right of her people to hunt, fish, farm on that land, but only during her lifetime.

Now, folks, I see this in Maine on deeds, and it's like in perpetuity, right? And again, to be sort of ... Now, let's put it this way.

We know this means that the Native peoples understand the deal pretty much, right? Because ... Let's put it this way.

If you buy a house, are you going to offer to let the people who just sold it to you keep on using the garage every winter? No. You would never suggest that, would you?

Well, here, if you have a clause like this, you think the English are going to recommend this? No. This is the squassation saying like, okay, I'll agree to this, but I know you people.

Here are my conditions. You're not going to disturb me here for the rest of my life. My family and everybody can continue to use this land, but also this finality which tells you how desperate they were and how few of them were left, saying like, okay, by the time I'm dead, they're all going to be gone and moved elsewhere anyhow, so it doesn't matter.

I mean, it's a very depressing thing. They aren't even trying to get that use for time immemorial for my descendants to use this land. It's stunning.

It really is, and it shows how desperate people are here, how much the population had been annihilated, and also the power of Massachusetts Bay, which certainly are not necessarily the good guys in this story by any stretch of the imagination, right? I mean, they're taking full advantage of the situation, and in Maine, you have lots of deeds that are individuals buying land, and here, it's basically like the towns or people representing the town that buy land. It's very much of a corporate thing, so, and having said that, we know, what do the Puritans, Massachusetts Puritans say about who owns the land?

Well, tell you what, John Winthrop and others basically have this term they use called vacuum domicilium, vacant land, that widowed land, you know, all those abandoned cornfields and stuff, if you're not productively using it, you don't really own it. The only native land that they would give ownership to, claimed, would be improved areas, that is, areas that are actively being farmed. Beyond that, you know what?

It's God's will that we're here. King James says he owns this land. King Charles says he owns this land.

They own it, and we're going to improve it, and so, therefore, we will own it, yeah. And again, to some degree, you're saying, wow, isn't that nice of them that they even went through the formality occasionally of buying off the native peoples with some modest purchases. So, you improve it, you own it.

This is a conquest of, ideology of conquest. Make no mistake about it. Interesting thing, there's one person who disagrees with this, and he's, of course, Salem's minister, Roger Williams.

We all think that Roger Williams was thrown out of Massachusetts because of religious differences. Well, yeah, there was also this deal where he said, you know, John Winthrop et al., I think we need to buy the lands from the native peoples. I think they actually own it.

No, no, no, no, no. The king owns it. He says he does.

Well, in that case, the king's a liar. Woo, no. I mean, the Puritans don't like the king, but no, no, no, no, no.

So, in fact, one of the reasons, really, that he gets thrown out of Massachusetts is his views about land, and this, of course, explains what's the first thing he does when he gets to Rhode Island? Sits down and negotiates with the native peoples to live there in their company, and Roger Williams is one of those people who really does understand and have a very good relationship with native peoples. So, yeah.

So, by the way, you know, so, Sacramento George, the one surviving son after the smallpox epidemic, and then the kind of the ruler after his mom's death, probably sometime in the 1650s or 60s, he refuses to play this game. And, in fact, he repeatedly tries in court. He said, hey, I'm taking you to court and suing you for my land.

They're like, no, no, no, I own the land. Well, show me where you own this land. Well, the town gave it to me.

Well, no, the court says, no, you need to talk to someone else. You need to go to the general court. You need to go to the county court.

You need to go to court in Boston. He tries off and on for about 20 years without any success to get any land restored to him during his lifetime, but he refuses to play the game and to sell, to his credit. And, meanwhile, by the late 1660s, most of his family had left the area anyhow.

As we'll see, they're all living, they moved to these sort of these praying Indian villages, principally at Womaset, really at Chelmsford, and also at Natick, which are the two big praying Indian villages. So, it kind of becomes a moot point to some degrees, but clearly George is not gonna give up on that at all. Nancy, you asked me to do a bit of a timeline, so I'll be seeing a timeline kind of embedded in these random thoughts.

