[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to a special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50th this year!]
For its
350th anniversary, a couple important ways to push past our
memories of a tragic conflict.
In this
post on the Pequot War’s horrific massacre at Mystic, I noted that that 1630s
war represented a painful and definitive shift in the
relationship between English settlers and Native American communities in
New England. Of course settler colonialism and violence
had always been part of that relationship, but so too had the possibility of
cross-cultural alliances like those traced by historian Cynthia Van Zandt in
her excellent book Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural
Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660. But across the 17th
century, that relationship in New England became more and more overtly and
centrally hostile and violent—and if the Pequot War marked a significant step
in that destructive direction, it was King
Philip’s War forty years later which really reflected the worst of European-indigenous
encounters and set the stage for (for example) the unfolding history of scalp
bounties that I traced
in this column.
As with so
many of our most painful histories, we’ve done a pretty terrible job including
King Philip’s War in our collective memories. When we have done so, at least
here in New England, it seems to me that it’s been entirely through the lens of
Mary
Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, the story of an English woman taken
hostage by the Wampanoag who witnesses much of the war during her time with
that community. As I argued in that hyperlinked post, and at length in a chapter
of my book Redefining
American Identity, Rowlandson unquestionably experiences cross-cultural
transformations that reflect the possibility of more mutual relationships
between these communities. But her narrative begins with an extended depiction
of the violent attack on her home and town by Wampanoag warriors, and it ends
with her grateful return to her white world and sense of the entire experience
as a challenge presented by her Christian God. Which means that in too many
ways, remembering the war through Rowlandson’s lens deepens our sense of the
divisions and hostility between these two communities.
There’s
another possible lens through which our collective memories of this conflict
can be viewed, though, and that’s the Wampanoag chief (known to his people as
Metacomet) after whom we’ve named the war. I’ve written many
times in this space about one of my favorite critical patriotic texts,
William Apess’s “Eulogy on
King Philip” (1836). Apess doesn’t just ask his audiences—both white
Bostonians in the 1830s and all Americans at all times—to remember Philip/Metacomet
with more nuance and more sympathy, although he certainly does that. He also
makes the case for thinking of this figure as an ancestor of all Americans, and
thus for “every patriot” to see him as a revolutionary leader akin to George
Washington himself. I agree entirely, but would add this: even if 21st
century white Americans might struggle to get to that perspective, they and all
of us could at least since this war as a civil conflict, a tragic battle
between multiple, interconnected American communities. That’d be an important reframing
as we work to commemorate the war’s 350th.
Next
anniversary tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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