(Re)Imagining Brown 250+

Histories of Violence in the Making of An American University

Phoebe Young

Thesis submitted to Brown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Ethnic Studies

April 2017

1 2 Signatures of Approval

This thesis, by Phoebe Young, is accepted in its present form by the Department of Ethnic Studies as satisfying requirements for the degree of Honors in Ethnic Studies.

______Director, Monica Muñoz-Martinez April 21st, 2017

______Reader, Evelyn Hu-DeHart April 21st, 2017

For the Department of Ethnic Studies

______Chair, Matthew Pratt Guterl

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Image by Tom Sullivan for the Brown Daily Herald, March 10th, 2014

Fireworks celebrating the 250th anniversary of Brown University’s founding in March of 2014, mounted onto University Hall, or the “College Edifice,” which was built by enslaved African Americans on Native American land.

4 Contents

Introduction “Our Feet Never Left the Ground” 13

Chapter 1 I Lose My Land Webs of Colonial Violence in Rhode Island, 1636-1676 24

Chapter 2 Speaking Silence Native American Removal in New England after King Philip’s War 52

Chapter 3 Ghosts of Founding Tracing the Brown University Charter to the Transatlantic Slave Trade 75

Chapter 4 What Happened Here? History Repeated in the 250th Anniversary of Brown University 105

Conclusion Afterlives & Anticipated Futures 122

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Acknowledgements:

Writing this thesis has been immensely challenging, not only because it is ridiculously long, but also because it has required me to draw from arguably every dimension of my life in order to be able to compose it. But what that has also meant for this thesis is that, at every step of the way, there have been people in every dimension of my life who have lifted me along and told me that I was able to do this. My mother has always been patient with each and every one of my questions, even when they were prying, nosy, or when I was asking something that was none of my damn business. She has always been there with me, patiently answering those questions, and thinking alongside me when she is out of answers. This thesis would not have been possible without her. My grandmother has always been the asker of questions—the one who has been waiting for this thesis, who has listened patiently as I explained my jumbled thoughts to her and who, upon hearing them, smiled and said “right on.” Perhaps because she asks so many questions, she has also been the one who keeps the stories and histories, and she has taught me how to find history in the everyday things in everyday places. My sister has always reminded me to ground my study of the past in the things that lie before me and ahead of me. She is the person I reach out to when I think about what comes next, and she is the person I talk to when I think about what lies behind us. And she makes me incredibly proud. My dad has continued to provide me with the music and jokes I have needed in order to write this thesis, and he has patiently and thoughtfully engaged in these materials with me even as he also, possibly, worried about my job prospects. Just a little. I have been very lucky to have several years worth of professors who have given me the space to ask these questions, and who have developed these thoughts and pages patiently with me throughout the years. Monica Muñoz-Martinez, my thesis advisor, concentration advisor, and Mellon Mays mentor, has sat with me through this thesis at every step of its development, and I feel incredibly grateful and humbled to have had such a consequential mentor in my lifetime. She has pushed me to expand my conceptions of what I am capable of—even up to the last minutes of writing this thesis. Evelyn Hu-DeHart has consistently encouraged me keep writing, to speak up louder, and occasionally to go to sleep earlier. She has patiently waited for me as I completed this thesis and always keeps me thinking about what is coming next. Elizabeth Hoover and Adrienne Keene are the role models that have propelled me through every day at Brown. They have given me laughter, love, tea, beading skills, and the constant reminder that it is possible to do activist work, community work, and academic work all in the same breath. They have relentlessly demanded a community for Native students on campus and have done so with joy and laughter. Naoko Shibusawa has helped me think about the global dimensions of the extremely local questions I am asking within this thesis. She has also been an enormous support within the History department over the years and has always taught with so much love and generosity.

6 Mika LaVaque-Manty at the University of Michigan helped me through the beginning stages of asking these questions in my freshman year of college, and I am incredibly grateful for his willingness to sit with me during office hours, answer e-mails, and read through the enormous pieces of writing that I worked on during his classes. His encouragement to continue my work early on was invaluable to me in the years to follow. Patricia Rubertone in the Anthropology department and Linford Fisher in the History department have each helped me to think about my work in complex, interdisciplinary ways. Each of them has provided me with crucial, generous insight and feedback on my work and each of them have introduced me to different landscapes of thought within the fields that my research falls into. Debbie Weinstein in the American Studies department allowed me to think through the early questions and frameworks of this thesis in the honors thesis seminar last year, and provided me with crucial support, updates, and breakfast in the semester before I began writing my thesis. The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship has made this entire body of work possible. Besenia Rodriguez, Mary Grace Almandrez, and Shontay Delalue have lovingly mentored me and my other cohort members throughout the last three years, and have enabled me to see academia as a possibility for myself. Lily Mengesha and Warren Harding have given me invaluable insights, talked with me over tea, lent me books, and interrupted our conversations to make sure I wrote down my thoughts for this thesis so that I wouldn’t forget them. All of them have seen me through crucial stages of this thesis process and crucial stages of my college career. The list of Mellon Mays fellows that I have to thank within this thesis-writing process is a long one, and is also a testament to how important the people within the Mellon program have been in providing an intergenerational network of support. Hassani Scott, Aditya Kumar, Danii Carrasco, Lovinia Reynolds, and Zoila Bergeron have always given me so much joy within this process, and when none of us were feeling joyful, they always held space with me. Aanchal Saraf, Jackie Rice, Maria Garcia, Héctor Peralta, and Kristina Lee continue to be the people in my life that I look up to when I think of where to go next. Camisia Glasgow coached me through every stage of the Mellon application process when I was a sophomore, and was kind enough to help me through interviews, thinking through the application, and answering my questions about the program even when she barely knew me. Liliana Sampedro, Sierra Edd, Kara Roanhorse, Nikki Lee, Nikki Ubinas, and Emily Sun make me incredibly proud and excited to be part of the Mellon program because I cannot wait to see what they will become, and I am always in awe of how much they are doing, thinking, and leading on this campus. I would not have been able to make it through writing such a long history of colonial violence without my friends, who always reminded me that laughter is needed— especially when it cannot be found in the work you do—and who always reminded me that love is needed, because it is precisely what allows this work to continue. Floripa Olguin, Myacah Sampson, Mae Verano, Victor Bramble, Sarita Ballakur, Keven Griffen, Kevin Peters, Areeb Mahamadi, Roshan Moazed, Kara Roanhorse, Jasmine Ben, Sierra Edd, Sarena Grey, Jack Martin, Stanley Stewart, Jessica Brown, Pedro Mota, Rohith Nagari, Kairy Herrera-Espinoza, Sage Fannuchi-Funes, Clarissa Sorenson, Eugenie Thompson, Emmalina Glinskis, and Lily Starbuck have all walked me through the many

7 stages (and years) of writing this thesis, have written their own theses alongside me, have thought through these ideas with me, encouraged me to do better, brought me food, bought me food, made me food, checked in with me, laughed with me, and have been incredibly patient with me throughout this whole process. The Sarah Doyle Women’s Center and the Brown Center for Students of Color have provided me with ongoing support and spaces of love. Gail Cohee, Felicia Salinas- Moniz, Anne-Marie Ponte, and Joshua Segui have all provided me with the grounding advice and encouragement that has been necessary in order to complete this work. There have also been several very important restaurants in the area that have given me the fuel I needed to finish this thesis and which have also given me general joy over the past few years as an undergraduate. In particular, Baja’s, Soban, Eastside Pockets, Bagel Gourmet, Bagel Gourmet Ole, Better Burger Company, and Eastside Mini-Mart have all truly been there for me in my times of need. Lydia and Amir Kelow-Bennett have given me so much love, laughter, and patience in writing this piece. They have constantly reminded me to be patient and loving throughout this entire process. My partner Muki Barkan has been amazing and has always believed in me, my ability to complete this and my ability to grow within this work. And he’s been my best friend. Lastly, the community I have found within Native Americans at Brown has been invaluable. They have been the community that has informed every part of my time here, that has seen the entire range of emotions and experiences I have had on this campus, and that has pushed me through this to the end. They have been the people that I look to for the strength needed to write this.