Heading towards the end here, folks, thank you for your patience. King Philip's War is that last, well, one of the last big devastating blows that native peoples face here in the 17th century, as if they haven't suffered enough. A war fought from 1675 to 1678, initially led by Metacom, better known by the English name King Philip, who's the chief sagamore of the Wampanoag.

He and other native peoples rise up in rebellion, realizing that, see, there's more of them down there. They weren't hit as hard by these virgin soil epidemics, but they're still, by 1670s, they're realizing, like, this is not going well, is it? And this is, the handwriting is definitely on the wall, and now may be our last chance to essentially drive the English back into the ocean, which is what is gonna have to do if we're gonna survive here, because it's clear that they're not really all that interested in creating a biracial society, no matter the fact that, of course, one of the reasons the Puritans supposedly come over here, if you look at the seal of Massachusetts Bay, you know, it's got that little, like a cartoon-like balloon, come over and help us, the Native American.

And of course, very controversial to this day, because a version of that is our current state plan. Anyhow, this war will start off well for the Native Americans, but soon turn south, in part because some of the native peoples, including a lot of the praying Indians, fight for the English, and ultimately the tide will turn in the war. This is, from all accounts, one of the most lethal wars in American history, destructive to both native peoples and Europeans.

Native villages destroyed, English villages burnt down, noncombatants on both sides killed, taken prisoner, hostage, you name it. Very high casualty rate for all the people living in the region, so it doesn't go well for all, but it goes far worse for the native peoples. In Maine and New Hampshire, actually the native peoples win the treaty in 1678.

Down here, they don't. They basically have to surrender. Many of the leaders of native peoples are tried for treason and executed.

The lucky ones amongst the leaders and others are shipped in slavery to the Caribbean, in most cases never to be seen from again, though there are, down in places like the Barbados, there are native populations down there that trace their ancestry back. Really good book on that that I can recommend, too. Anyhow, the amazing thing here is George, who apparently tried to stay neutral in the war, it's unclear, somehow may have, certainly was implicated as being amongst the enemy, or was used as an excuse to get rid of this guy that kept on demanding land, and he's shipped down to the Barbados in slavery.

We don't know much about it. All we know is there's a document in 1684 saying that he has come back. I'm told that John Elliott, the leading minister of the praying Indians, is apparently responsible for bringing him back, but again, I haven't actually seen a surviving 17th century document yet that convinces me, so a lot of this stuff is kind of like, frankly, it's like studying the Salem witch trials in this regard.

I'm like, okay, I see this in all these secondary sources, but I really, prove it to me. So we're still working on some of those details. So George actually does make it back here, and a few months later, though, in 1684, he does die, but he dies really at home.

So again, sadly, that may be as close as you get to a happy ending here, folks, but after George dies in the 1680s, mid-1680s, and I think in some degrees partly because of his dying, because I think as long as he was alive, he probably said, over my dead body, are you gonna sell this land? But they start to have a series of land sales where the native peoples do sell off most of the land in this region, and in fact, what happens is, at the time, in 1684, Massachusetts Bay's charter has been revoked, and there's a whole new government put in place here under Edmund Andrews, the Dominion of New England, and Andrews immediately says, you guys, you've been really slacking off from what the king said you were supposed to do in so many ways, not the least of which is, the king owns the land, the king has the right to give the land, and all you towns, like Lynn, which, of course, Swanscoot was a part of Lynn in the 17th century, as was Nahon, as was Lynnfield, much larger area, your towns can't give away this land, only the king can, so you know what, I'm gonna take it all back, and then I'll rent it out to you.

Yeah, good political trick there, right? Basically creating a real estate tax for everybody. So what does Massachusetts do?

Well, one thing they can do is, okay, now is our time to go get deeds to this land, because if this goes to court, eventually maybe we can use our deed from the native peoples, so around 1685, 1686, they literally go scrambling throughout eastern Massachusetts, tracking down the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren of these people, of the last leaders, intact leaders, to sign deeds, go up to Womisset, go to Natick, can you sign here and we'll give you a couple of coats and a blanket and a bottle of liquor? Being bought off on the cheap. They don't have a lot of leverage, again, too, it's kind of like, but it's kind of like, oh, I basically thought that ship had sailed, I mean, I'd given up on ever seeing anything for this, you're gonna give me a little something to sign my name off?

