[Speaker 2] (0:05 - 3:37)
My name is Jonathan Lehman and I'm Vice Chair of the Swanstown Historical Commission. I'd like to introduce other members of the commission who are with us tonight. Nancy Schultz, our Chair, Brad Brim, our Secretary, Justina Oliver.

We also have members of the Historical Society, Molly Connor, Chair, and a number of members of the Historical Society as well. I'm very pleased to introduce Mary Ellen Lepianka, who graciously agreed to come back again once this year to speak with Swanscott and local residents about our indigenous history. Mary Ellen prepared a wonderful, well-researched talk a year ago, and we're glad to have her back.

This year we were fortunate to learn that Steve Busbucus of Swanscott discovered a very old framed photograph from 1860 of Jonathan Phillips, an early resident of Swanscott, and indigenous members of the Penobscot. It's actually right behind me. The photograph was right here in the library, that's where Steve found it, and the Swanscott Historical Commission arranged to have the photograph restored and preserved with acid-free matting and museum-quality glass.

It's currently hanging in the display case in Town Hall. Mary Ellen is helping us research the photograph further, and we hope to learn more about it as she continues her research. Mary Ellen is a Gloucester resident and independent scholar researching the indigenous history of Essex County from the last Ice Age to around 1700 for her book.

Some chapters have been published at kbanhistory.org. Mary Ellen is a retired college instructor, textbook developer, author, and publisher with a master's degree in anthropology from Boston University and postgraduate work at the University of British Columbia. She taught cultural and physical anthropology and world history at Boston University, Vancouver City College, Northeastern University, North Shore Community College, and Salem State University.

She participated in salvage archaeology on Great Neck and Ipswich, excavated an early Iron Age Bantu refuge site in Botswana, and conducted fieldwork in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Mary Ellen also had a career in higher education, publishing as a developmental editor of college textbooks. Her book, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, has been published in the third edition and is an online course by the Text and Academic Authors Association.

Articles and essays by Mary Ellen on indigenous history of Essex County appear in the Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, the Journal of the New England Antiquities Research Association, historicipswich.org, enduringgloucester.com, and kbnslavery.org. Some of her slide lectures can be found on YouTube. Let's give a warm welcome to Mary Ellen.

[Speaker 1] (3:37 - 38:53)
Thank you for having me again to talk about local indigenous history. The people in this picture were from the Penobscot Reservation on Indian Island in Maine. And the photo was taken when they were visiting Squampscot in 1860, camped on what was then known as Phillips Point, the exact location of which we're going to figure out.

And that's Mr. Phillips being embraced by the expedition leader, possibly the Penobscot chief at that time, and the man with the drum is their spiritual leader. This group may have included descendants of the Penacook-Abenaki people who were living here at the time of English contact. The people who lived here were known variously as the Pawtucket or the Nomkiag or the Agawam, but they were all the same people.

Many indigenous families that were here integrated into Penobscot society after King Philip's War. They fled north and assimilated into Penobscot society and other Abenaki societies in the diaspora following King Philip's War. So more about this picture and these people a little later on, but I think first of all, a little bit of background.

The name of your place comes from the Natick dialect of the Massachusetts language. This is one of 30 Algonquian languages that still exist today. Squampscot was named for the ferrous granite outcrops along the shore between Saugus and Marblehead, including Phillips Point, and it means at red rocks.

It was corrupted to Squampscot in English. The rocks are red because they contain iron oxides, including hematite and magnetite, which rust on exposure to the air. I don't think you really want to change the name of your town to Squampscot at this point.

Too late, too late. So Squampscot and Nahant were part of Lynn, as I'm sure you know, and this area was a popular destination for indigenous people. Families maintained their wigwams in various places throughout their homeland to take advantage of different resource areas in season, but all within a 20 or 30 mile radius of a main village.

The sons of the Grand Sacum Nanapashamat lived here. Montawapiti, or Sagamore James, lived at Sagamore Hill in Lynn and Round Hill in Saugus. Winapoykin, or Sagamore George, lived at Saugus and Salem.