Chi-Miigwetch.

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If I had to explain New England colonization to you—I would take you on a walk through Providence.

We would look down at our feet and I would ask you what you see beneath you.

Concrete. You would respond.

Or, maybe if we were in a still older part of the city--stone. Bricks. Cement.

This is how I would explain colonization in New England. It is a constant process of laying and re- laying physical concrete, physical stones onto which the official record of New England “history” is written and re-written. This history is always one that renders Native peoples invisible, un-see-able. The history of our peoples always lies beneath this concrete history that is written in stone.

Another question—where is the ground?

Beneath me, you would reply. I am walking on it right now.

But out here, out in New England, on the East Coast, the ground on which we walked—the things that grounded us--the places we buried our stories, ancestors, memories, are covered up. Colonialism and its histories smoothed out neatly on top of it so that no one would ask questions. And eventually people started mistaking the “concrete,” and the concrete history—that surface level layer of cemented truths, for the ground and the “grounded” history.

The history of Native peoples, our connections to the past and present and future, is quite literally within the ground we walk. And taking that land base away from us, smoothing it over so that you can build your concrete structures of history, religion, government, education—that is colonialism.

But then I would also point to the cracks in the concrete, the places where plants have pushed up above the cement, towards the sun. The places where the roots of trees have unearthed carefully laid streets, crumbling their sharp lines, soft crushed brick disintegrating into the dirt that the tree pulls up with it, pushing towards the sky.

That, I would say, is resistance—that way in which the land upends and unsettles the concrete, the way in which it demands to be remembered, recognized, and seen. The way in which it demands life.

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“If you’re reading a document and somebody says ‘I lost my land rights,’ they say ‘nupunohshom.’ ‘Nuhpunohshom’ is ‘I fall down, onto the ground.’”1

“For Wampanoag people, to lose one’s land, to lose the right to use one’s land is to literally fall off your feet, to have no ground under you, to fall down. And prior to white people coming here our feet never left the ground, we didn’t have horses, we didn’t have carts or carriages, your feet never left the ground and when you say my land ‘natakeem’ my land that is not separate from my body. So it’s always attached to the bottom of my feet, whatever I do.” 2

“When I first heard instruction I believed not, but laughed at it and scorned praying to God. I did think of running away because I cared not for praying to God. But because I loved the place where I lived I thought, ‘I will pray to God so that I can still stay at that place,’ therefore I prayed not for the love of God but for the love of the place I lived in.”3

1 jessie ‘little doe’ baird, Mashpee Wampanoag, in We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân by Anne Makepeace. (Documentary, Film, Bullfrog Films, 2010), 24:09-24:22. 2 jessie ‘little doe’ baird, Mashpee Wampanoag in We Still Live Here, 25:35-26:14 3 “Monequassen, whole former Confession, read before the Elders, was as followeth” in We Still Live Here, 32:02- 32:30.

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Introduction:

“Our Feet Never Left the Ground”

In 1675 Wampanoag sachem Metacom, known to the English as King Philip, led one of the largest, bloodiest and perhaps most consequential allied Native American uprisings against the British colonists of New England. Four centuries later, jessie little doe baird and other members of Wampanoag communities in Aquinnah and Martha’s Vineyard began to revive the sleeping wôpanâak language that Metacom and countless generations of Wampanoag people had spoken. How can we understand each of these moments as part of a broader history of

Native peoples within New England and their ongoing attempts to maintain connections with their homelands in the midst of colonization? And what were the mechanisms by which Native peoples’ feet “left the ground” of New England so that colonies and their attendant institutions could be built?

Ultimately, each of these tactics—from language revival to revolt—can be understood within a larger framework of regional Native American resistance to their removal. In order to understand the continued need for these tactics of resistance, we need to understand the ways in which colonialism continues to manifest itself in the present-day context in which we live. In particular, we need to examine the spaces and places that are often taken for granted as a naturalized part of a landscape or cityscape and understand more clearly the contexts of their origins and how those contexts continue to shape their present realities. Within my own time in

13 New England, this question arose as I was attending Brown University, a school that proudly claims its pre-national origins in 1764, but which makes little to no public mention of the Native

American peoples who were cleared out of the area and which has only just begun to acknowledge the enslaved African peoples who built the school and its wealth. In what ways do these silences within the University’s historical record continue to uphold colonial logics in the present day?

In thinking about the community that I seek to engage in this discussion, I want to make it very clear that I seek to engage and encourage the Brown community to think about the violence of founding that took place in this space in order for Brown University to be realized.

This thesis is in many ways a transcription and translation of the violence that was done here—I cannot fully capture its totality, but I can within these pages give voice to the regional violence of colonization that goes unacknowledged, unrecognized, or understudied. In particular, this thesis understands colonization as a web of interwoven violence[s]—literary, historical, physical, psychological, spiritual, emotional, and multigenerational—that has lead to acts of violence against Native American and African peoples in this region that range from slavery to language and land loss. These acts of violent dispossession pervade the historical record and are rendered literally unspeakable, unutterable because the English language many of us use today cannot quite capture them in their totality. In other ways, these acts of dispossession and violence are drowned out, silenced when held up against the long archive of colonial New England fanfare, or buried deep underneath the business of nation-building that has been mapped over the land we call New England today.

In thinking back to Brown’s 250th anniversary celebrations during the year of 2014, there are certain geographies of remembering that can help us understand the ways in which this mapping of settler colonial power continues into the present day on Brown’s campus. In particular, there is the geography of commemoration. The way in which the University’s celebrations unfolded ultimately pushed aside more complex histories of violence, colonization,

14 slavery, and nation building. On the Main Green, on the front of University Hall, massive scaffolding rigs of fireworks that spelled out “250+” for the kickoff celebrations of the year.

Behind the Main Green—an abstract cast iron ball and broken chain, sinking into the grass on the Quiet Green with a stone plinth abstractly describing the “legend” of Brown University’s origins in the slave trade.4 Beneath the Main Green, land that has been occupied for over three hundred years sitting in the silence of the University, holding up the foundations of familiar buildings on campus.

The positioning of the 250th anniversary celebration in relation to these locations can help us map out the relationship Brown continues to have to the history of its own founding. At the forefront of Brown’s understanding of its founding is a dazzling celebration meant to awe in a simple and uncomplicated way. Just behind that celebration, visible in plain sight, is a long history of Brown’s relationship to and dependence on slavery, which is harder to hide, but still made to be abstract, narrow, and of seemingly little consequence to University operations of today—instead relegated to the stuff of “legends.” And just beneath the site of celebration, buried and silent amidst the cacophony of the University, is Brown’s relationship to the colonization of Rhode Island. On the matter of how the homelands of indigenous peoples came to be the site of Brown University—founded by and created for the settler colonists of Rhode

Island—Brown is silent.