Yeah, okay, I guess I'll do it, because again, that's what I'm reduced to, and these deeds survive, this is the 1686 deed to Lynn, it's at the Peabody Essex Museum, and you can read a, I've got actually a copy of it here, it's a great book by Sidney Pearlie where he has all the deeds of Essex County, and they're included on our website that I have a link to at the end, where you can read transcriptions of all of these documents, and again, you can see, these people are basically saying like, yep, I'm quit claiming my right to this, and you're giving me, actually I think all of Lynn was 16 pounds, which again, at the time, oh, when someone, an average fellow at the time who died in Lynn and left his estate, house, lands, money, clothing, might be worth a couple hundred pounds, so 16 pounds is a pittance, right, it's not even what a person would probably make in a year, it isn't much, folks, but again, it's what they could get away with, right, your state government in action. Now, what I've done is, so back to that initial, I'm gonna end with that initial question, who were these folks? And if you start looking at the deeds of the 1680s, and who's selling the land, it may give you an idea.

Now, there's a caveat here, the question is like, are you going to the right people, or are you just going to like, can you round up any, but the fact is that they were actually able to round up, for example, we know they were able to find Nana Peschmuth's grandchildren and great-grandchildren, including George's children, including George's, at least one of George's sisters, so you've got a couple of generations who are around, mostly, again, all these praying villages, Wamasut and Nadik, Neshoba, who are willing to deed that land, and if you look at who's deeding which towns, because there's literally about 20 or 30 deeds, you get your idea of who has the right to those lands, we would think, because again, I'm thinking, well, you know, if we're just going to offer them a pittance, we might as well at least get it from the right people, because again, who knows what scrutiny this will hold if this goes to court before the king, so we want to get this right, so we want to get to people who have the real right, and when you read these deeds, they start off with, again, you can sort of see, you know, basically says, to all Christian people to whom this presents deed, says me, they basically say who they are, I'm the grandson of George Nono's, also called Winnepocket, sometimes of Romney Marsh, sometimes of Chelmsford in Massachusetts, and then it lists all these people, who they are, how they are descended from Winnepocket, basically, so what's great about this is, this is gold to scholars and genealogists, because it basically gives the family trees of these folks, and it's helped me reconstruct a lot of what I've been talking about, and it also helped, but again, finally, too, if you assume that Massachusetts is going to the people that they think has the best title to this place, right, which would stand out the best in court, when it will, because they're pretty sure it will go to court, you know, it never does, so if you look at the pattern, here's what we see, you know, Peschmidt's heirs, there, Lynn, Saugus, Peabody, Salem, bits of Reading, Nahant, couple of deeds, covers all that territory, okay, this clearly was Nahant of Peschmidt's homeland. In addition to, between here and like the Mystic and the Charles River, maybe as far west as Concord, but certainly as far west as like Woburn, that area, because those are properties that the Squassetians sold in the 1630s, including over to Charlestown, with no one complaining. To the north and west, what happens?

Very different picture. Maskinamut, Maskinamut, Maskinamut, right? Beverly, across the river from Salem, Maskinamut, the Sagamore of Agawam, you're going to his grandkids?

Isn't that interesting? Again, we know Nahant of Peschmidt's were around, but that clearly suggests that there was a dividing line between Maskinamut and Nahant of Peschmidt, there, and then further to the north, past Oconaway, really Haverhill, Newbury, Salisbury, northern Essex County, and along the river. And one or two of the deeds will be like, well, we do this, but with past Oconaway's permission, right?

So again, clear. So you can use these deeds, again, do I trust these deeds 100%? No.

But again, are they going to the right people to get them? Probably. And it kind of paints a picture, right?

Now, with this in mind, then, one would seem that, you know, really the southern part of Essex County, what we call Essex County, would have been the true homelands of Nahant of Peschmidt and his family. So that Massachusetts of Pawtucket, again, ultimately, again, with all due respect to all the native peoples, from most layman's understanding, I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference, because these people were very similar. They were intermarrying.

I'm sure the boundaries moved back and forth. Different groups had different leadership at different times. But go back to Mort's relation, because there's one other thing that he says in the same section on Nahant of Peschmidt.

