UTOPIAN PROMISE - Annenberg Media

[1210] John Underhill, The Figure of
the Indians’ Fort or Palizado in New
England and the Manner of the
Destroying It by Captayne Underhill and
Captayne Mason (1638) courtesy of, the
Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-32055].
“VIEWS OF NATIVE
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[1210] John Underhill, The Figure of
the Indians’ Fort or Palizado in New
England and the Manner of Destroying It
by Captayne Underhill and Captayne
Mason (1638), courtesy of the Library of
Congress [LC-USZ62-32055]. In 1636,
the English settlers engaged in a campaign
to wipe out the Pequot tribe.
Captain John Underhill chronicled the
Pequot War in his News from America
(1638), providing this sketch of the
Puritans, along with their Narragansett
allies, encircling and destroying a
Pequot village.
[2583] The First Seal of Massachusetts
Bay Colony (1629), courtesy of the
Massachusetts Bay Secretary of the
Commonwealth, Public Records
Division. The Massachusetts Bay
Colony’s official seal features a Native
American uttering the words “Come
38 UNIT 3, UTOPIAN PROMISE
tionships in which war and exorcism replaced tutelage
and conversion.” As early as 1636, the English
settlers engaged in a genocidal campaign to wipe
out the Pequot tribe. In Of Plymouth Plantation,
William Bradford described the carnage wrought by
the Puritans as a “sweet sacrifice” and “gave the
praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully.”
Captain John Underhill also chronicled the
Pequot War in his News from America (1638), providing
a sketch of the Puritans, along with their
Narragansett allies, encircling and destroying a
Pequot village. Puritan-Indian hostilities erupted
again in 1676 with King Philip’s War, one of the
most devastating wars (in proportion to population)
in American history. Former Puritan allies like
the Narragansetts banded together with other
Algonquian tribes to oppose the English. In her narrative
of captivity among the Indians during King Philip’s War, Mary
Rowlandson frequently employs standard Puritan demonizing rhetoric,
calling her captors “infidels,” “hell-hounds,” and “savages,” and
insisting that they are a “scourge” sent by God to chasten and test his
chosen people. She reserves a special hatred for Native Americans who
had experienced Christian conversion (the “Praying Indians”); in her
view, they were nothing but hypocrites. Still, tensions and contradictions
mark Rowlandson’s narrative; she comes to see some Indians as
individuals capable of humanity and charity, thus complicating her
black-and-white worldview. English victories in both the Pequot War
and King Philip’s war, combined with the ravaging effects of European
diseases like smallpox, resulted in the depletion of Native American
populations in New England and enabled Puritans to seize most
remaining Indian lands in the region by the early eighteenth century.
Unfortunately, we do not have extensive records of Indian/Puritan
encounters during the seventeenth century composed from a Native
American perspective. But some written accounts, pictographs,
archaeological evidence, and transcriptions of oral traditions survive
to give an indication of what Indians thought about the English settlers
in New England. Some of the most interesting records remain
from Natick, an Indian “Praying Town” east of Boston. Established in
1651 by missionary John Eliot, Natick consisted of English-style
homesteads, three streets, a bridge across the Charles River, as well as
a meetinghouse, which housed a school, and the governing body. The
Indian residents of Natick were taught to read and write in their native
language of Massachuset, using letters from the Roman alphabet. In
1988, anthropologists Kathleen Bragdon and Goddard Ives translated
the town records from Natick into English and published an accompanying
grammar for the Massachuset language under the title Native
Writings in Massachusett. Our understanding of native lives and the
Algonquian view of conquest has been further enhanced by Williams
Simmons’s ground-breaking collection of Algonquian oral tradition
from southeastern New England, The Spirit of New England Tribes, and