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The History and Traditions of Eunice Williams and Her Descendants, 1922
- University of Massachusetts Press
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255 TheHistory andTraditions ofEuOiceWilliams andHer Descendants,1922 Elizabeth M. Sadoques E M S was born in 1897, grew up in Keene, New Hampshire, and died in 1985. She was the great-great-granddaughter of a woman who was part of a group of Abenakis who visited Deerfield in 1837. That visit, and a subsequent one the next year, drew the attention of the local media and ministers. Newspaper accounts documented the visit. In Deerfield there was much excitement because one of the Abenaki women claimed that she was descended from Eunice Williams. Deerfield’s minister, the Reverend John Fessenden, was inspired to preach a sermon admiring “the workings of that mysterious providence, which has mingled your blood with ours.”1 The following year Abenakis visited Northampton as well (figure 23). For both the people of Deerfield and the Sadoques family, the relationship to Eunice formed a compelling connection. Speaking in 1922 to the members of Deerfield’s local historical society, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association , Elizabeth Sadoques emphasized her people’s abiding sense of their ancient ties to the land now a part of the United States. Her ancestor Eunice Williams embodied these ties for Sadoques. At the same time, she claimed that Eunice was not all that Abenakis and Americans had in common. Sadoques was at pains to set the event in the context of a continuing series of exchanges involving land, trade, religion, and politics, stretching back to the 1620 arrival of the Pilgrims and continuing to the present. Sadoques’s account does not present a generic “Native” version of events. Instead, it reflects the perspective of her people, the Abenakis, and the more Elizabeth M. Sadoques, “The History and Tradition of Eunice Williams and Her Descendants ,” 1922. The manuscript of her February 28, 1922, talk to the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association remains in the hands of her family and is reproduced here with the permission of Lynn Murphy. 1. John Fessenden, A Sermon, Preached to the First Congregational Society in Deerfield, Mass., and in the Hearing of Several Indians of Both Sexes, Supposed to be Descendants of Eunice Williams daughter of Rev. John Williams, First Minister of Deerfield, August 27, 1837 (Greenfield, Mass.: Phelps and Ingersoll , 1837). 256 particular concerns of her family. In her discussion of Eunice and Kahnawake, for example, she claims for the Abenakis people and places associated with the Mohawks. This action is an important reminder of the differences, political as well as cultural, among Native peoples. Her hostility to the Jesuits who set up a mission at Odanak in 1701, however, derives largely from the fact that she was a Protestant. Her family, the Sadoques, along with the Wajoos, whose visit to Deerfield is described in this account, were among the first converts to Protestantism at Odanak. In 1837, a local man who had graduated from Dartmouth College, Pierre-Paul Osonkilaine Masta, began building a Protestant chapel that divided the community of Odanak. The ensuing controversy may have played roles in the Wajoos’ visits to New England in 1837 and 1838, and in the Sadoques family’s subsequent relocation to New Hampshire, where Elizabeth was born. For Sadoques’s Deerfield audience, the interest was somewhat different. Deerfield’s residents had been fascinated for two centuries with the plight of the captives who never returned. Their interest in the talk focused primarily on Eunice Williams. Their perspective is evident in the revisions made to Sadoques’s manuscript when it was published in 1929 in the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Society’s Proceedings. Whereas Sadoques begins her manuscript with a broad sketch of the history of the relations between Natives and Europeans, the published version condenses this section and puts it toward the end, placing her discussion of the captive Eunice at the front instead. The published version also emphasizes the differences between Abenakis and Anglo-Americans. It drops Sadoques’s mention of “strange men” and instead inserts “White-men” in several places were it had not been in the manuscript. Such changes reflect a sense of racial distinctiveness that undercuts the sense of commonality emphasized in the original manuscript. In short, for the people of Deerfield in 1922, Sadoques’s talk was configured in ways to reinforce their sense of being different and victimized, rather than similar and victimizers.2 Now is time to look anew at the original version of Sadoques’s address. The version of the address...