The stationary governor of this place is called Obtinowot. That's of Boston, right, of Shawmut. And though he lived in the bottom of Massachusetts Bay, yep, Boston, yet he is under Massasoit, he's an allegiant, he's a subject, sort of, under the protection of the Wampanoag down in Plymouth and down in Fall River, that area, all right?

He used this very kindly. Yeah, we got along well. He told us, he durst not they remain there in any subtle place for fear of the Tarantines.

Tarantines was the word they had for the Mi'kmaq and the Etchemes. Like, yeah, I'm constantly on the move right now, because they never knows when they're gonna attack. But then he also says, so I'm really worried about them.

Again, but then also, too, also the Squaw Satchelmore, Massachusetts queen, was an enemy to him. If this refers to the Squaw Satchelmore mystic, which it probably does, if it's, again, if they're interpreting what Obtinowot said properly, if Obtinowot is being completely honest with these strangers, who he probably has good reason not to play all his cards, suggests that the people on the opposite side of the Charles River there do not hitchhorses at all, right? So on the one hand, I keep thinking, like, southern Essex County here could well be part of these Massachusetts people.

But again, clearly, in 1621, 1622, they're not seeing eye to eye. 30 years earlier, maybe they did. We'll never know, right?

So it's kind of an open question. But also, too, I think the problem is, too, is this is Edward Winslow calling her the Massachusetts queen. But clearly, Massachusetts in Boston didn't think she was, right?

And again, I think it's probably more appropriate to call her Squaw Satchelmore mystic. But again, I really wish I knew what her name was. All right, in conclusion, very, very small population remains after King Philip's War and the subsequent war, King William's War.

But again, they persist. Native peoples persist and are still present on the land here. They never left.

This idea of the vanishing Native American is just a fabrication and sometimes deliberate fabrication, right? We know, for example, that Joseph Felt, the historian of Salem, talks from 1725 and beyond every summer Native peoples of the region would come and camp on Gallows Hill. We know the families lived on Wigwam Hill and Ipswich well into this time period as well.

And there was a long relationship between the Epps family who lived there and Native peoples where they were sort of seen as their protectors. We also know from the Salem Witch Trials that we have other Native peoples around, too, like John Indian and his wife Tituba. John might have been local, doubt it.

Usually when people are enslaved, they're not enslaved in their homelands. They're deliberately taken away from them so they can't make escape. And Tituba probably actually was from the Caribbean.

But there were definitely Native people here. There were also people in debt peonage. When Native peoples went into debt, the court said, okay, you have to go work it off.

Sometimes you'd spend years. Sometimes even if a family went into debt, they might literally sort of sell off into debt peonage one of their children to help pay their debts. And so Native slavery in that sense certainly was real here and well into the 18th century.

Yeah. So again, they didn't vanish. If anything else, I want to make sure you understand that impression.

So some recommendations here I'll put at the end, too. If you really want to get a good general picture of this, Lisa Brooks, our beloved kin, wonderful history of King Philip's War, written by a Native American and brilliant scholar, won the Bancroft Prize in History. Lisa's a wonderful person, a wonderful scholar.

Can't recommend it enough, and she talks some about these people. Mary Ellen Leponica's website with her indigenous history of Essex County is a really great resource. It sounds like she gave a wonderful talk here not too long ago.

You can see all of those Salem deeds at Salemdeeds.com, all of these Native American deeds that I referred to. Plymouth Patuxent Museum has a great website. David Stewart Smith's dissertation on the Petticoat is brilliant, hard to find.

A lot of my information on the genealogies comes from David. Someone who died way too young, he died from cancer a few years ago, but brilliant scholar. Margaret Newell does a great book on Native American slavery in New England.

I highly recommend. Peter Leavenworth's really good article on Native American land tenure amongst the potpocket that I recommend as well, too. Nancy mentioned my article, but honestly, it's getting a little long in the tooth, and there's some inaccuracies in there, so I'm not even going to put my own stuff up here because there's better stuff out there.

Thank you very much for your patience, and I would be happy to answer any questions.

[Speaker 2] (1:10:03 - 1:10:12)
Yes? I'm interested in the language. What does Swanstock mean?