Nanapashamat's oldest son, Awanahaquaham, or Sagamore John, lived on Rumney Marsh in Chelsea and Revere. Nanapashamat himself summered on Marblehead Neck before he was killed in 1619 at his fort in Medford by enemies from the north called the Tarantines. The Tarantines canoed down the coast to raid Algonquian agricultural villages for corn, and that's another whole story.

And you have the Sagamore Poquanam, or Black Will, who lived in Nahant and had a fort at Castle Rock. His daughter, Ahawait, was married to Nanapashamat's youngest son, Winapoykin. So you have a deep indigenous history here going back to probably the 15th century.

In 1630, Black Will famously sold Nahant, and I'm sure you've heard this story. He sold Nahant, along with a piece of the coast here where he summered called Black Will's Cliff, to the English farmer Thomas Dexter in exchange for a suit of clothes, two stone pestles, and a mouth harp. Poquanam would have regarded those things as the payment of tribute, just as he paid tribute to Sagamore James.

Poquanam thought that he was giving Dexter the right to live there and use the resources there to make a living, that the earth could be divided and commodified, and that people could be permanently alienated from their homeland. These were alien concepts to first people, not only here, but worldwide. Here's the same classic illustration on a book cover modified to show Black Will disappearing into thin air.

Perhaps you've seen this. The book, Firsting and Lasting, is about the false narrative that was constructed for the history of New England, how the Indians had died off or disappeared, how history began with English settlement, the industry of town fathers, and the taming of the wilderness. Gage's History of Swampskate, for example, mentions Indians only in connection with King Philip's War of 1675 and its aftermath.

So historians refer to this as the narrative of erasure, and it has skewed our perceptions of the past. Because of erasure and because of intergenerational trauma caused by efforts to exterminate or marginalize indigenous people, many indigenous families today still keep their identities private, or else they never even knew it, the price of survival. These are some of the other erasure narratives that have been handed down to us, and they have contaminated our understanding of history here, but none of them is true.

Here are the families of the four children of Nanapashmet and his wife, the Sakskwa of Mystic. They have living descendants today. Your late Kwanapowit is named for Yawata's son.

She was known in history as Skwa Sockum. Her actual name was never recorded. Her title was Sakskwa, which is a female Sockum, which we unfortunately have been pronouncing as Sachem, but it's really Sockum.

Skwa Sockum administered Swampskate after her husband's death until her son Mantawampiti came of age. But Mantawampiti and Wanahakoham both died in the smallpox epidemic of 1633, as did Pokwanam, or Black Will, and many others. And after that, Wetapoykin, or Sagamore George, the youngest, administered this area, the Lynn Swampskate area.

He survived his smallpox, but was disfigured by it. The colonists called him George No-Nose. This mural in the Winchester Post Office shows the Sakskwa of Mystic, Nanapashamit's widow, in her white deerskin, standing with her two older sons, Wanahakoham and Mantawampiti.

And she is accepting payment of tribute from colonists who believed they were purchasing Winchester and Woburn. Between 1686 and 1701, Nanapashamit's children and grandchildren signed the quitclaim deeds to towns in southern Essex County. They signed your deed.

In addition to Swampskate, Lynn, Redding, Linfield, and Nahant, Nanapashamit's heirs also signed the deeds to Salem, Danvers, Peabody, Middleton, Saugus, and Barblehead. Signatories had to include all the adults in the leadership family because indigenous homelands were held in common and everyone had rights in them. These are some of their marks.

James Quantapowitt took his Uncle George's adopted surname of Rumney Marsh. He was literate in English and a great ally of the English, as were most of the Pawtucket and the Massachusetts bands. The colonists often called the bands by the names of their villages, the Agawam Indians, the Nomcag Indians, the Pawtucket Indians, the Pentucket Indians, and so on.