Like many other examples of celebrations organized around moments of “founding,”

Brown’s 250th celebrations function as acts of forgetting just as much as they are acts of remembrance. In particular, successful celebrations like Brown’s own are particularly good at detaching themselves from the historical and physical landscapes in which “foundings” are able to take place. 5 But with these celebrations that seek to “decontextualize the events they celebrate…they open the door to competitive readings of these events.”6

4 “Nickel, Mark. “Brown to Dedicate Slavery Memorial Sept. 27.” New from Brown. September 19, 2014. https://news.brown.edu/articles/2014/09/puryear. 5 Michel Rolph-Truillot Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston,

15 It is important to also note that in 2014 Brown University unveiled its Slavery Memorial sculpture on the Quiet Green, designed by Martin Puryear, along with the school’s Center for the

Study of Slavery and Justice, both of which came out of efforts lead by the Ruth Simmons administration in 2006 to better understand Brown’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. In addition, the 2006 publication of research conducted by the Steering Committee on Slavery and

Justice detailed the role of Rhode Island in the transatlantic slave trade at the time of Brown’s inception, and more pointedly, the specific role that the Brown brothers played in the slave trade. Each of these moments demonstrated critical moments of University-led reflections on its own origins—moments of reflection that have not happened before on this campus. But the self-reflection and exploration of Brown’s role in slavery and colonization is far from finished.

In particular, the full scope of colonization, slavery, and violence that took place in order for Brown to be realized as a university has yet to be reckoned with. Not only were the Brown brothers involved in a transatlantic slave trade that fundamentally altered the world writ large, but so too were many of the original members of the corporation that founded Brown University in 1764 (then named “The College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence

Plantation). Those who were not directly involved in the slave ownership and slave ventures were participants in and benefactors of the emergent Rhode Island economy, to which the transatlantic slave trade was fundamental.7 A crucial part of understanding the genesis of the

Rhode Island slave trade and Brown University’s role in it also involves understanding the land base that the colony was built on, and how it was “cleared” of its Native peoples in order for the colony and its attendant institutions to materialize. It was no coincidence that the main hubs of slave trade activity in Rhode Island—the ports of Newport, the plantations in Bristol and

Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 131. 6 Truillot, Silencing the Past, 131. 7 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006).

16 Kingstown—were all areas that had once been the pulse points of Narragansett and Wampanoag homelands.

Instead, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigenous displacement and enslavement, and the making of Rhode Island need to be understood as deeply intertwined with one another. Land dispossession via quasi-legal systems in the emergent colony and the regional King Philip’s War in 1675 allowed colonists to clear Rhode Island of its Native inhabitants. The selling of Native

American captives after King Philip’s War into slavery in the West Indies, and the sale of their homelands, allowed colonists at the end of the seventeenth century to acquire the capital needed to enter into the slave trade and the land bases to establish plantations in the colony. These sales would help to build up Rhode Island as the “commissary of the Atlantic plantation complex,” launching some sixty percent of slave trading voyages from North America at the height of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century.8 The same slave traders and colonists who had engaged in or benefited from King Philip’s War would also enter into government in Rhode

Island, creating laws and institutions like Brown University.

Brown was not only a beneficiary of the transatlantic slave trade but, at its moment of founding, also represented a physical culmination of these colonization efforts that were behind the making of Rhode Island. When we celebrate the founding of Brown University uncomplicatedly, and when we continue to tell stories about the inherently exceptional qualities of Brown, we fail to recognize the institution as a site that represents the racialized violence that had to take place in order for us to be able to celebrate 250 years as a campus, a city, and to some extent, a country.

The primary aim of my thesis then, is to bridge this gap between historical memory of Native displacement in Providence and the transatlantic slave trade, and to demonstrate the way in which Native displacement and enslavement were deeply interwoven with the chattel slave

8 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 10-11.

17 ventures and plantation systems of Rhode Island. At the heart of this discussion, I want to situate and view the founding of Brown University as a physical culmination of the colonization efforts that were behind the making of Providence. I want to recognize Brown University as a site that represents the racialized violence that had to take place in order for us to be able to celebrate 250 years as a campus, a city, and to some extent, a country.

The academic literature that is emerging on Native enslavement in the colonial Americas is still a relatively new field born out of the last twenty years, but has been lead by scholarly works like Ned Blackhawk’s Violence Over the Land and Alan Gallay’s compilation of works,

Indian Slavery in Colonial America. While neither of these texts are directly mentioned in my work, they have been crucial in understanding the branch of history that has dealt with Native enslavement within the colonial regimes of the Americas. In tandem with these understandings of Native enslavement in the Americas, works like Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity and the research put forth by Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice’s 2004 report have given me the local and global frameworks that allowed me to understand the sociopolitical contexts of the transatlantic slave trade. Craig Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled

History of America’s Universities has helped me tremendously in situating the American university within the larger context of slavery in the Americas. Lastly, in dealing with questions of memory—how we think through what is intentionally forgotten, what is intentionally silenced within a broad public understanding of history, especially in the midst of ongoing colonialism,

Michel-Rolphe Truillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Patricia

Rubertone’s Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett

Indians, and Amy Den Ouden’s Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England have been crucial tools in thinking through the questions of memory, power, and history in this thesis.

In total, an academic intervention that interweaves colonial historical memory, college campuses, and Native displacement, together with university and state involvement in the

18 transatlantic slave trade contributes to this growing literature. This thesis is an effort to bridge these academic works around founding, memory, colonization, slavery, and the enterprise of educational institutions in the hopes that they can be put in conversation with one another and understood together as synergistic processes.

Within this work, the sources I draw upon within the past and present allow me to trace a genealogy of colonization and racial subjugation that continues to function within the present day. I examine the documents that set up the framework of colonial institutions within the seventeenth and eighteenth century—land deeds, maps, court testimonies, and literary accounts of war and the so-called “New World” of the colony. Later on as I move into Rhode Island’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, I also look at the colonial documents that detail and reveal the daily business of slavery—receipts, letters, and account books. Taken together, all of these records demonstrate the ways in which the slave trade and colonization informed everyday practices within the colony and created a normalized context of domination of African and Native American peoples. All too often, these histories of violence and subjugation are hidden in plain sight, written out of historical understandings of New

England’s past. Lastly, I read the recent celebrations of Brown’s 250th anniversary as a continuation of this regional process of erasure by analyzing how the cultural materials of

Brown’s celebration of its history downplay or sidestep these histories of racial violence that are central to the university founding.

I begin this thesis with a study of the long process of Native land dispossession that took place in the making of Rhode Island beginning with the colony’s founding in 1636 and up to the end of King Philip’s War in 1676. This chapter deals with a study of the ways in which colonialism leading up to King Philip’s War precipitated, and how the gradual dispossession of land from Native peoples in New England functioned as a quotidian process of violence within the new colony of Rhode Island. In order to understand how such a bloody war took place, it is necessary to understand the violence that led up to such a watershed moment in New England’s

19 colonial history and the consequent colonial powers that emerge from the war’s outcomes. This analysis also allows us to understand the colonial framework in which the transatlantic slave trade materializes in eighteenth century Rhode Island and the synergism of Native American genocide in Rhode Island and African enslavement.

