If you read Jean O’Brien’s (White Earth Ojibwe) book “Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England,” you will soon meet Moses Rice (page 15), my sixth great-grandfather.
Commemorated in June of 1855 (the 100th anniversary of his death) as the “first” settler of Charlemont, words spoken then powerfully illustrate firsting the experiences of colonialists to replace the history of Indigenous peoples, and also refute Indian claims to land and rights. As I read further, and grappled with O’Brien’s hundreds of examples of colonialists trying to erase Indian presence, I wrestled with this question: How can we delve into and understand the ongoing impact of settler colonialism on those who were here first?
I moved here (via Washington state, Kuwait, Newark, Argentina, Philadelphia) 45 years ago. Strangely, I felt very at home. As part of my graduate studies, I had to research and create a family tree. Intriguingly, I discovered a branch (from Lincolnshire, England) had sailed to Boston in 1634 on the Griffin. Subsequent generations had migrated to Sudbury, Worcester, and then Charlemont. I was surrounded by relatives (albeit dead).
I was particularly taken by stories about Moses because two of his young cousins, Timothy and Silas Rice, were taken captive in Sudbury in 1704 by a French and Indian raiding party. When three years later, their father went to Kahnawake (a Kanien’keha :ka/Mohawk town on the St. Lawrence River) to “redeem” them (buy them back, a common colonial practice), the two boys refused to return. Adopted into Kanien’keha :ka families they became part of the sizable Mohawk-Puritan community about which I knew nothing.
Also, in a different raid, Moses was scalped in 1755 in Charlemont — purportedly the last settler scalped in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (Cash was given for scalps. For example, in 1723 the colonial government paid 100 pounds sterling for scalps of Indian men older than 12, and 50 pounds sterling for those of women and children.) I walked the land where Moses died and visited his grave behind Zoar Outdoors on the Deerfield River.
I traveled to Kahnawake. There, in Saint-Francis-Xavier Mission, I traced the names of Silas Tannahorens Rice, his wife Marie Tsiakahawi and their five children inscribed in a huge baptismal record book. Later, I met some of their descendants at Old Deerfield Mohawk-Puritan reunions.
But O’Brien’s decade of research into local histories of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, detailed in “Firsting and Lasting,” as well as her other books, asks more from me, and others descended from colonialists. What do we need to further learn about how Indigenous peoples inscribe land with identity, religious beliefs, kinship networks, and how that means homeland for all, not the Puritan grabs of individual tracts?
Each of my ancestors’ migrations across the colony meant huge dispossessions of Massachusetts and Nipmuc territory — territory that was crucial for their hunting, planting and gathering. Roaming colonial pigs ate essential foods like nuts, and destroyed corn, bean, and squash plantings. Starvation and debt often forced Indians to sell land to survive.
When I opened another book by O’Brien, “Dispossession by Degrees, Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790,” I found other Rice relatives (pages 82-83, 106). Matthew Rice of Sudbury is described: “He was singled out as particularly blatant in his trespass and bold in his flouting of Indian rights: ‘Some of us have discursed with him about it he sayd wee are poore creatures and have noe money & if you goe to law & I cast you you must goe to prison and there Lye & rott.’”
Land taken and subsequently sold over several Rice generations enabled my grandfather, Moses Rice, to dispossess Pocumtuc peoples of 2,700 acres of land in Charlemont in 1742. This history needs to be known and acknowledged. As does the resistance of Indigenous peoples in the Northeast such as creating protection policies for their land, and defending themselves in the 1600s as detailed in Abenaki scholar Lisa Brook’s book “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War.”
To learn more, Historic Northampton (in partnership with On Native Land: Leverett Advocacy and Education Group) recorded a recent talk O’Brien gave over Zoom. A link to the “Firsting and Lasting” talk can be accessed by sending an email to info@historicnorthampton.org.
Janine Roberts, of Leverett, is professor emerita at UMass-Amherst. She can be reached at janine@umass.edu.