An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

In response to these killings, and probably knowing the victims, Terry
composed an oral poem titled “Bars Fight.” It is both a memorial for those
settlers who were killed, captured, and injured and a denigration of
Indigenous peoples. It is not clear when she produced the poem, but it is
very likely that she shared it shortly after her emancipation. It begins,
August ‘twas the twenty-fifth,
Seventeen hundred forty-six;
The Indians did in ambush lay,
The names of whom I’ll not leave out. 27
She then lists the names of those affected. The poem was preserved
orally until 1855, when Josiah Gilbert Holland published it. 28 It
demonstrates the persistent narratives that settlers make in a society: when
Indigenous peoples commit an act of armed struggle, it is a slaughter, but
when white people do it, it is a great victory. It also illustrates the role of
popular culture in passing down memorials of settlers. It is not surprising
that she sided with whites. As a devout Puritan, she grew up in a town
where describing Indigenous peoples as bloodthirsty savages was the
norm. 29 Lucy Terry’s poem, its subject an incident on the eve of the French
and Indian War, was passed down several generations before the Civil War.
It presents the complications of Indigenous Africans growing up in a
society predicated on enslavement and dispossession.
Lucy Terry offers a cautionary tale. Although she was an Indigenous
person, she was kidnapped and reprogrammed into a settler society that
actively hated Indigenous peoples of the northeast. And she contributed to a
narrative that memorialized the killing of Indigenous peoples. As historian
Ibram Kendi writes in Stamped from the Beginning, “Racist ideas are ideas.
Anyone can produce them or consume them.” 30 If anyone can reproduce
racist ideas, they can also replicate settler-colonial ideas about Native
people, even other Indigenous peoples. Racist or settler-colonial ideas are
not divorced from histories of violence. However, reproducing an idea is
not the same as having the power to use a narrative in order to commit
violence. Even today, Indigenous people become enraged when Black
people discursively erase Indigenous peoples; however, discourse is
connected to power, and Black people don’t have the power to subjugate
Indigenous peoples.