The second chapter looks at the physical and rhetorical removal of Native peoples in New

England during King Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676 and the enduring echoes of these mechanisms of violence into the present day. In particular, this section discusses how the

Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and other Native peoples in New England were removed from their homelands through the process of war and mass killings, but also through the process of enslavement and captivity. These physical removals in the immediate aftermath of the war were followed by a gradual erasure of Native peoples from the memory of colonial New England, creating what Jean O’Brien has termed a “New England replacement narrative” in her work,

Firstings and Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. These imaginative constructions of Native peoples as absent from New England after King Philip’s War have had real material impacts for Native peoples within the region, effectively allowing for the continued colonial acquisition of Native lands and allowed for the legal codification of Native peoples as

“extinct” in Rhode Island in 1880. Both of these forms of removal have functioned together, allowing for colonial claims to Native lands in Rhode Island to rework and recreate themselves into the present day.

The third chapter focuses on building a genealogy of involvement of the original corporation members of Brown University in the transatlantic slave trade and the post-King

Philip’s War process of land speculation and acquisition. In tracing this lineage I also look at the ways in which these hyper-local forms of wealth and power within the tiny bounds of Rhode

Island had consequences that reverberated throughout the coasts of the Atlantic. This chapter also seeks to unsettle the commonly held belief today that the Northern states of the U.S. were largely free of blame in the history of slavery. Instead, this chapter shows how Rhode Island’s

20 planter elite in the eighteenth century were engaged in a transatlantic wealth acquisition through the slave trade and that their wealth transcended the boundaries of the colony—spilling over into plantations in the southern British colonies and the West Indies. Understanding this context of Brown’s founding in 1764 and just who, exactly, the corporation members that chartered Brown University were allows us to better understand the ways in which these histories of violence are forgotten within Brown’s institutional histories. This small-scale study also allows us to understand how these histories of racialized violence continue to be erased from the landscape of New England’s popular memory.

This thesis closes with a chapter about the process of forgetting, and the creation of silences in the archives of New England and Brown University. When we fail to contend with the violence of colonization within New England that had to take place in order for Brown

University to be established, we continue to immerse ourselves in the violence of forgetting. This violence of forgetting happens when injustices of the past go unacknowledged, and creates the potential for violence in the present when those injustices are not recognized as such. This analysis is centered around Brown University’s 250th celebration, and critically reads the commemorative history of Brown University that was published in 2015 by Ted Widmer,

Brown: The History of An Idea. I argue for an understanding of Brown’s history that places the slave trade and colonization of New England at the center of our understanding of how Brown came into being in 1764.

The history in the pages that follow can be seen as the “competitive reading” of Brown

University’s celebration of itself that Truillot speaks of.9 Instead of telling a story about origins rooted in greatness and righteous ideals, this is a story about interwoven mechanisms of dispossession, a story about silences, and a story about the making of an American university.

This is also a story of capitalism and its roots in the transatlantic slave trade and colonial

9 Michel Rolph-Truillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 131.

21 projects in the Americas. And this is a story about the urgency of writing histories that understand all of these mechanisms in relation to one another.

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“Its war against the humanity of people was everyday and all the time.”

-Yazir Henri and Heidi Grunebaum, “Re-Historicizing Trauma: Reflections on Violence and Memory in Current-Day Cape Town”

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Chapter 1:

I Lose My Land

Webs of Colonial Violence in Rhode Island, 1636-1676

King Philip’s War is largely understood as a watershed moment within the web of New

England colonization—it was both the moment in which the web had the potential to collapse and the potential to expand. But it was also, importantly, the moment that promised a return of

Native life and land in the midst of increasingly aggressive attempts by the colonies to dispossess Native peoples of their personhood and place—and the regional alliance of Native tribes fought fiercely to stave off this dispossession. During this time, Metacom and his allied forces razed huge swaths of colonial New England, destroying personal property and settlements, including Providence. As the war went on for fourteen months from June, 1675 to

August of 1676, northeastern Algonquians throughout the region—Nipmucks and Pockumtucks in central and western Massachusetts, Narragansetts in Rhode Island and Abenakis from

Maine—joined forces with Wampanoags to reclaim the landscapes of New England.10 By 1676, more than half of the colonial settlements in New England had been destroyed and English occupation had been pushed back to the coastal regions.

10 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), xii

25 The Native American uprisings against colonial forces of control and genocide echoed across the continent during this moment—with King Philip’s War taking place just five years before the Pueblo revolt in New Mexico against Spanish colonial rule. While these two uprisings are largely believed to be unrelated to one another, inter-colonial communications were aware of these rebellions and it is worth considering the possibility, as Patricia Rubertone has noted, that just as imperial colonies had inter-colonial communications and strategies of domination,

Native American tribes throughout the continent may have also had networks of communication, news dissemination, and modes of resistance that extended much further than written records indicate.11

While the Pueblo revolt Spanish colonial forces were expelled from the region, within

New England, the regional Native tribes that had taken up arms against English settlers suffered estimated losses between fifty-six and sixty-nine percent of their populations. Many of the

Native peoples who hadn’t been killed by colonists in the war were in the Caribbean.12

Consequently, the post-King Philip’s War landscape of New England, quite literally cleared of large portions of its Native inhabitants through mass killings and enslavement, saw massive colonial acquisition of Narragansett, Wampanoag, Nimpuc, and Niantic territory and the subsequent expansion of colonial power of Rhode Island.

Colonial land acquisition after King Philip’s War fundamentally changed the nature of settler colonial terms of power, economic development, and dealings with Native peoples in the region. However, settler attempts to entrap Native peoples within colonial rule and Native resistance to this web of entrapment, date much farther back in the timeline of Rhode Island colonization. In order to understand how Providence, Rhode Island, and Brown University came into existence, this interwoven web of colonial violence had to lay down foundations for new

11 Patricia Rubertone, “ANTH 1624: Indians, Colonists, and Africans in New England.” Undergraduate Course at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, October 4, 2016. 12 Colin Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences” in Rhode Island History Journal Vol. 72, No. 1. Winter/Spring 2014 (Rhode Island: 2014), 4. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. (Bloomsbury Press: New York, 2013), 40. Fisher, Linford D. “‘Why Shall Wee Have Peace to Bee Made Slaves’: Indian Surrenderers during and after King Philip’s War.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 1, 2017): 91–114. doi:10.1215/00141801-3688391.

26 structures to come into being. A crucial aspect of this colonial project involves the daily ways in which colonialism was acted out in legal documents, settler-Native interactions, and settler practices on Native land. This concept is what Edward Said calls the “quotidian processes of hegemony.”13 Within official colonial documents: maps, journals, land deeds and court records, an institutionalization of racism that positions Native peoples as inferior to colonists becomes visible. These racial assumptions allowed English colonists to justify the dispossession of Native and African peoples of their land, labor, lives, and personhood in order to create, defend, and expand the landscape of institutions that formed colonial New England. At the war’s end, Rhode

Island’s continuation as a colony would be deeply dependent upon the dual project of Native

American displacement and the transatlantic slave trade.