But as I mentioned before, they really were all the same people. They were a southern branch of the Pinnacook Abenaki. They were not organized as a band, as a tribe or tribes.

They did not have chiefs and they did not see their homelands as sovereign nations until the English defined them that way. They were governed by councils of elders who chose their Sagamores, Sockums, and Sock Squaws by consensus from among high-ranking families who had inherited their eligibility for leadership. The bands were joined with each other and with the Nipmuc and Massachusetts neighbors around them through marriage, trade, and military alliance.

And these were the principal villages in Essex County at the time of European contact, whose names have survived in some form. They were sited at the headwaters and mouths of rivers. They were connected to each other through a network of trails and canoe routes.

A village in Saugus on the Saugus River and the village of Massabequash on the Forest River were the nearest main villages to here. The Lynn Swampscote Coast was their summer playground. On this map from the Southern Essex County Registry of Deeds, the green lines are overland routes and the turquoise lines are canoe routes.

The Mystic Trail connected Saugus and this area to the Nomkiag Trail. And I've listed some of the roadways that began as Indian trails in this area, including Routes 1A and 129, which go through Swampscote. These were Indian trails.

Between 150 and 200 people were camped on your coast in the summers at the start of English settlement. There were wigwams, for example, all along Humphrey Street. Their winter camps, hunting grounds, and trap lines were inland on the wetlands associated with forests and rivers, the Harold King Forest, Lynn Woods, Salem Woods, the Forest River Conservation Area.

On the coast, the people strung channel nets between the inshore islets and the headlands. They staked surf nets on the beaches for menhaden and other herring. They dug clams and gathered other shellfish.

They collected seabird eggs from the offshore rookeries, and they hunted seals on the rocky prominences, just as people who were here before them hunted walruses in the same waters. They had a permanent agricultural village at Mesa Bequash, where they cultivated corn and other domesticated food crops. Accumulations of oyster shells and clam shells in refuse piles called middens indicate thousands of years of occupation.

Colonists found shell middens all along West Shore Drive and Phillips Beach, for example. They also reported large burial grounds where the Waterside Cemetery and Harbor View Cemetery are in a marble head today. Colonists also noted wigwams on all the hills.

For on the shore, any elevation would have been chosen for planting. The only way to get a corn harvest to this area is to plant in arable soil perpendicular to groundwater flow on the gentle slopes of hills that have been cleared through controlled burns. In addition to maize, there grew squash, beans, pumpkins, Jerusalem artichokes, and other sunflowers, tobacco, amaranth, and quinoa.

People also had stone quarries in the rocks along the coast. You have geological formations called the Lynn Volcanics, and there's marblehead rhyolite. From the most ancient times, indigenous people came here for the felsite and the rhyolite prized for napping projectile points.

The rocks here had been magnetized, and nuggets of magnetite were of special interest to shamans and healers. People had ceremonial gathering places. Eagles Hill above Vinnins Square still has the remains of what was likely a ceremonial stone landscape.

Also, possibly an astronomical observatory, and you may want to look for solstice and equinox alignments there. Such sites were first created much earlier in indigenous history. Other similar sites in Massachusetts and up on Cape Ann date to the Middle Maritime Archaic Period.

In Algonquian belief systems, certain boulders, such as these in the Harold King Forest, also would have had spiritual significance to the people living here. But Algonquian spiritual beliefs and practices are another whole subject that we don't really have time for today. The Penacook-Abenaki people who were occupying Essex County at the time of European contact, they were only the most recent ones to be here.

Indigenous history actually goes back all the way to before the Ice Age, it turns out. But the earliest evidence we have for this area is the Paleo-Indians from 11,500 years ago at the famous Bulbrook site in Ipswich. But this gives you an idea.

There's a tendency to sort of collapse the concept of Indians into a single monolithic group, but there were actually many different groups over a very long period of time. The great majority of stone artifacts found in Swampscotch and the rest of Essex County are from the Middle Maritime Archaic Period and the Late Woodland Period. This assemblage is from the Saugus River.

