Appreciate this one, John, as I share these thoughts!
Regarding Land Back and real estate, Nick Estes got into these fears a bit in “Our History Is the Future.” While he didn’t fully map out what Land Back would look like, he did write about how fears of being evicted from one’s home is a reflection of being stuck in a colonial mindset, when what it would really look like is for a different kind of relationship with land and place to be the norm. (Something like that; I haven’t reread it since it came out.)
John, this excellent offering brought into greater clarity a familiar image from my family history: a deed kept in the Orleans, Massachusetts town hall delineating & controlling the status of a sizable area of land designated as being on Freemans Lane off of Tonset Road.
That deed bears a large “X” stated to have been written on the document by an unnamed Native man who was thus relinquishing, under unspecified but obviously beleaguered circumstances (given the then-ongoing colossal impact of the immigrant-brought smallpox epidemic), his family’s claim on, and access to, that land in perpetuity for the great benefit of some of my ancestors.
My middle name, and the last name of many of my ancestors, is Freeman.
That family name obviously got started in a context in which some were in bondage and others not, and someone had the desire to permanently label himself and his family with an advertizement of his good fortune in comparison to the misfortune of others.
A large percentage of my Mom’s ancestors came to Cape Cod and the Massachusetts Bay area in the 1600s, and our clan’s version of filial piety and self-celebration involved nearly annual visits to some of the places which those ancestors “settled”.
So one of the most frequent stops was the site of the old family homestead on Freeman Lane in the Tonset area of the town of Orleans.
Orleans itself was named by ‘my people’ — on no obvious geolocal basis — after the city in France, which in turn was named for himself by the Roman emperor Aurelian (a family name meaning “golden”) when he rebuilt the city in the 3rd century CE.
The Wampanoag name “Tonset”, according to the book Indian Place Names of New England, either meant “hill-place”, or was perhaps an abbreviation of “Annusau-tonset”, meaning "hoed garden place."
And so your writing helps me notice — and at least somewhat tease apart — some of the layers of cultures, peoples, time, power, suffering, chance and privilege that have all informed the map of a small region which I’ve known since early childhood, a place whose story I was assured was important to me and mine, even though that story was only very partially remembered and re-told in my hearing.
Thanks Barry for this informative and powerful story. We often think of these stories with regard to the West, because history is so recent out here. But you show it playing out in the East as well. I might add that the town where you and I grew up, Needham, was deeded by an educated Christian Algonkian Indian named Nehoiden -- and although Needham today has a Nehoiden Street and annual Nehoiden day, nobody seems to have preserved any record of what the Algonkians called the place. It's just named after an English village.
Yeah, one major step in the Westward Expansion by English-speaking colonists took place about as far East as you can go — at First Encounter Beach in Eastham on Cape Cod.
The village, the tribe living there and the cape as a whole were all apparently referred to as “Nauset” by the people whom my relatives “encountered” there on December 8, 1620.
Shots were fired on both sides, so my folks moved on to a place (Patuxet, soon to be renamed Plymouth) where the people were more currently debilitated & depopulated by smallpox and thus were more eager for a potential alliance with these aliens against their less-sickened neighbors to the west.
And the Patuxet Wampanoags had the “advantage” of having had one of their members, Squanto, abducted into English slavery earlier on and thus was a fluent interpreter.
The Wampanoags not only tolerated my people digging up their buried corn supplies, but directly provisioned and aided them in numerous vital ways, a set of decisions since described as “a very bad move” by contemporary Wampanoags.
My first reaction after reading "Wisdom Sits" was envy. I wanted to live in a landscape so permeated with story, so instructional, as the Western Apache have. I had an instinct to make up stories about places when I was a child. And now I have such stories rooted in my own experience. But they are individual, only unevenly shared even with friends. They are not a part of a cultural guidance system.
How to let the land guide us was one of many things we could have learned (or re-learned, as it seems reasonable to assume that our "frostbitten forebears" as Robinson Jeffers calls them once had such stories) from the people of this continent had we not been so determined to dominate. It seems to me that we had the chance to regain the commons, but we were arrogant, violent, too sure to listen.
I have hoped that the LandBack movement is a path to restoring the commons. Exactly how that would work is unclear. I think there is such a path. But it appears that a majority of us care more about the price of Cheerios than about trying to achieve any sort of common vision.
That comment on having individual stories rooted in your own experience is something I feel, too. It’s always been so easy to story-root places with my kids with rich descriptions, but it’s not something that’s going to change the culture.
In England many centuries ago, there were places with clayey soils. At least one came to be known as Claytown, or as they pronounced it then Claytun. Eventually there was a guy named John who took the place-name as his own. So maybe it's not just envy that you felt, but nostalgia. Our culture once named people after places. But somehow later that got reversed.
Appreciate this one, John, as I share these thoughts!