Histories of King Philip’s War often locate the starting point of the conflict at the moment of John Sassamon’s death at Assawampsett Pond on January 29th, 1675.14 Sassamon was a Massachusett minister who preached in the Christian Indian town of Namasket. In 1675, as he was headed back to Namasket from Plymouth he disappeared. His body was discovered in

Assawampsett Pond a few weeks later.15 Sassamon’s death was ruled a murder and the Plymouth colonial court tried and hung three Wampanoag men—Tobias, Wampapaquan, and

Mattashunannamo—who were loyal to Metacom. While it is generally agreed that Sassamon was murdered, the guilt of Tobias, Wampapaquan and Mattashunannamo was tenuous at best.16

Tobias and Mattashunannamo were killed on the gallows, but Wampapaquan’s noose broke, interrupting his execution.17 These three guilty rulings and the two deaths of Wampanoag men precipitate the attacks by Metacomet that would begin King Philip’s War shortly thereafter.

This chapter focuses its attention on the colonial acts of aggression leading up to the execution and the consequent colonial power that emerges from King Philip’s War shortly

13 Edward Said, 1993 quoted in Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) 40. 14 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), xxv 15 Ibid, 21 16 Ibid, 24 17 Ibid.

27 thereafter. King Philip’s War must be understood as part of a larger ongoing story of Native resistance to colonization that extends backwards and forwards in time from the war. A surmounting web of colonial tactics of dispossession precedes physical violence of wartime.

From the moment of Rhode Island’s founding, land deeds, literature, private property, courts, colonial cartography, and missionary work all serve to divide and conquer Native space, place, and peoples. While these vectors of colonization do not necessarily constitute acts of war in and of themselves, together they allow us to trace the asphyxiation of Native New England in a web of colonial forces that are all interwoven with one another.

These forces are interactive, gradually bringing Native peoples to the point where Native

American life and futurity in New England is barely possible. Psychological, spiritual, physical, and material relationships between communities and their homelands can no longer be maintained. In this sense, the physical deaths and atrocities of the war were preceded by the death of Native relationships to land and relationships to self. While historical calculations of the devastations of King Philip’s War have been framed in terms of property damage and loss of life, these analyses do not fully gauge the consequences of colonization for Native peoples. These deaths of relationships to land and community are not within neat start and end dates of war, but they are just as significant and painful. We therefore have to look to the atrocities of war and the more muted violence of the written colonial record to understand how dispossession, enslavement, and erasure of New England Native peoples came to be.

The colonization of King Philip’s War through tactics of physical violence was preceded by legal and social conquest in colonial Rhode Island. As Amy Den Ouden notes, “Discourse on

Indianness and conquest in colonial southern New England reflects the connection between ideas about the nature of Indian identity and the manufacturing of a ‘legal and cultural grounding for the domination of indigenous peoples and their lands.”18 The first portion of this chapter analyzes the literary and legal contestations of three successive land deeds that

18 Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in Colonial New England. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press: 2005), 39.

28 established colonial presence in Rhode Island leading up to King Philip’s War. Each of these land deeds: the 1636 land deed between Roger Williams, Canonicus and Miantonomi that founded the colony in Providence, the Atherton Purchase19 of 1660 by Major Humphrey

Atherton, and the Pettaquamscutt Purchase of 1674, belie the tactics of violence involved in manufacturing settler justification for colonization. Within these analyses I also include proceedings and decisions from the Rhode Island General Assembly around land and private property development in order to underscore the colonial tactics used in these documents.

For this chapter, my primary archival records were the Colonial Records of Rhode Island at the Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence, Rhode Island. Within my analysis of land deeds in Rhode Island before King Philip’s War, I read against the grain of colonial texts in order to highlight how the silences of the archives can tell us just as much as the written words themselves.20 Because colonial discourse can be understood as the “speaking of power,” then

“that speaking is always also a silencing; and what is silenced must be investigated.”21 With this in mind, I analyze the terms of trade enumerated (or ignored) in each instance of land acquisition, especially as these terms of trade pertain to wampum, material goods, and reciprocity/common land usage rights between colonists and Native peoples. Finally, I examine how colonial rulings that come after land purchase and settlement grant legitimacy both explicitly through court rulings that support colonial interests and implicitly through lack of enforcement of rulings meant to protect the rights of Native peoples.

The acquisition of Native land in the making of Rhode Island was therefore an inherently violent process that dispossessed local tribes of their personhood, identity, and land-based communities. While land acquisition in Rhode Island did not erase or wipe out Native

19 Which, for the purpose of this paper, will be referred to only in name as a purchase. This land that was violently taken from Narragansett peoples and named “The Atherton Purchase” was not acquired by any legitimate means or through any type of mutual understanding or compensation with local tribes but was instead a coerced claim to Narragansett land by Gen. Humphrey Atherton in 1660 as a result of fines levied against the Narragansett by the United Colonies. 20 See Rolph-Truillot, Michel. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995). 21 Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in Colonial New England. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press: 2005), 39

29 communities in the region, nor did it erase their communal, ancestral, and present-day connections to place and space in Rhode Island, the making of Rhode Island—and the institutions that followed within the colony like Brown University—were deeply violent and devastating processes. This chapter begins an attempt to remember the subtle and overt forms of violence involved Rhode Island’s colonization, in the hopes of undoing the threads of colonial logic that have held together the spines of New England’s history books.

I Lose My Land: “‘Nuhpunohshom’ / ‘I fall down, onto the ground.’”22

In the colonial founding stories of New England, the 1636 land deed gifted to Roger

Williams that founded Providence stands in friendly relief from colonial tensions across other parts of the New England landscape. The seemingly amicable settler-Native relations surrounding the founding of Providence in 1636 has been captured today in popular imaginings of the state’s beginnings with the phrase “What Cheer, Netop”—referenced in local band names,23 the Roger Williams national memorial, and the buildings and landmarks of local colleges, including Brown University’s Van Wickle Gates. This greeting, according to local lore, was supposedly shared with Roger Williams and his traveling party as they came across the

Seekonk River towards friendly Narragansetts.24 At a time when colonists just south of Roger

Williams in Connecticut had begun a war of extermination against the Pequots, and just a few decades before the outbreak of King Philip’s War in 1675, the story of the genesis of Providence is almost idyllic. Founded by a man who promised religious freedom to all, who had

22 jessie ‘little doe’ baird, Mashpee Wampanoag, in We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân by Anne Makepeace. (Documentary, Film. Bullfrog Films, 2010), 25:35-26:14. 23 “About the Band,” What Cheer? Brigade | the Providence street band, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.whatcheerbrigade.com/about-the-band/ 24 “Roger Williams: Founding Providence.” Roger Williams: National Memorial Rhode Island. Accessed February 10, 2017. https://www.nps.gov/rowi/learn/historyculture/foundingprovidence.htm

30 “befriended” local Natives enough to write and speak their languages and live among them at various points throughout his lifetime, Providence’s beginnings are remembered as almost welcomed by Native peoples. Their greeting to the colonists, “What cheer, netop,” combines

“what cheer”—a common informal English greeting at the time, with the Narragansett word for friend, “netop.” 25 This popularly remembered depiction of Providence’s founding seems to signal promises of friendship and brotherhood in both Native Narragansett and English languages.

And yet a closer look at Roger Williams’ tactics of land acquisition allow us to place him within the story of colonial attempts at regional control and domination in Rhode Island.