So the Eastern Woodland Indians diversified into different language families, and the eastern branch of the Algonquian language family occupied the eastern seaboard from the Arctic Circle to Chesapeake Bay. The Algonquians further diversified into distinct societies referred to by the names we use today for the different tribes and nations. At the time of European contact, these were some of the Penacook-Pawtucket or Penacook-Abenaki villages, and there were others.

The people came from the lower Merrimack Valley in New Hampshire, and they came via tributaries to the Merrimack into the North Coastal Watershed. Their expansion southward coincided with the start of a cold phase called the Little Ice Age around 1200, 1250. And they may have been looking for better security for growing their corn in slightly warmer soil, which was why they expanded southward into Essex County.

Their sphere of influence from around 1150 to 1650 extended from Lake Winnipesaukee to the Saugus River. The English got all the toponyms or place names and what they really meant mostly wrong. And efforts to retranslate these names is another whole presentation that we also don't have time for today.

Indigenous people living on the Massachusetts coast welcomed European contact. They participated in the French fur trade and the Basque and English fisheries on the coasts for hundreds of years prior to European attempts to colonize here. There were many Algonquian traders on the coast who were bilingual in European languages well before the Mayflower.

They wanted European things, of course, but they especially wanted help with defense against their native enemies. The Tarantines to the east, especially the Mi'kmaq, and the Mohawks or K'anien'kehaka to the west. So they wanted guns, they wanted powder, they wanted shot, which the Tarantines and the Mohawks already had.

And they also wanted, of course, the metal kettles, woolen cloth, reading glasses, mirrors, sewing needles, jingle bells, and mouth harps. In addition, the Algonquians had to navigate the ongoing competition between the French and the English and the Dutch for New England land, mines, ports, and commodities, especially furs and timber. Tricky situation.

Early settlers had good relations with the indigenous people for the most part, but colonization was a rude awakening and that is also another whole story. In 1644, the Pinnacook, Nipmuc, and Massachusetts leaders in Essex County, Middlesex County, and Suffolk County, including the Nanapashamet Sonsquah, signed an oath of allegiance to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the English Crown. These are the questions they answered to the satisfaction of Governor John Winthrop and the Reverend Richard Mather.

It was a turning point in indigenous history here. In exchange for protection from their native enemies and equal justice under English law, they agreed to be converted to Christianity, to have their children baptized and taught to read, and to remain neutral in any future conflict between the colonists and other Indians. And now a bit of timeline because, long story short, things went downhill after that, gradually at first and then catastrophically.

Within two years of the Oath of 1644, the General Court outlawed Algonquian spiritual traditions, including powwows, and legalized the use of Indians as forced labor. They began confining them to reservations, making them economically dependent, and moving in on their homelands. King Philip's War was a breaking point.

This was Plymouth Colony's war against the Wampanoag for their land. It began down in Rhode Island. Because of this war, let's just see here, okay, I touched something.

All indigenous people were deemed enemies and nobody was safe. Families that had assimilated, those living in praying Indian towns that were set aside for Christian converts, those who had served in the English militias with the English against the Wampanoag, it didn't matter, you were vulnerable to attack. When a Poythian and his wife and children were sold into slavery, Uwata and her son were interned on Deer Island with others from Natick, where a third of them died of starvation or exposure.

And efforts to distinguish between friend and foe broke down. It was very difficult for the colonists as well, because there were a lot of colonists who were trying to champion the indigenous people. Maybe not a lot, but there were some.

But any Indian could be executed, imprisoned or otherwise, confined or enslaved and sent to Caribbean plantations. The Indian slave market and debarkation point for the slave plantations was in Charleston, South Carolina. Enslaved Native Americans mixed with Africans and whites at home and abroad.

