Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England

Margaret M. Bruchac

336 Margaret M. Bruchac (b. 1953) Both a scholar and a performer, Dr. Bruchac is an assistant professor of anthropology and coordinator of Native American and Indigenous studies at the University of Pennsylvania. As a storyteller and musician, she has been featured at the First Nations Festival, Historic Deerfield, Old Sturbridge Village, and hundreds of other venues. Her book Malian’s Song was awarded the American Folklore Society’s Aesop Award. Her academic essays on Native history, material culture, and repatriation have appeared in Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice; Captive Histories: Captivity Narratives, French Relations and Native Stories of the 1704 Deerfield Raid; and Museum Anthropology, among others. As the 2011–12 recipient of both a Ford Fellowship and a School for Advanced Research Fellowship, Dr. Bruchac is working on a new book manuscript, titled “Consorting with Savages: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists” for the University of Arizona Press. The two selections below were published in Dreaming Again: Algonkian Poetry. War Wounds: Sophie Senecal Goes to Washington introduction Soldier’s Certificate #208738, housed in the Civil War records in the National Archives, identifies my great-grandfather, Lewis Bowman, as follows: 5΄ 8½˝, dark complexion, black hair, and black eyes; born July 20, 1844, Canada (no birth certificate); occupation: farmer and laborer; resident of Porter’s Corners, Town of Greenfield, Saratoga County; previous residences in Canada and Vermont. Enlisted August 29, 1864, as a private in Company E, Sixty-Ninth New York Infantry, serving under Commander Peter W. Sweeney; wounded by a Minié ball at Hatcher’s Run, Virginia, and gunshot in left knee, right thigh, left arm, right hip; medical discharge August 14, 1865, aged twenty-one years. Lewis Bowman earned a disability pension of twelve dollars a month for thirty years. The shrapnel in his body (as my grandfather liked to put it) helped to pay for the care of two wives, thirteen children, and a Margaret M. Bruchac 337 one-hundred-acre farm. In 1890 Lewis’s mother, Sophie Senecal, began drawing a widow’s pension of eight dollars a month based on her son’s service. Pension attorneys processed thousands of military claims each year, exacting their fees directly from the funds due to veterans and widows. Attorney George E. Lemon handled more than 125,000 claims, tending to many veterans of color who were too illiterate to get what was owed them without assistance. It is doubtful that his clients knew how much money their attorney was raking in; in some cases, Lemon interceded for clients he never even met. Lemon’s dealings inspired legislation that reformed the system so benefits would go directly to veterans and their families rather than to lawyers. What follows is an excerpt from a longer essay that imagines Sophie Senecal’s trip to Washington to meet with attorney George Lemon, who negotiated the family pensions. washington dc, july 22, 1890 “There you go, Mrs. Bowman, just make your mark on this here line, and you can collect your government pay.” Attorney George Lemon, sweltering in his silk brocade waistcoat, topcoat pinching at his ever-increasing girth, beaver hat cocked rakishly to one side, leans across the writing desk, pen in hand. He works his cigar around to the other side of his mouth, scattering ashes. As the ashes whisper their way across the documents, Sophie Senecal sees the eye of the eagle in the U.S. seal blink—there—just for a moment. She slowly eases back into the unfamiliar chair, narrowing her eyes. “What’s the matter, missus? No speak English?” Sophie is remembering the way the nuns taught her to speak French, recalling the easy way the traders at the markets toss around English words, and musing about the strange marks she used to see young Joseph Laurent making in his books when he should have been learning his catechisms. Then that eagle on paper catches her eye again, arrows in his claws, dripping blood. She glances up at Mister Lemon, the sharpness of her gaze cutting through the cigar smoke. “Speak fine, Monsieur. Read? No read. You read to me.” Sophie lets her mind drift as the man spins out a story that she knows is not written in the marks scratched on that page. Lemon is waxing poetic 338 abenaki about a “grateful government,” our “Red Brothers,” and an “ancient alliance ,” speaking in those strange tones that all the Bostoniak use when they...