Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology

5. Decolonizing through Heritage Work in the Pocumtuck Homeland of Northeastern North America

86 5 Decolonizing through Heritage Work in the Pocumtuck Homeland of Northeastern North America Siobhan M. Hart For nearly two centuries, the early colonial era was seen as the time when Native peoples of the New England region of northeastern North America “lost” their “traditional” cultures or “disappeared” entirely. Randall McGuire points out that the “Vanishing Indian” myth endured in public policy and popular sensibilities because it was believed that Indians had to assimilate and “cast off their primitiveness to join the melting pot of US society ” (1992:822). In New England, the “Vanishing or Vanished Indian” was a subplot of local town histories produced around the turn of the twentieth century and disseminated in public displays such as monuments, ceremonies, pageants, and performances (O’Brien 2010:xiii). Jean O’Brien argues “the collective story these texts told insisted that non-Indians held exclusive sway over modernity, denied modernity to Indians, and in the process created a narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans” (2010:xiii). An uncritical use of these histories in New England colonial scholarship in the last century combined with a lack of attentiveness to Indigenous transitions—material and otherwise—has contributed to the persistence of this problematic notion long after scholars rejected the overt racism that was its foundation. Nonetheless, the dominant narratives characterizing Native American peoples in the region are underpinned by the theme of cultural disappearance and anchored by places that invoke their “pastness.” The so-called Pocumtuck Fort, best known as the place where Mohawk raiders attacked a group of Pocumtuck in the mid-1660s, is one such place. Heritage Work in the Pocumtuck Homeland 87 The Native peoples encountered by early Europeans in the middle Connecticut River Valley along the banks of the river called Pocumtuck—an Algonkian place-name meaning “swift, shallow, sandy stream” and known today as the Deerfield River—were identified by this place-name (Bruchac 2005). The Pocumtuck and other middle Connecticut River Valley Native communities such as Norwottuck, Woronoco, and Agawam were more akin to village polities composed of politically autonomous but related mobile communities, rather than fixed identities or nationalities as contemporary tribal names may suggest (Johnson 1993; Thomas 1985:156). Dominant narratives of the Pocumtuck and other Native peoples of the middle Connecticut River Valley are underpinned by the theme of cultural disappearance and rife with historical erasures. This is evident in the various accounts of an attack on the fort by the Mohawk that purport that the Pocumtuck were “destroyed” by the raid (Melvoin 1989:46). The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony granted Pocumtuck lands to Euroamerican settlers from Dedham, Massachusetts, only a few months later. For over three hundred years, colonial settlement in the area has been justified on the basis that the attack left the area “empty” of Native peoples. Recent archaeological investigations in Deerfield, Massachusetts (Figure 5.1), have centered on a seventeenth-century site believed to be the location of the Pocumtuck Fort. In an explicit attempt to decolonize archaeological practice and interpretation in the region, archaeologists have collaborated with multiple stakeholders, including diasporic descendant communities, local residents, heritage institutions, and scholars. The story of seventeenth-century Pocumtuck life that is emerging from these investigations and collaborations is not one of destruction or assimilation, but one of a complex process of transition. This chapter presents an approach to heritage work anchored in an archaeology of transitions at the Area D Site (19-FR-415) in Deerfield, Massachusetts . The Pocumtuck Fort Archaeology and Stewardship Project takes place in a region and town where there are multiple stakeholders with varying interests and claims to the past, and varying amounts of political and social power in the present. Deerfield is a place where the colonial past is cast and recast daily by museums, institutions, residents, visitors, and archaeologists, so heritage work has significant social and political impacts on Native peoples today. With the increasing visibility of some Native American groups in New England, particularly federally recognized tribes with tribal land bases, other groups are increasingly marginalized. Deerfield, and the middle Connecticut River Valley, is an area where there are no resident federally recognized tribes, tribally held lands, or single descendant community. Descendant communities are dispersed but maintain connections to these ancestral homelands. Here, nondescendant communities of property owners and local residents also have Siobhan M. Hart 88 interests in interpretations of the...