And some of their descendants today are still denied their indigenous identity, either because of the color of their skin or mixed race ancestry. After 1675, those who could fled to the northern and western frontiers. When a Poythian was rescued from slavery in Barbados by the Puritan missionary John Elliot and the Mass Bay Colony Indian agent Daniel Goofin, and they also managed to retrieve his wife and children from other places.

George died shortly afterwards a native in Iwata's wigwam, because his sister and nephew had survived Deer Island. Many of the escaping warriors joined the Wabanaki resistance movement in the north or the Wampanoag resistance movement in the south. And these groups were very effective in making life hell for those attempting to settle, fish, or do business on the frontiers over the next hundred years.

Meanwhile, the extermination of the Indians became official government policy. The Mass Bay Colony began to offer bounty money for the scalps of Indian men, women, and children. So one way or another, indigenous people became invisible, stopped practicing their religion, stopped speaking their language, and stopped telling their children who they were.

And this is where they went. Many of their descendants are in northern New Hampshire and Vermont today. Many are at O'Donath in Quebec, and as you can see, the Penobscot Reservation on the northern frontier was one of their destinations.

The Penobscot, who were actually the Penobscot, were able to retain possession of these two islands in the Penobscot River. And that is where some of the families from Essex County found refuge. Like other surviving indigenous communities, they struggled to maintain their sovereignty and economic independence, and one of the few ways to do that was through their traditional arts and crafts and performances, or the dances and songs that they had that other people regarded as performances.

So that brings us back to the historical photograph of the Penobscot, who came to Squamish in 1860, which is recorded in the Annals of Lynn. And it says that they came to pursue their trade of basket making. Now this is from the text for the exhibition of the photograph in the town hall.

Phillips lived on Puritan Street, a few doors down from where the fish house is today. Now it says that they were on Lincoln's Point, and Phillips did own Lincoln House Point, which certainly would have looked a lot different than it does today. But there's a question here, because the old label that is attached to the historical photograph says that the Penobscot were camping on Phillips Point, which was then called Little's Point, which doesn't seem to be the same place.

And on one historical map, I saw that Little Point was at the end of Little Point Road, and that it had formerly been called Phillips Point, next to Phillips Beach. And it's possible that they were camped there rather than on the Lighthouse Point, or the Lincoln Point. But we need to look into that further to figure that out.

But it's a very logical place, because they would have beached their canoes on Phillips Beach, and pitched their tents in the lee of those islets, which would have been, from an indigenous perspective, an ideal camping spot. And of course Phillips owned all that land as well. I think the people came not just to sell baskets, but to gather basket making supplies.

Swampscot neighborhoods still feature basswoods and lindens, for example, on Dale Street and Linden Ave. Groves of basswoods, which are prized for basketry, were growing between Phillips Beach and the golf course. And the people used basswood bark and pith to weave baskets, mats, bags, and pouches. It's a very soft and flexible type of wood.

And they braided basswood to make drag lines for sleds, tump lines to carry burdens, and cradleboard ties, and things like that. Soft and strong. The town of Swampscot's annual report for 1945 listed basswoods as one of the five most valued trees in town.

The others were lindens, beeches, birches, and ash, especially black or brown ash, all of which are also ideal for basket making. And these trees were the first to be planted in Swampscot's Veterans Arboretum, which was to be done the same year as that annual report in 1945, which I believe still exists in some form. There's ash trees, which were formerly very prevalent here.

And of course, they're all dying off now. They're infested from the emerald ash borer. Beech trees.

The area was rich in beech trees. And I guess you had a 100-year-old purple beech on Monument Ave. It was declared a legacy tree in 2021, but apparently died and was cut down this year. Not yet.

The beech trees have been dying from beech leaf disease all over Essex County. But maybe you can think to a time when these trees were more abundant and realize that it would have been a veritable paradise for basket makers. So the Penobscot and other families from that area, who were then part of the Wabanaki group of communities, they traveled all together, the whole family, by canoe, by foot, by horseback, by train, and even by steamship to sell their baskets.