Historian John Frederick Martin points to two kinds of seventeenth-century Indian experts in

New England, those who were experts in sustaining relationships with Native peoples, and those who were military experts, valuable in severing relationships with Native peoples.26 Those who knew Native peoples as “friends,” neighbors and partners in trade played a valuable role in the colonization process by speaking local Native languages and negotiating land purchases.27 Those who were military experts were valuable because, often unprovoked, they attacked and exterminated Native peoples and lead subsequent efforts to establish towns on freshly conquered land. Both of these types of actors were crucial in the project of colonial founding.28

Williams’ actions within Narragansett Bay—as a missionary, trader, “friend of the Indians,” who also spoke the Narragansett language and founded Providence—does certain colonial work that is seemingly less harmful than the colonial violence in King Philip’s War, but which sustains, facilitates, and is essential to making the more overt forms of violence against Native peoples in the region possible.

25 See “Roger Williams: Founding Providence” at https://www.nps.gov/rowi/learn/historyculture/foundingprovidence.htm 26 John Frederick Martin, 1993, 18 quoted in Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in Colonial New England. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press: 2005), 50. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

31 The acquisition of Native land in New England was a project of legal, cultural, and moral justification that legitimated colonial presence and land claims through the construction of

Native savagery and cultural/moral inferiority.29 In the English colonial logic, relationships to land were made and maintained through resource extraction and private property, necessary components of “subduing” and “improving” the landscape.30 The absence of fences, private property, and domesticated livestock in New England Native peoples’ agricultural projects and land relationships was taken as evidence that Native peoples did not deserve the land they lived on.31 Much of the construction of Native savagery therefore rested on de-legitimating their relationships to their homelands while reifying colonists’ rights to land and their relationship with God. This tactic is employed by Roger Williams in a deed confirmation of the lands of

Providence written to his associates in 1661, claiming himself to be “by God’s merciful assistance the procurer of the purchase, not my monies, nor payment, the natives being so shy and jealous that monies could not do it.”32 While some amount of wampum33 may have been given to the

Native sachems by the colonists in exchange for the land, Roger Williams and other colonists largely saw the original land acquisition of Providence as free—implicit permission to colonize the land they received. This initial “landing” of Roger Williams, and the problems enumerated therein, sowed the seeds of colonial entitlement to Native land and resources.

Williams’ interpretations of Canonicus and Miantonomi’s refusal of payment—that they were “too shy and jealous” to accept Williams’ offer of payment also raises the possibility of distrust in this initial encounter of founding. The description of the sachems as “shy and jealous”

29 Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in Colonial New England. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press: 2005), 43. 30 Den Ouden, 42. 31 Den Ouden, 43 32 Jene M. O’Brien, Firstings and Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in Colonial New England. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 24. 33 The purple or white shell beads that acted as the monetary currency of the time in a Native trade network that extended from the Plains Indian communities all the way to coastal communities in the Northeast where they were produced, Lynn Ceci, “Tracing Wampum’s Origins: Shell Bead Evidence from Archaeological Sites in Western and Coastal New York.” In Proceedings of the 1986 Shell Bead Conference, edited by C.F. III Hayes, Lynn Ceci, and C.C. Bodner, 63–80. Rochester, New York: Research Division, Rochester Museum and Science Center, 1986.

32 reveals the ways in which Miantonomi and Canonicus may have been suspicious of Williams and the proprietors and careful in guarding their lands from them when they tried to purchase them.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the seventeenth century use of shy as roughly meaning

“difficult of approach owing to timidity, caution, or distrust; timidly or cautiously averse to encountering or having to do with some specified person or thing; suspicious, distrustful.”34

Similarly, jealous is defined as being protective over something important, “zealous or solicitous for the preservation or well-being of something possessed or esteemed…suspiciously careful or watchful.”35 Williams’ acquisition of land from Canonicus and Miantonomi was likely not as friendly or wholly amicable as we are lead to believe by Williams himself or other accounts of the founding, which saw the procurement of Providence as assisted by God.

Canonicus and Miantonomi, by contrast, likely saw this exchange as an affirmation of indigenous concepts of space and place, but also approached the transaction with a degree of distrust and protection over their lands. The Providence deed signed by Miantonomi and

Canonicus, and re-confirmed by their later successors, notes that the founding space of

Providence was intended for English cattle use, “as feeding, ploughing, planting, and all manner of plantations whatsoever.” This deed also came with the understanding that “it shall not be lawful for the men abovesaid to remove the Indians that are up in the country for their fields,” without the “consent and content” of Native peoples themselves. 36 Within indigenous

34 “Shy, adj.” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed April 21, 2017. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/179089?rskey=B1DF24&result=3&isAdvanced=false#eid. 35 “Jealous, adj.” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed April 21, 2017.http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/100952?redirectedFrom=Jealous#eid. 36 Roger, Williams. “Deed from Cannanicus and Miantonmu to Roger Williams [March 1637],” in Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Vol. I 1636-1663, edited by John Russell, I:35–39, (Providence, Rhode Island: A.C. Greene and Brothers, state printers, 1856), “Memorandum 3 mo. 9th day. This was all again confirmed by Miantounomu; he acknowledged this his act and hand, up the streams of Pautuckqut and Pawtuxet without limits, we might have for the use of cattle. Witness hereof, ROGER WILLIAMS, BENEDICT ARNOLD.” In a re-confirmation of the Providence deed by successive Narragansett sachems, Scuttappe and Quequganewet, in 1659 a similar acknowledgement is made that confirmed “without limits, or as far as the men abovesaid of Providence and Pawtuxcette shall judge convenient for use of their cattle, as feeding, ploughing, planting all manner of plantations whatsoever…Nevertheless, it shall not be lawful for the men abovesaid to remove the Indians that are up in the country for their fields, without the Indians’ consent and content, nor shall it be lawful for any of those Indians to sell any landes abovesaid to any, only it shall be lawfull for them, to take of the men of Providence and the men of Pawtuxcette, according to their joint agreement, satisfaction for their removing.” From “Deeds of Confirmation made by the Indian Sachems, successors of Conanicus and Miantonomy, to the inhabitants of Providence and Pawtuxet, of lands previously purchased by them,” in “Memorandum 3 Mo. 9th Day. 1639,” in Records of the Colony of Rhode

33 worldviews in New England, permission to use Native land for livestock and colonial livelihood did not imply a full transfer of land ownership to colonists—nor did it signify a Native relinquishing of rights to the land for their own livelihood. Instead, it was a transaction that reified indigenous notions of social obligation and reciprocity to one another. Narragansett,

Niantic, Nipmuc, Massachusett and Wampanoag tribal members expected the colonists who came onto their lands to “join and participate in providing for the social, spiritual, and physical well-being of the [greater] community.” 37 For Native peoples, colonial compensation for Native land use was the beginning of a relationship with the colonists—not the end. The reaction of

Canonicus and Miantonomi was not a naïve refusal of compensation, as Roger Williams recorded it, but rather, rested on the Native worldview that land could not be bought. Therefore, when Roger Williams and other colonists “purchased” land from Native peoples in New

England, the consent that Native tribes gave to the settlers was not the consent to be colonized but instead was consent that allowed and invited colonists to share in the reciprocal relationships that the land and the people had maintained for thousands of years.