Regarding Land Back and real estate, Nick Estes got into these fears a bit in “Our History Is the Future.” While he didn’t fully map out what Land Back would look like, he did write about how fears of being evicted from one’s home is a reflection of being stuck in a colonial mindset, when what it would really look like is for a different kind of relationship with land and place to be the norm. (Something like that; I haven’t reread it since it came out.)
John, this excellent offering brought into greater clarity a familiar image from my family history: a deed kept in the Orleans, Massachusetts town hall delineating & controlling the status of a sizable area of land designated as being on Freemans Lane off of Tonset Road.
That deed bears a large “X” stated to have been written on the document by an unnamed Native man who was thus relinquishing, under unspecified but obviously beleaguered circumstances (given the then-ongoing colossal impact of the immigrant-brought smallpox epidemic), his family’s claim on, and access to, that land in perpetuity for the great benefit of some of my ancestors.
My middle name, and the last name of many of my ancestors, is Freeman.
That family name obviously got started in a context in which some were in bondage and others not, and someone had the desire to permanently label himself and his family with an advertizement of his good fortune in comparison to the misfortune of others.
A large percentage of my Mom’s ancestors came to Cape Cod and the Massachusetts Bay area in the 1600s, and our clan’s version of filial piety and self-celebration involved nearly annual visits to some of the places which those ancestors “settled”.
So one of the most frequent stops was the site of the old family homestead on Freeman Lane in the Tonset area of the town of Orleans.
Orleans itself was named by ‘my people’ — on no obvious geolocal basis — after the city in France, which in turn was named for himself by the Roman emperor Aurelian (a family name meaning “golden”) when he rebuilt the city in the 3rd century CE.
The Wampanoag name “Tonset”, according to the book Indian Place Names of New England, either meant “hill-place”, or was perhaps an abbreviation of “Annusau-tonset”, meaning "hoed garden place."
And so your writing helps me notice — and at least somewhat tease apart — some of the layers of cultures, peoples, time, power, suffering, chance and privilege that have all informed the map of a small region which I’ve known since early childhood, a place whose story I was assured was important to me and mine, even though that story was only very partially remembered and re-told in my hearing.
Thanks Barry for this informative and powerful story. We often think of these stories with regard to the West, because history is so recent out here. But you show it playing out in the East as well. I might add that the town where you and I grew up, Needham, was deeded by an educated Christian Algonkian Indian named Nehoiden -- and although Needham today has a Nehoiden Street and annual Nehoiden day, nobody seems to have preserved any record of what the Algonkians called the place. It's just named after an English village.
Yeah, one major step in the Westward Expansion by English-speaking colonists took place about as far East as you can go — at First Encounter Beach in Eastham on Cape Cod.
The village, the tribe living there and the cape as a whole were all apparently referred to as “Nauset” by the people whom my relatives “encountered” there on December 8, 1620.
Shots were fired on both sides, so my folks moved on to a place (Patuxet, soon to be renamed Plymouth) where the people were more currently debilitated & depopulated by smallpox and thus were more eager for a potential alliance with these aliens against their less-sickened neighbors to the west.
And the Patuxet Wampanoags had the “advantage” of having had one of their members, Squanto, abducted into English slavery earlier on and thus was a fluent interpreter.
The Wampanoags not only tolerated my people digging up their buried corn supplies, but directly provisioned and aided them in numerous vital ways, a set of decisions since described as “a very bad move” by contemporary Wampanoags.
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving ! 😄
Thanks for the acknowledgement.
My first reaction after reading "Wisdom Sits" was envy. I wanted to live in a landscape so permeated with story, so instructional, as the Western Apache have. I had an instinct to make up stories about places when I was a child. And now I have such stories rooted in my own experience. But they are individual, only unevenly shared even with friends. They are not a part of a cultural guidance system.
How to let the land guide us was one of many things we could have learned (or re-learned, as it seems reasonable to assume that our "frostbitten forebears" as Robinson Jeffers calls them once had such stories) from the people of this continent had we not been so determined to dominate. It seems to me that we had the chance to regain the commons, but we were arrogant, violent, too sure to listen.
I have hoped that the LandBack movement is a path to restoring the commons. Exactly how that would work is unclear. I think there is such a path. But it appears that a majority of us care more about the price of Cheerios than about trying to achieve any sort of common vision.
That comment on having individual stories rooted in your own experience is something I feel, too. It’s always been so easy to story-root places with my kids with rich descriptions, but it’s not something that’s going to change the culture.
In England many centuries ago, there were places with clayey soils. At least one came to be known as Claytown, or as they pronounced it then Claytun. Eventually there was a guy named John who took the place-name as his own. So maybe it's not just envy that you felt, but nostalgia. Our culture once named people after places. But somehow later that got reversed.