UNSETTLING STORIES

Art by @bb_pluto

Look, it’s me! I’m 6. I’m in first grade, and I just learned what a “Pilgrim” is. I’m crouched behind the bathroom door, concealing myself from Catholic religious persecutors. A purple and silver fold-up PlaySkool mirror is my Book of Common Prayer, and I study it surreptitiously. I bring its shiny reflection right up close to my face so I can read the small, secret print. I pray that those who forbid my religious beliefs won’t find me here, hiding in the future. I pray for my freedom and for the tall ships that will take me away towards the distant, unknown shores of New England.

Look, it’s me! I’m 7. I spent the past three weeks of second grade learning about Paul Revere and his infamous revolutionary ride through the towns that some of my family still live in. I’m outside in the forest among those towering guardians of my universe--the pines. I am wearing my self-fashioned three-cornered hat and I am shouting, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” I am listening and listening hard. And I am getting scared. The closer I listen, the closer I can hear the cavalry horses’ hooves coming for me through the woods. And now my blood is pumping and I am scared. I run towards the house, run towards safety--away from the Red Coats I am convinced have come to take me away.

Look, it’s me. I’m 8. I’m flipping through my favorite book again--Letting Swift River Go, by Jane Yolen, a local author. I’m pestering my Dziadzu to tell me his story again, the one about the time he rode with his father in the farm truck those 20 some odd miles East to watch the men dismantle those four little towns, house by barn by church by graveyard stone.

I imagine the force of the flood that will hit when each of those little houses has been taken apart and the cows have all been corralled and then water comes, filling the edges of the great Quabbin Reservoir like a glass very full. A glass brimming with tension, filling up that dirty hole in the earth with clean drinking water for the city folks in Boston. You can scuba dive down into the Church’s steeple, you know. Those wild blueberries growing alongside the water’s edge will keep your mouth sweet all winter, you know.

History has always been alive for me--something to play with, something to immerse myself in, something to get lost in. Growing up in Hadley, Massachusetts, I was surrounded by foundational (or, colonizer) stories and myths about our region. Not the old stories indigenous to the land, like the story of Ktsi Amiskw, the great beaver whose ancient body forms Wequamps, or, Sugarloaf Mountain in Sunderland. But settler stories--stories that made people who looked like me triumphant and brave and entitled to the many riches of the place I came from--the Connecticut River Valley.

The History of Hadley, written by Sylvester Judd and published in Northampton in 1863, was my bible. That dusty tome guided my earnest search for connection to who and what came before me. With my mom’s encouragement, I poured through the 15-pound behemoth at an early age, relishing its dusty smell and the many old stories it told.

The History of Hadley told me about the so-called River Gods who slashed and burned their way into the forests and hills of “our” land amidst emerging war with those who were already here. It told me about how that land teemed with riches like hardwood and fish and freshwater--resources that made the settlers’ lives livable and even prosperous. And it told me about the successful deeding of the land and the gridding off of private property that followed.

In The History of Hadley, I read about the founders of my town, who in 1659 (that would be 20 years shy of the Salem witch trials for context), settled a parcel of that precious earth along the banks of the Connecticut River--then known by one of its many other names, the Kwinitekw, the longest river. I read about how those settlers (whose legacies are preserved in street names throughout the region) were “gifted” the land thanks to John Pynchon’s “purchase” of the parcel from the Norwottuck (or Nolwotogg) community a few years earlier. Then, I read about how those settlers promptly constructed a nine-foot tall stockade around the entire settlement (so much for the commons) and proceeded fearlessly into the future.

On field trips, I went to Forbes Library in Northampton to see Frederick A. Chapman’s 1850 oil painting of the so-called Angel of Hadley, who “saved” those same settlers from an “ambush” by local indigenous people during King Philip’s War in September of 1675. The painting’s full title told its own story-- one I didn’t fully comprehend until much later: “The Angel of Hadley, or the Perils of our Forefathers.”

The historical stories and scenes I played in as a kid (THE BRITISH ARE COMING!!) offered me one version of one story that is held in the land where I grew up. The one version of the one story made its way to me because it most clearly aligned with how “Our Forefathers” needed to be seen by their children in the distant future: as the rightful inheritors of the land’s riches. Once that history was written, other stories that lived deep in time, bound by reciprocal relationships to the mountains and rivers and forests of the Valley, were eradicated and promptly forgotten. They were buried as if they’d never existed. Erased.

The truth is, the settlers’ stories worked. At least they worked towards the specific ends the settlers imagined. By creating and preserving a version of “local history” that became true because “we” (the white inheritors) believed it (because our triumphs were sealed in official town records and archived in the town’s historical society), the hierarchical power dynamics that still define this region today were sedimented into a governing reality.

Put another way, settler stories became the supreme rule of the land and of the local history where I’m from. White people and white problems were (and still are) on top in Western Massachusetts. Material resources like land and economic wealth and access to markets typically still flow in the one direction those settlers wished them to -- directly into a line of generational inheritance that dispossesses those who exist outside of its own story of settled, up river whiteness.

In researching this post, I wanted to find some more specific details about how these early settler stories relate to contemporary distributions of power and resources in the region where I’m from. To my delight, I came across a related project undertaken by my very own sister, Kristen Whitmore, who is completing her doctorate in regional planning at UMass.

In “HOW WE SETTLED: A regional analysis of social inequity in the Pioneer Valley” Kristen explores everything from the history of zoning laws in Western Massachusetts to current census data on income, race, and education to link up historical stories about white settlers’ control of land and resources in the region to the very real conditions of racial disparity in health, wealth, and housing across “the Valley” today. I suggest checking out the section on differential zoning laws that govern structure height in Springfield and in Amherst to see some of the time-tested mechanisms that ensure some communities stay white, just as our founders intended. Tofu Curtain anyone? Through the lens of HOW WE SETTLED, we get a clearer sense of the ways in which historical stories of white settler supremacy have become hardened into both the physical landscapes and social/economic structures of the region.

