Digging Deeper

This even-handed passage is taken from a book titled "A Pictorial History of King Philip's War," published in the 1850s.

(A note: You're welcome to read on, but please be aware that this post is still under construction. Here's what I've managed so far ...)

"That one person you talk about, the sachem selling land? Bullshit. Okay?"

The speaker was Professor Bob Goodby, a rather rumpled fellow with round glasses who slouched in the chair behind his messy desk, hands clasped over his belly, holding pointed opinions. Bob teaches anthropology and archaeology at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, N.H., about an hour from my home. For decades now, he has dug for the actual, findable, physical truth of native life in New England, particularly in New Hampshire, and he has uncovered artifacts that document an indigenous presence of at least 13,000 years here.

For the record, that's 520 generations in what we call New England, compared to our family's fourteen. That puts us in perspective, doesn't it?

Anyway. Back to Bob: pottery shards and stone tools can't speak for themselves. They take on meaning through interpretation, and the study not just of artifacts but cultures around the world.

So, yes, Bob has opinions, and when I told him a Lancaster history's account of the land deal that brought the town into being—how Sholan, the Nashaway sachem, invited the English there, selling them eighty acres, signing a deed which protected the natives' right to still use the land for hunting, fishing, and planting—he waved it away.

"You're a party of English people," he said. "You're looking to expand to this area. You find an Indian there, you give him some rum and get to know him a bit. And he says, sure, you can have it, makes his mark on a piece of paper, even though he is coming from a culture where you don't do that, you can't do that. Right? You never even think of doing that. Land isn't bounded. It's not alienable. You can't separate it from people. They're playing by two very different sets of rules initially. And then when the native people do catch on to the new set of rules that's being imposed on them, the legitimacy of those transactions is often suspect. Did the people signing this have the authority to speak for anybody?"

John Prescott, Jonas Fairbanks, and the Travises all came from a place ruled by a single king or queen, a land of documents and boundaries, a world of nation states. The natives they found here, Bob said, lived in a world of decentralized, family-based social networks with no formal political structure and no one person with the authority to make decisions that applied to everyone. The tribal names we know, he says, are essentially an after-the-fact labeling convention and not terms indigenous people would have used to identify themselves. "Their social world was based primarily on kinship," he said, "who was related to who and how you could use those kin ties to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish."

At the same time, Bob said, New England's native inhabitants shouldn't be thought of innocents. "They were also players," he said. "They had their own ambitions, their own complexities, their own ego-driven characters who shaped this response" to the arrival and growing presence of English colonists, keeping one eye on the settlers and the other on their native rivals. "They had things they wanted and they played the game, and they played it effectively. At times they played it in a very calculating and sometimes ruthless way. They were not Rousseau's 'noble savages,' right? They were in this."

~

As I listened to Bob, I couldn't help but think back to a comment by another academic, Michael Birkner, a friend and former colleague who teaches history at Gettysburg College. Consider how much meaning is packed into the single, simple sentence he uttered:

“History is what we think happened.”

His comment came in the form of assurance he shared with two amateur historians: Mike Pride and me, years ago. Mike and I were coworkers and collaborators on what became My Brave Boys, a history of a Civil War regiment from New Hampshire and a first book for us both, published in 2001. As we started in on research, we struggled with the uncertainty inherent every author faces in writing about the past. There was so much we couldn’t know, so many pieces we couldn’t fit together. We turned to Michael for guidance and benefited greatly from his answer.

"History is what we think happened."

For years, I heard Michael’s sentence like this: History is what we think happened. I took it as an acknowledgement of our incomplete understanding of the past and permission to write history just the same. Of course we would overlook some aspects of the story of these soldiers and misunderstand others. We weren’t there. Civil War survivors themselves argued over who did what, where, and when until they died decades later of old age, each of them convinced of the truth in their own memory. Surely we could do no better. What else could history be but what we think happened?

With this project, telling my family’s stories, I’ve come to hear Michael’s sentence in a new way. That’s the essence of its wisdom; it lends itself to different meanings.

History? It’s what we think happened.

We can’t help but see history through the lens of our own time and our own sense of identity. It’s not a perfect lens either. It brings new aspects of history into focus while distorting others. It’s as much about us in the now as it is about them in the then.

Nothing makes this more clear to me than the reading I’ve done about King Philip’s War, the starting point of our family's century of violence. To Puritans fighting for their lives, the natives were “the perfect children of the Devill.” To their descendants in the early years of industrialization, Indians were doomed and noble innocents in a paradise lost. To Douglas Edward Leach, author of Flintlock and Tomahawk, a history written during the darkest years of the Cold War in the late 1950s, they were once again savages and howling warriors. To Lisa Brooks, author of Our Beloved Kin, writing in 2018 through the lens of oppressed and oppressor, the Indians who rose in revolt were not savages or warriors but protectors.

