"Community of Thieves": Blood, Violence, and Land in Narratives of the American West

Abstract

"Community of Thieves":Blood, Violence, and Land in Narratives of the American West Edward C. Rafferty (bio) Anne F. Hyde, Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2022. xix + 442 pp. Maps, notes, index. $40.00. Margaret D. Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. viii + 343 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $29.95. As I write this, in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, I sit on American Indian land. More specifically, I sit on land that served as a borderland for various Indigenous peoples of the Dawnland (the area the English were to call New England): Massachusett, Pawtucket, Pennacook, and Nipmuc people all traversed the region and called it home. At least, this area most certainly was Indigenous land. Today we might regard it as stolen land. In the abstract sense it certainly was stolen; all space in the Americas was Indian Country. That it is now much diminished is the result of settler colonial policies of genocide, erasure, theft, war, treaty-making, removal, and assimilation. But the land on which I sit and write might be stolen in a more literal sense as well. There is no written record of an agreement to purchase the land encompassing Concord and neighboring towns. In a place as steeped in history-making and history-marking as Concord (and New England as a whole), it is striking that there is little recognition or coverage of this fact of the past. Concord—or Musketaquid as it was known in the Algonquian language spoken here—has only a virtual founding based on testimony taken nearly fifty years after the fact. The documentary record provides the General Court's authorization of 1635 to found a town "six miles square" at Musketaquid to be called Concord (an erasure through renaming); it is an authorization made with no mention of Indigenous peoples, their rights, or even their existence. This is the date generally used as Concord's founding moment, and English families did settle here; the town is mentioned throughout the colonial records after 1635. [End Page 148] The actual authorization for these families to purchase "the ground within their limits of the Indians," occurred two full years later in 1637. But there is no written record of any sale occurring. It was only decades later—in 1684 after King Philip's War and after colonial officials challenged township grants—when the residents of Concord sought out a documented founding. The General Court took depositions (from two whites and two Indigenous people) who spoke to the sale of "six miles square" taking place in 1636 and representing Concord township. In sum, there was a written document from the General Court to settle land in 1635; there was a written document from the court in 1637, authorizing the purchase of land from Indigenous peoples though no purchase record exists; and, there was a set of depositions taken and recorded in 1684, claiming that the sale took place (although those depositions indicated 1636 as the date of the actual sale).1 Ironically, the existence of a deed of sale depends upon oral tradition—the source of much Indigenous knowledge, record keeping, and narrative that has often been ignored or denigrated as a valid source for the past in traditional historical accounts of European settlement. There is an even more troubling sense of confusion about the land on which I sit. What exactly did the English people who came to settle on and live on this land say to one another and to American Indian peoples in the region? How well did Indigenous peoples in the area understand the alleged agreement they made for settling a permanent English town? The town founders were authorized by colonial officials to purchase "six miles square." How did Indigenous people and leaders in the region understand those dimensions? Were they explained in the meeting by reference to places on the landscape or simply by the mileage? What did miles, an imperial unit of measurement, mean to Indigenous peoples in the early 17th century? For these and other questions...