Is it a red rock? Wow.

[Speaker 1] (1:10:13 - 1:10:41)
I don't know. I don't know. See, I've been studying this stuff hard for about a month now, trying to get back into it, and part of the problem I will say is that the linguists have not studied this area as well as I would like them to.

There's still a lot we don't know, but unfortunately, some of the 19th century documents where they made the translations, some of them are really on the money, and that might be, but some of them also can be a little laughable, so I don't know in this case which it is. Yeah?

[Speaker 4] (1:10:42 - 1:10:54)
I think that what we know is that Swanstock was the English slurring of the Native American word.

[Speaker 1] (1:10:55 - 1:11:06)
Yeah, and that's part of the problem is that, again, the Native American word and how we butcher it in English is, yeah, well, you know, that's true, I think, pretty much today.

[Speaker 3] (1:11:07 - 1:11:22)
At Oakport, when Champlain did those maps and the detail, how did he communicate with the Native Americans to get any information whatsoever?

[Speaker 1] (1:11:23 - 1:12:04)
He had Native American guides with him who were, again, from the north. When he came down in a boat, he brought people with him, and they knew the language. Again, we think Native people's being static because people moved all over the place, right?

And it sounds like, again, people along this region could reasonably understand each other, so he had Native interpreters and guides who could tell him and talk to him, and again, I think some of them, if you look at what he was saying, it probably might have been somewhat laughable the way he was misinterpreting what they were saying, but we think it's pretty accurate, but again, obviously, a lot of that map is based on, as you point out, has to be based on what the natives told him, right?

I mean, you can only see so much.

[Speaker 3] (1:12:04 - 1:12:08)
And how long did he spend doing what he did?

[Speaker 1] (1:12:08 - 1:12:13)
A few days down here. I mean, he was basically, yeah, he's coming up and down the coast.

[Speaker 3] (1:12:14 - 1:12:19)
Can I ask about the water? I mean, how do you do that?

[Speaker 1] (1:12:20 - 1:13:22)
Well, you have a whole boatload of French soldiers and sailors and explorers, and he was a very good cartographer, very good. And again, right, he's basically made the depth charts for the rivers, but as far as you know, you can read, it's all published. It's all published, Champlain's Voyages, and you can pick up volumes online, you can look it up in old volumes published on the Internet Archive, and you can read through it, and I can't tell you exactly, but basically, think about this, it's like he's doing a summer voyage down from, like, present-day Nova Scotia, and he's spending, you know, a couple of weeks cruising the coastline of Massachusetts. He draws a map of Socoming.

He draws one of Gloucester. He draws one down in Chatham. So he doesn't draw them everywhere, right?

He's only, like, a few places, but he was a very good cartographer, and I think he must have worked pretty quickly. Again, too, how much artistic license is involved in some of those, too, right? We don't know.

And how accurate they are. In other words, was there literally a village where he shows it here, or was it more like over there? What I've seen of his is pretty accurate.

[Speaker 4] (1:13:22 - 1:13:26)
I don't understand what the phrase, the praying village is.

[Speaker 1] (1:13:26 - 1:14:00)
Yeah, so in the Massachusetts Puritans, first off, I don't think we like the Puritans very much, because they're pretty self-assured, and they were, all Europeans claimed they came over here amongst their other goals was to Christianize and civilize the native peoples. I'm not sure they really needed that or wanted that, but that was one of the professed missions. But the Puritans do it a different way.

Like, people like the French would send the Jesuits out into native villages and live with them and really try to understand their ways and convert them. Puritans say, we're coming over here to build a city upon the hill, and you know what? It's going to be so perfect, everyone around the world is going to want to be just like us.

[Speaker 8] (1:14:01 - 1:14:02)
Again, I'm not sure I care for these people a lot.

[Speaker 1] (1:14:04 - 1:15:58)
And so what they do is, though, they say, okay, well, you know what? You see what our life's like here? You want to be like us?

We'll build a town for you, and we'll give you a, yeah. Oh, by the way, no, not quite realistic. It is going to be out in the woods out there.