Today, I know that historical stories aren’t neutral. I know that what we call “history” comes to us directly through time-honored exercises of power. And I know that there are some very intentional reasons I played in the shadow of Paul Revere’s ride and not in the shadow of a Great Beaver, even though it rested right before my eyes my entire life, concealed as a benign lump of earth known as Mount Sugarloaf.

The settler stories I received were first and foremost about securing settler ownership over the land, and a Great Beaver like Ktsi Amiskw cannot be owned or tamed or sold for its fur. It cannot be removed or dismissed or enticed to work for pennies. The Great Beaver’s story shows us what a long-term, cyclical relationship to the land can look like. It reminds us about what happens when we live out of balance. And for that reason, the story poses a vital threat to the march of progress that white settlers brought with them, hammered into their boats and into the joists of the mills they constructed up and down the Long River’s banks. For the threat it posed to the emergent promises of settler capitalism, the Great Beaver was storied into a lifeless mound of rock and dirt.

In New England, erasure has been a choice tool in the settler colonizer’s tool box. The false narrative of indigenous erasure binds local white settler histories to the very real dynamics of land-based power they made possible. In Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, indigenous scholar Jean M. O’Brien suggests that white settlers/colonizers in New England were “obsessed” with their “self-fashioned providential history” and they defined their region “as the cradle of the nation and seat of cultural power.”

To me, that means that the local history stories I received as a white kid growing up in Hadley were the result of intentional labor, not simple documentation. Following O’Brien, the effects of that labor were to “appropriate the category ‘indigenous’ away from Indians and for themselves.”

Hence, the “Pioneer Valley” was born. First, it was naturalized as empty and then as white, and the indigenous communities who still live here were storied out of existence just like that. That sentiment is alive and well today, despite ongoing efforts by local indigenous people to reclaim both place and story for more realistic and just distributions of power, including the power of self-determination. The “battle” over whether to keep racist mascots at Turners Falls High School is just another iteration of the deep-seated local belief in white entitlement to indigenous history, land, and story in the Valley.

Today, we (the white inheritors of settler stories and settler values) must be accomplices to supporting fully self-determined indigenous life through concrete means, like land back reparations. We must listen to, honor, and directly support the voices and stories that were erased with the theft of the land. Not because we are entitled to the stories, but because they are sacred and true. Because they are part of the future we are all moving towards together, whether we acknowledge it or not. The stories are here, evading the intentional trap of white colonial history by drinking nutrients up from roots that push down far deeper than a plow could ever reach. The stories are here, alive and beating with life that looks sounds and looks different than the lay of the land we falsely think of as our own. Unsettling.

Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’ book and web project Our Beloved Kin: Remapping a New History of King Philip’s War offers the kind of story-full intervention that directly amplifies these calls to center, honor, and support other stories. Brooks, a professor of English and American studies at Amherst College, literally remaps the geography and story of the Connecticut River Valley through an explicitly indigenous lens in order to establish the movements and returns of indigenous communities across the region from the early 1600s up to the very present moment and beyond. In centering ongoing relationships of kinship and reciprocity to the land, Brooks is clear and concise about the stakes of this work. She calls it an awikhigan, the Abenaki word for a tool of navigation and creation:

This awikhigan is not "a new history" in the sense of creating some thing, entirely new and different, or offering a definitive replacement for a History that is old or outdated. Rather, in the Abenaki sense, the book and website are part of a cycling or spiraling of ôjmowôgan (history), which refers to a process of telling a collective story, an ongoing activity in which we are engaged. Every manifestation of history-telling, though, like every new moon, may shed light on "new" insights, experiences, and knowledge, depending upon the position from which we view or engage it.

Here, it’s the spiraling, multi-modal expanse of deep time and not the linear, completed march of settled history that’s front and center in the ongoing creative labor of telling “our” story-- a collective story that is incomplete and always already unfolding. What a relief.

As Brooks models this way of doing history in Our Beloved Kin, I can begin to see entirely other worlds blossoming within, around, above, and below the settled space I come from. And that vision is both unsettling and entirely invigorating. It foretells a different way of being together-- a different way of inhabiting space and story that might feel quite unsettling to some of us, until we learn to trust it, too.

It’s true that unlike much of the rest of the world, most white people in New England have been taught to trust what we know. We’ve been taught to trust and rely on a secure sense of entitlement to our history, which justifies our secure sense of entitlement to the land. Unsettling stories may leave us with a sense of loss that can turn desperate and violent if not listened to in deep conversation with what has remained true across time--the earth, its waterways, its companion species, and its continuous cycles of change. We are not losing anything if what we’re moving towards is more robust than what we’re leaving behind. White people don't need to be coddled into a new history -- we need to seek it out with the same force with which we settled.

Today, we know that settling wasn’t gentle -- it was urgent, intentional, and brutal. Unsettling stories can be less brutal, but the urgency and intentionality is no different. To unsettle is to be made uncomfortable, at least for a period of time. To write and listen to unsettling stories, we must first acknowledge the emptiness (or at least the deep incompleteness) of the stories and the maps we as white people did receive in order to move through and past the trap of white colonial history in which we've been stuck. The truth is, we set the trap ourselves and it's time to see what happens when we get ourselves free.

Follow me next week for some of the ways I’m seeking to unsettle the story I’ve been tasked to tell. Until then, more will be revealed!

XO,

L