They sold their baskets in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. By 1835, Swampscot had 1,338 year-round residents to buy baskets. Then the railroad reached Swampscot in 1838.

And by 1860, tourists were coming here to spend the summer. Resort hotels were springing up along the coast, where the indigenous people had traditionally camped. And one of the first hotels was on Phillips Point, as well as on Lighthouse Lincoln Point.

Mr. Phillips probably had baskets like these, especially the rent baskets. It was a custom of the Indians who were in this enterprise to pay landowners for the right to camp on their property and harvest fibers and bark from their trees. And the payment was a special pumpkin-shaped sweetgrass basket with a lid, like these.

And it was presented in lieu of rent money. Band baskets were for the storage and transportation of hats and clothing and special regalia. Both men and women were basket makers, and the methods and styles were passed down within families.

It was a communal activity and intergenerational. Children practiced by making miniature baskets, and the miniature baskets themselves became collectibles. Baskets were either utilitarian or fancy.

Utilitarian ones were made for carrying and storing food, trapping fish and crabs, making backpacks, bags, snowshoes, mats, cordage for nets, and canoe construction. Porcupine baskets were fancy baskets in a style that was invented by the Penobscot. And Mary Nicola, also known as Molly Molasses, was a Penobscot woman famous for her porcupine baskets.

In 1860, she would have been in her early 80s. Is Molly Molasses in that photograph? During the late 1800s, enterprises like these popped up all along the main roads.

And today, members of the Maine Indian Basket Makers Alliance, which is located in Old Town, have thriving businesses making and selling baskets. They're reviving and passing down the knowledge and skills as an act of decolonization. And they will know the names of the basket makers of the past.

Museum quality baskets and vintage baskets made by well-known artists sell for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Famous Penobscot basket makers include Alice Solomon Swassian. She would have been 22 years old in 1860.

And here she is as an old woman weaving a basswood bag. She could be in the photograph. Her kinsman, Joseph Solomon, would have been 12 years old in 1860.

The Swassian, Solomon, Dana, Nicola, and Socalexus families were basket makers. Charles Dana would have been 2 years old in 1860. Frank Dana would have been 14.

Joseph Nicola would have been 33. And Peter Nicola, who later became a chief of the Penobscot Nation, would have been 7 years old. Clara Neptune was 29 in 1860.

And her husband, Joseph Orono, may also be in the picture. And there are others. So who were they?

Was Chief Atien there? Joseph Atien would have been 31 in 1860. In 1853, he guided Henry David Thoreau on his famous canoe trip up the Merrimack River.

Atien died young in a logging accident on the Penobscot River. Whoever they were, their names are going to be in the census for the Penobscot Reservation of 1860, which exists both as a transcript and in original handwriting. So there were 141 Penobscot families surviving on Indian Island in 1860.

504 people in all. The population in the 2020 census was 541 people on Indian Island, including 24 non-Penobscot. Altogether, there were 2,398 people enrolled as members of the tribe, including those not living on the reservation.

So the town of Swampscot is presenting a copy of the photograph as a gift to the Penobscot Nation for their genealogical database and their museum, which is on Indian Island in Maine, which I've had the pleasure of visiting and talking with its curator, John Neptune. The people in the photograph are their ancestors, and we hope they'll tell us more about them. Looking forward to going up there.

There are baskets in the little museum on Indian Island, and the Penobscot legacy is also being preserved by the University of Maine at the Hudson Museum in Orono. So there are very few reservations left in New England, but indigenous organizations and small intentional communities exist in a great many towns, including Lynn. Indigenous people everywhere still face challenges today, as I'm sure you're aware.

The Penobscot have had to be vigilant against encroachments on their lands, the pollution of their river with mercury and industrial waste, and the continuing failure of state and federal governments to carry out the terms of their treaties. Through time, the basket makers have helped to preserve indigenous culture and solidarity in America. And this is what I've learned so far about Emsquad's indigenous history and the people who came in 1860 to sell baskets, with more information to come.

Thank you. Applause