It's not going to be where you live now, but it'll be okay, and we'll give you a minister, and we're going to, you're all going to become Christian, and you'll have a meeting house, and you'll learn to read the Bible. And John Eliot actually translates the Bible into Massachusetts. And so those native, and they want to reduce the disability.

Native men in particular would be very proud of their lawn here. No, no, no, chop it up. You've got to be short-haired just like a Puritan.

You've got to be in church, meeting every Sunday, and adopt those ways. Now, having said this, to me, which way you're going, and if I'm a native person, I'm doing this, why? Well, think about this.

If you're the last person standing of your family, your society's completely gone, you're wondering what you have done to offend your gods. You know what? Maybe this Christian guy doesn't have the answers.

And again, and there's certainly that entertaining in a people's mind, and increasingly, native peoples are convinced over the generations, I think, to sign up that being an ally of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and living as a praying Indian is probably a much better odds of survival than not. But also, too, frankly, there's also that question of to what degree it's a thin veneer of Christianity, right? We know that some of these native peoples, even living in praying villages and in theory being Christian, are also practically traditional native boys, too.

So it becomes, in some ways, to think of this as the, as I say, maybe the first version of the reservation system is at play here. And again, to me, it sort of speaks smacks of how desperate, perhaps by that time, the native people were and how few chances they really had. Like I said, an impressive story.

Sir.

[Speaker 6] (1:15:59 - 1:16:07)
Thank you. First of all, it's fascinating to hear the story and hear how much of it you know despite the limited evidence.

[Speaker 1] (1:16:07 - 1:16:08)
It's the tip of the iceberg.

[Speaker 6] (1:16:09 - 1:16:20)
I guess my question is, is there any record of the indigenous peoples, of their stories, or their songs, or their art?

[Speaker 1] (1:16:20 - 1:18:50)
Absolutely, their traditions, yes. And they're definitely preserved. The native peoples preserved those traditions.

Some early anthropologists who were folklorists recorded them, their songs, and so on, in the late 19th, early 20th century. So in essence, too, we know a lot more about their traditions, their folkways, their myth and legend, or their cosmology. But it's, so in essence, it sort of helps build a picture of what life was like.

Does it give these kinds of details? Not that I'm aware of. But again, here's the problem, too.

We academics tend to not value oral tradition as strongly as we should. Which again, which is I'm saying, back to the point of like, if both of these native peoples claim this territory as part of their homeland, I believe them. Because I'm not the keeper of their oral traditions.

And far be it for me to be so arrogant as to think otherwise. But unfortunately, so again, you could have, and I'm not the expert to do that, but you could have some wonderful talks and experts coming in and talking about what we know of Native American life in the region from their surviving tales and legends. But again, too, here's the problem is, how authentic would those be?

Could I tell you of a particular native myth or legend that we know would have been told by the people who lived in what's now Swabscoot? No. Why?

Because again, all of these people just get dislocated all over the place. And then if you're in a place like Native, where you have people coming from maybe two or three or four different communities, probably speaking, a couple different variations of local language, and also then all these stories and the language all, basically you're creating a whole new community with whole new traditions where you're building on these traditions of all the people around. So it's very hard, and linguists and folklorists have a huge trouble with this, because again, going back to that huge displacement that I talked about, it clouds our pictures, it also clouds our ability to tell how closely related the myths are.

But having said that, as far as we can tell, again, people throughout southern New England and even along the coast up in Maine seem to have very similar traditions and myths and stories about the creation of the world, about everything from the supernatural beings to the cannibal giants to, you name it. Yeah?

[Speaker 6] (1:18:51 - 1:18:56)
So are there any books or documentary films or recordings or scenes of what like?

[Speaker 1] (1:18:57 - 1:19:10)
William Simmons has written a really good book based on folklore of Native Americans in New England. I don't know the exact title, but look that up. It's a really good place to start, and there's many, many others.

Nancy, if you want, I can put together a list for you.

[Speaker 5] (1:19:12 - 1:19:14)
Perfect. You can post it on our page.

[Speaker 1] (1:19:14 - 1:19:16)
Great, all right, I'll get to work on that. Yes, sir?

[Speaker 5] (1:19:16 - 1:19:28)
Yeah, I'm currently reading a book, a great novel scheme, about the French settling up in a town called Scotia, which is one in Maine.