But this initial deeding of Providence would shape colonial entitlement to Native land bases in the decades to come. A land transaction testimony delivered to Rhode Island colonial officials by Roger Williams and Gregory Dexter in 1646 detailed their attempt to acquire land in the immediate area surrounding what is now Providence from a Narragansett sachem named

Ousamequin. 38 According to the testimony, the parcel of land was located in between

Pawtuckqut and Loquaquscit, and they had offered Ousamequen fifteen fathoms of wampum for it. Initially willing to make the sale, Ousamequin had agreed to accept the colonists’ offer.39 But the communication breakdown that ensued after this initial offer gives us a glimpse into the

Island and Providence Plantations, Vol. I 1636-1663, edited by John Russell Bartlett, I:35–39. Providence, Rhode Island: A.C. Greene and Brothers, state printers, 1856. 37 Paul A. Robinson,“The Wampum Trade in 17th-Century Narragansett Country,” in What A Difference a Bay Makes, edited by Rhode Island Department of Library Services, (Providence, Rhode Island: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1993), 26. 38 Within the Rhode Island Colonial Records this document is titled a “testimony or report” and was likely delivered to either the General Assembly or a precursor to that colonial legal system in the early years of the colony. 39 “Testimony, or Report of Roger Williams, Gregory Dexter and others in relation to the lands purchased of Ousamequin, 1646” in Rhode Island Colonial Records Vol. I, Bartlett. 33-34

34 logic of acquisition that would help colonists justify their fragile claims to Native land in the architecture of the Atherton and Pettaquamscutt Purchases a few decades later.

It is worth noting here that wampum,40 while highly valued throughout the Northeast at the time as an exchange mechanism for furs and material goods, was an inherently inadequate compensation for the land and resources that had physically and spiritually sustained millennia of Native communities.41 Furthermore, at this time in 1646, wampum payments by Native peoples to the English colonists as tribute or as fines for petty “crimes” already greatly outweigh the compensation that the English are giving them in exchange for their land. Lynn Ceci, the late anthropologist and scholar of wampum trade within the Northeast, places estimates that New

England and Long Island Indians gave 1300 fathoms of wampum in payments to the English colonists in 1646.42 Perhaps recognizing the colonists’ lack of reciprocity, their intentions to continue acquiring more land, or the inherently inadequate compensation of wampum,

Ousamequin goes back to them, “begging” two coats of the colonists. Initially, the colonists refuse him: “we were not willing to wrong our country in granting his desire of foure coats, and so unreasonably to raise ye [the] price of such parcells of land in this barbarous wilderness.”43

Instead of engaging in more communication with Ousamequin, the colonists “declared yt [that] ye [the] said land according to a fair and righteous bargains belongs to the Towne of Providence, the town paying Ousamequin, as aforesaid.”44

40 The purple or white shell beads that acted as the monetary currency of the time in a Native trade network that extended from the Plains Indian communities all the way to coastal communities in the Northeast where they were produced, see Lynn Ceci “Tracing Wampum’s Origins: Shell Bead Evidence fro Archaeological Sites in Western and Coastal New York” and Paul A. Robinson’s “The Wampum Trade in 17th-Century Narragansett Country,” in What A Difference a Bay Makes, edited by Rhode Island Department of Library Services, (Providence, Rhode Island: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1993). 41 And which could not, by definition, be owned by anyone in a Native viewpoint. 42 Lynn Ceci. “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World-System,” in The Pequots in Southern New England, Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, ed. (University of Oklahoma Press, Oklahoma: 1990), 58-60. 43 Roger Williams, and Gregory Dexter,“Testimony, or Reort of Roger Williams, Gregory Dexter and Others in Relation to the Lands Purchased of Ousamequin, 1646.” In Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Vol. I 1636-1663, edited by John Russell Bartlett, I, (Providence, Rhode Island: A.C. Greene and Brothers, state printers, 1856), 33-34. 44 Ibid.

35 This court testimony by Williams and Dexter reveal the ways in which colonization was buttressed by colonial documents and legal systems. Within the first few years of the establishment of the colony, any legal system that was established was likely constituted by the same thirteen colonists who had settled in Providence—including Roger Williams and Gregory

Dexter. While Dexter and Williams did not serve in the court at the exact moment of their testimony, the members of the court that upheld the decisions of Williams and Dexter were invested in the same project of land acquisition from Native peoples in the area. This court testimony was, very simply, not an objective process. Instead, the function of the testimony and the colonial court system is to produce justification for colonial acquisition rather than examining both sides of a land dispute.

As Amy Den Ouden writes, these mechanisms of colonial knowledge production utilize

“colonial discourse...not only in diffuse cultural forms but also in specific administrative and juridical forums to which colonized people have limited access and over which they have no control.”45 In the court testimony, Ousamequin is not present—his testimony against this transaction is automatically silenced by virtue of its absence. Instead, Roger Williams and

Gregory Dexter portray Ousamequin in the court documents as fraudulent, claiming he

“pretendeth to” the rights to the parcel of land they seek. In a twist of irony, this land which they have gone so far out of their way to get from Ousamequin and then testify about in court is categorized as “barren and rockie, without medow…” by their accounts—a tactic perhaps meant to make Ousamequin’s refusal irrational, or to minimize the fact that their claim to the land was hardly a consensual exchange. This language used to portray Ousamequin in the colonial record stands in contrast to the language Williams and Dexter use to describe their actions. For

Williams and Dexter, their testimony in court is “a word of truth and faythfullness,” and their

45 Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. (University of Nebraska, Nebraska: 2005) 39.

36 transaction with Ousamequin is a “fair and righteous bargain.”46 The testimony therefore serves less of meditation role between two parties, but is instead a story about who is right and who is wrong, who is good and who is bad, who is a colonist and who is a Native American.

While Native peoples in New England were able to petition the colonial court system as a means of redressing their grievances, this did not imply an equal transaction. We therefore cannot make this assumption of objectivity when looking at the colonial court systems of seventeenth and eighteenth century New England.47 Instead, the courts actively facilitated and buttressed colonial claims to Native lands, and the subjection and enslavement of African and

Native peoples in New England—thereby helping to solidify the beginnings of white supremacist, colonial institutions in the region which would later become the foundational institutions of the United States. Understanding this colonial legacy is also important for understanding the racialized shortcomings of the legal system and other American institutions that, while purportedly acting in an objective way, have consistently delivered bias results that uphold the same social status quos that subject people of color century after century.

It is therefore absolutely crucial when analyzing the role of English courts in the process of New England colonization that we remember that there was not fair treatment within these systems. Instead, while Native peoples could and did petition the General Assembly, the imperial crown, and the United Colonies for redress of grievances, these institutions were not meant to operate in their favor—or even objectively. Colonial legislators, and the recorders of colonial legislation, were not objection arbitrators, instead they helped to facilitate what U.S. federal Indian law and legal scholar Robert Clinton refers to as “white law,” helping to “play a powerful role in justifying and rationalizing, first, the colonial expropriation of Indian land and resources and, later, the colonial subjugation of Indian peoples to governance” by “their

46 “Testimony, or Report of Roger Williams, Gregory Dexter and others in relation to the lands purchased of Ousamequin, 1646” in Rhode Island Colonial Records Vol. I, Bartlett. 33-34 47 And it’s worth questioning whether we can really make the assumption of objectivity today in our legal systems in the United States, or if these biases in favor of private property, elite interests, and the protection of whiteness continues on today within our legal system from the colonial period.