Jill Lepore, another historian writing in my fractious time, devotes her book, The Name of War, to parsing the meanings behind the words we have used to tell the story of this life-or-death struggle, beginning with the debate among her contemporaries over its name. Is it properly called King Philip’s War? The Indian who led it was neither a king nor a Philip to his own people. He was Metacom, a Wampanoag sachem. So is it Metacom’s Rebellion, emphasizing Indian resistance? The Puritan Conquest, by way of condemning the colonists? Or was it an Indian civil war—in the end, it was an Indian who killed Metacom—and thus best named from that perspective?

And so it goes.

~

All of which is a challenge, when it comes to telling these stories with my grandkids in mind, and their kids too, who I'll never know. So I tried to get Bob to do the work for me.

"What do you think my kids, my grandkids, the great-grandkids I'll never know—what should they know about this particular phase of human history and more specifically, their own family's history?" I asked him.

I was playing tennis against a backboard. The ball came bouncing right back.

"Yeah, that's a tough one," Bob said. "One of the ideas that infected me in graduate school and has never gone away is that while there's history in the sense of the events that happened—and we want to know what really happened, what the facts of history are—on another level, almost a more important level, there's what do we do with history in the present? And that's always tailored by our concerns, agendas, things like that. So in a way, it's hard to anticipate what your great-grandkids might want to make of this.

"I'm thinking about if my great-grandfather had written something like this," he continued, "I'd also want to hear their voice. And maybe with that idea of we write history for our time and for our concerns, and here's me."

"And here are my times," I interjected. I was catching on. "And I can't know yours."

"Yeah."

"But this is what I know to be true."

"Yeah," Bob said, tying it off. "And this is what I think is good, and this is what I think is not good."

~

The exchange left me thinking of yet another academic, a third voice in my head, pointing me in the same direction. Her name is Barbara Kreiger, and she chairs the graduate creative writing program at Dartmouth. I took four classes in that program in my early sixties, two of them with Barbara, the last of them an independent study that involved researching and writing exploratory essays in this very topic, our family history.

Time and again, Barbara would read these essays, putting check marks in the margins next to turns of phrase that she liked, scribbling questions in spots where my words were unclear or my research incomplete. Then, at the end, she'd often close with a challenge—a call to dig deeper.

"It's rhetorically satisfying," she'd write. "But is it thematically satisfying?"

It's a clever ending, she was saying; you're good with words. But what do you really think?

I've always resisted staking my ground in this way. In part, that's a consequence of my journalistic training. As a reporter, I thought of my job as gathering the facts and opinions of others on a topic of interest, then synthesizing them in a way that let readers decide for themselves what to make of it. But it's also a consequence of my nature and upbringing. I'm drawn to questions that matter, but I'm averse to conflict. I'm more comfortable leaving the arguments to others. That's one reason I fell for history as a child. As a young reader, history seemed to say that the important arguments were settled. Slavery was bad, Abraham Lincoln and the Union armies good, and they won. No need to take sides. That's that.

But I'm a child no longer, and I'm writing about a past time of conflict during my own time of conflict. Writing, in fact, during the summer of 2024, days after an assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, in the midst of an election in which both sides insist the soul of our nation and the very future of American democracy are at stake.

Maybe. Maybe not. We don't know yet.

So, back to our family's century of violence, and a time in which our family's future and that of New England were most certainly at stake.

What do I think happened?

~

Conflict inevitable. Bob again, but no.

Views deplorable.

One thing can't accept, regardless of context: slavery.

Consequences tragic, not just in that long-ago century but for centuries after. Abenaki today.

Strip away who's at fault, why it happened, left with suffering. Courage,and cruelty.

Ben's reflection on Ukraine: I wonder, am I brave enough to send my family away to safety and take up arms? Our family's story says we are. Courage—and cruelty too; must be confident in former, mindful of latter.

Mindful too of how values of our time shape our choices. Most of us, intent on our own challenges, our own family, our own kids, take the path of least resistance—even if it might lead us to slavery or violence. It takes a different form of courage to break from that, to argue for change, for a better way, maybe even more rare than physical courage. At times—including my own, in this moment, it may be more important too.

...

Stray thoughts ...

I grew up playing cowboys and Indians. I had a cap-gun six-shooter. I watched Westerns and F Troop. I celebrated Thanksgiving.

I live in Canterbury, on Abenaki land, where the first public building the settlers erected was not a meeting house but a fort. I'm not yet sure where to go with that awareness.

I think the best I can do is write unflinchingly about what I know to be true, and how I feel about it, while leaving you with enough knowledge to make your own judgments in your time.