[Speaker 1] (1:19:28 - 1:19:28)
Yes.

[Speaker 5] (1:19:28 - 1:19:42)
They call it Octavia. Yes. And how they assimilated with the Indians as opposed to the Puritans, that they admitted to marrying, that they adopted Indian ways of filing and stuff, and it's much different than the Puritans.

[Speaker 1] (1:19:42 - 1:21:16)
Yeah, that's funny. I had to answer an essay on that, like compare and confess Spanish, French, and English reactions to Native peoples, and basically the answer was like, well, the Spanish kind of scored, the Spanish enslaved them, the French embraced them, and the English scored them. They don't, yeah.

Clearly, but part of it too, that's true, but part of it is by necessity, because the French, France in the 17th century was a pretty cool place to live, a pretty high standard of living, even amongst, they were probably the fattest, happiest peasants in Europe. You're not going to convince them to come move to Canada, where they're going to go cultivate snow. No thanks.

So they have to rely more and more on the Native peoples there as their allies. So part of it is that, but again, I think also part of it too is clearly there is something different in that whole response that the English encountered consisted of the Native American that I think goes beyond that practicality that is something, you know, I think as an archeologist, I've done some work on Baron Saint-Cassin, who was the French nobleman who was a military officer assigned to Maine, and when he gets there, what's he do? He marries the daughter of the local Sagamore and raises a family, and basically, by our standards, we'd say went Native, right?

He built probably a European sort of style house, but it was in a Native village. And so there certainly seems to be much more of this willingness to embrace that than there was amongst, at least the Puritan folk, absolutely. Yeah, maybe there's some lessons there.

[Speaker 7] (1:21:17 - 1:21:26)
The illustration there, back in time, the decoration on the nails, is that tattooed?

[Speaker 1] (1:21:26 - 1:21:26)
Yes.

[Speaker 7] (1:21:26 - 1:21:27)
Or is that put on?

[Speaker 1] (1:21:28 - 1:21:50)
Well, these fellows are actually, these are Nipmuc, members of the Nipmuc band who were doing the filming. I don't know if those are real tattoos or if they were put on for the show, but we do know that Native peoples in the 17th century certainly had tattoos, as well as Shakespeare. Absolutely, yes.

[Speaker 3] (1:21:53 - 1:22:46)
I must have gotten information long, way back in time, but first of all, I need to know the name of the person that did the translation of the deeds of Essex County. Sidney Purley. Purley.

The second question is, I always was led to believe that Saugus was the mother of our geographic area and then it divided into Lynn and then eventually beyond that as far as breaking up into Quamps Garden. And I think it goes back to a map or some such thing as far as that's the first, of what I was led to believe, the first indication of what our area was called.

[Speaker 1] (1:22:46 - 1:23:38)
So it was called, the formal town was Lynn, but it had many different villages in it. And one of the most important ones, of course, was at Saugus, because that's where the ironworks was, which actually was called Hammersmith. And that was an important center, absolutely.

And also too, I thought you were going in different directions, Saugus was also incredibly important because of the marshes to the native peoples. It is where many, many, many of them resided and frankly are where they ended up sort of living at the margins of society in the 18th and 19th century. And in fact, actually the family name of George and his family is Rumney Marsh, or the English family name of the marsh.

Rumney Marsh, of course, is the name of the marsh, which is actually, of course, named after a marsh in Kent in England. But yes, so the marsh land was, and Saugus itself and the river was critically important, but the actual town it was in was the town of Flint.

[Speaker 8] (1:23:40 - 1:23:42)
All right. Well, thank you so much.

[Speaker 4] (1:23:44 - 1:24:17)
Thank you. Before informal conversation, there's some snacks over there from Pomona that you can enjoy. And also, I want to point out we are relaunching our plaque program, our historic plaque program, and Justina has applications and a sample of the plaque, plus we have some, you know, items for sale from the historical commission.

So you can take a look at these tables and enjoy a light meal. Thank you so much.

[Speaker 8] (1:24:17 - 1:24:18)
Thank you.

[Speaker 4] (1:24:50 - 1:24:50)
Thank you.