Existence and Resistance

This past semester, I took an Indigenous Studies course taught by Lisa Brooks. When summer rolled around, a couple of my peers and I stayed on campus to continue working with her. All of our work centered on the   Kim-Wait/Eisenberg (KWE) Native Amherst Literature Collection  . This collection was acquired by Amherst in 2013 but is continually growing and expanding. 

My favorite part of my summer job was what Professor Brooks refers to as “community building.” One example of community building was when we met with Paula Peters. Paula Peters is a Mashpee Wampanoag author, whose work is featured in the KWE Collection, who we had the pleasure of spending the day with recently. Talking with Paula Peters was incredible, as she greatly expanded our knowledge of the collection and her own work.

One thing that stayed, seared into my mind, from the conversation with Paula Peters was a personal anecdote she shared. Paula Peters said that, in second grade, she had been told that Native Americans didn’t exist anymore. It was around Thanksgiving, and Paula’s teacher was giving the typical (probably problematic) spiel about Pilgrims and Native Americans that is repeated in elementary school classrooms around the nation. The teacher’s story ended by stating that Indigenous people were a remnant of the past, as they had been wiped out, erased by disease and illness. Obviously, Paula Peters knew this wasn’t true. Her hand shot into the air, desperate to show to her classmates and teacher the falsehood of the narrative, to prove and stand steady in her own existence and humanity. 

Hearing Paula Peter’s story was simultaneously shocking and not surprising in the slightest. Her story is an example of the Indigenous erasure narrative, a foul myth implanted in the New England psyche. As stated by Jean O’Brien in her 2010 book Firsting and Lasting, this myth acts to “relegate Indians to the past by suggesting that they were passive and static in nature and that this foreclosed the possibility of their ongoing participation in the making of a future” (105). Indigenous people are claimed to “reside in an ahistorical temporality in which they can only be the victims of change, not active subjects in the making of change” (105). The erasure narrative has been projected onto Indigenous people to justify European colonization; once Native peoples are eliminated from the picture, European conquest appears more justified, a noble and brave act rather than an act of intense settler-colonial violence. In An Afro- Indigenous History of the United States, Kyle T. Mays states that “land dispossession and erasure in the realm of popular culture go hand in hand in further dispossessing Native people, and erroneously educate the general populace…that Native people no longer exist” (Mays, 84). However, Indigenous disappearance and passivity is a myth, while Indigenous survival and resistance is the reality. In this post, I’ll be focusing specifically on resistance by Mashpee Wampanoag people, inspired largely by Paula Peters’ visit. 

Apess is a powerful and revolutionary author; he “represents an apex of the Native northeastern intellectual tradition, writing his relations into a narrative of continuance at a time when the rest of New England was heavily invested in the tragic story of extinguishment” (Brooks, 163). In Eulogy on King Philip Apess memorializes King Philip, a seventeenth-century Wampanoag sachem and reframes the history of King Philip’s War. He critiques the supposed legitimacy of colonial law, not only in Philip’s time, but his own, addressing its continuing impact. Apess writes, “look at the disgraceful laws, disenfranchising us as citizens. Look at the treaties made by Congress, all broken” (53). Apess asserts that if the colonizers “give the Indian his rights… you may be assured war will cease” (55). Reading multiple works by Apess made it clear to me that he both advocates against the erasure narrative and for Indigenous rights; his advocacy is part of the important Wampanoag history of resistance.

Despite its falsehood, there has been and continues to be an Indigenous erasure narrative taught in New England. While this narrative is disheartening, my recent engagement with the KWE Collection has given me renewed hope, as I have come to realize that there is a powerful and ongoing thread of New England resistance against this erasure narrative.