37 invader.”48 Even when Native peoples were willing to deal on the colonists’ own terms by working within court, treaty, or imperial negotiation systems, colonists and the institutions they brought with them failed to treat Natives on an equal basis.49

Native peoples were cast as inherently inferior in colonial imaginings—often portrayed as barbarous, savage, unworthy of the land they occupied and a constant threat to colonial society.50 These notions of Native inferiority permeated everyday language of colonists, and would also serve to justify the colonization of New England Native tribes and land—both within the court system and outside of it. Even as Williams wrote affectionately about Miantonomi and

Cannonicus in his accounts, claiming that he “never denyed him [Cannonicus] nor Miantonomy whatever they desired of me as to goods or gifts…” he also refers to Cannonicous as barbaric in the same sentence, claiming that Williams’ own “wisdom and merits stirred up the barbarous heart of Cannonicus to love me as a son to his last grasp…”51 Williams also echoes this sentiment in his writings about Miantonomi to other colonial officials, telling John Winthrop in a letter to him of the time when “Miantunomee kept his barbarous court lately at my [Williams’] house.”52

These subtle markers of language used to talk about Native peoples—even the ones who were relatively cooperative or friendly to colonists like Williams—is a reminder of the colonial hierarchies that are being mapped onto the land in the midst of colonization, posturing Native peoples as inherently barbaric and therefore unworthy of the lands they call home.

Court documents, letters between colonial officials, and other works of writing or accounts brought forth to the Rhode Island General Assembly all helped to do the rhetorical work of dehumanizing Native peoples within their own homelands. Even within the colonial

48 Clinton, 1993, 77 quoted in Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. (University of Nebraska, Nebraska: 2005), 65 49 Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. (University of Nebraska, Nebraska: 2005), 65 50 Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. (University of Nebraska, Nebraska: 2005), 65 51 Roger Williams, “‘Deposition of Roger Williams Relative to This Purchase from the Indians’ (Narragansett, 18 June, 1682),” in Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Vol. I 1636-1663, edited by John Russell Bartlett, I:25–26 (Providence, Rhode Island: A.C. Greene and Brothers, state printers, 1856) 52 Paine, George T. A Denial of the Charges of Forgery in Connection with the Sachems’ Deed to Roger Williams, (Providence, Rhode Island: Standard printing company, 1896), 13-14.

38 documents that seemed to be favorable accounts of Native peoples, like Williams’ accounts of his amicable relationship with Cannonicus and Miantonomi, particular work is being done to further legitimate colonial claims to land by documenting the civility of colonists’ relationships with Native peoples. Williams’ stated personal generosity towards Cannonicus and Miantonomi, never denying them whatever good or gifts they desired, postures Williams as friendly, amicable, and just while also referring to the Native peoples he is interacting with—who are also allowing

Williams to use their homelands—as barbaric, naïve, or jealous at best. At worst, the Native peoples he is interacting with are portrayed as irrational and unfit to occupy their lands, as was the case with Williams’ portrayal of Ousamequin in his court testimony. In any dimension— whether local Narragansetts and Wampanoags are cooperative and friendly with the colonists and permit them to use their land, or whether they refuse to give their land to them—colonial accounts of Native peoples in New England find ways to literarily and logically justify dispossession of Native homelands.

These portrayals of Native peoples in New England as undeserving or unfit for the lands they occupy ties back to English notions of property and “proper” land use. In order for New

England to be classified as vacuum domicilium, as John Winthrop termed New England, Native peoples’ inherent characters and their ways of living within New England had to be dismissed as fundamentally wrong. This principle of vacuum domicilium allowed for English settlers to have

“a sufficient title against all men” to the land of New England.53 According to Winthrop’s theory, the lands that Native peoples could lay true claim to had to have been used or farmed in a way that was similar to English notions of farming and property development. Otherwise, Winthrop argued, Native peoples only had a natural right of ownership—not a civil right—to the lands they lived off of. Native New England tribes were made out to be barbaric, savage, and sub-human—

“unbridled beasts” as Robert Johnson’s 1609 Nova Britannica called indigenous peoples—and

53 Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865, (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 149

39 completely incapable of subduing and improving the land as the English god required.54 In any of these equations of colonial logic, the concluding sum of their arguments was always that

Native peoples of New England were inferior to their British counterparts and that British settlers therefore had the right to Native homelands.

Roger Williams’ interactions with the Narragansetts and their homelands in Providence give us a glimpse into the early tactics of colonial coercion of Native peoples. In order to found and solidify Rhode Island as a colonial territory that could be controlled first and foremost by

European settlers like Roger Williams, Native peoples and their needs, notions of land, and ways of life, had to be subordinated. This subordination of Native peoples in the making of Rhode

Island took place in literary depictions of Native Americans, in the justifications that were used to fortify colonial claims to land and, perhaps most consequentially, in the colonial institutions that facilitated land transactions. These inter- and intra-colony institutions, like the Rhode

Island General Assembly and the United Colonies, would mediate the subordination of Native

American land claims in the region, allowing settler colonialism to take root beyond Providence and destabilizing Native American land and life.

During the 1640s, in an attempt to more aggressively assert English claims to land by moving land disputes away from diplomatic solutions and into colonial courtrooms,

Connecticut, Plymouth, New Haven, and Massachusetts Bay formed a security alliance called the United Colonies. Also known as the New England confederation, this alliance sought greater claims to sovereignty over Native land by pressuring Indians to sign treaties that ceded land to

English authorities and tightening demands of wampum from Native tribes as tribute for

“crimes” against the English. 55 Although Rhode Island was not a stated member of this security alliance, similar mechanisms of colonial encroachment and control became the normal relationship between Native tribes and colonial settlers. At the same time as the security alliance

54 Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. (University of Nebraska, Nebraska: 2005), 42. 55 Margaret Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, Ithaca: 2015), 108.

40 was formed, the English population of southern New England grew from 18,500 to 54,000— nearly tripling in just three decades—creating increased competition for land and resources just as colonial governments were making aggressive assertions of jurisdiction and control over

Native lands.56

Even as colonists increasingly laid claim to Rhode Island land, Native tribes still sought out the homelands that they had relied on for thousands of years to sustain them. This often meant continuing hunting privileges and usage rights on lands that had been deeded to the

English.57 However, as Ella Wilcox Sekatau notes, “traditional ways of gardening and hunting proved impossible for the Narrgansett after English settlers had altered the ecosystem by dividing the land into private tracts for individuals use…and by introducing free-ranging livestock.”58 The introduction of domesticated livestock and construction of private property—in particular, the construction of fences—served the dual colonial purpose of keeping Natives outside of the land colonists laid claim to while also “improving” the land with one’s labor and thereby reinforcing their claims. The centrality of private, landed property to colonists’ identity in New England was part of English relationships between land and self that were foundational to emergent capitalist theories.59

56 Margaret Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, Ithaca: 2015), 133. According to William Cronon’s text Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, as of 1600 some 70,000-100,000 Native peoples lived throughout the lands which now constitute New England (42) but by 1640 the population was likely somewhat lower considering the yellow fever epidemic that swept through the region between 1616 and 1619, where some Native communities, according to colonial documents, suffered a 99% population loss. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. (Hill and Wang, New York: 1983), 42 and Timothy L. Bratton,“The Identity of the New England Indian Epidemic of 1616-19,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 62, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 352. 57 Newel, 113. 58 Ella Wilcox Sekatau and Ruth Wallis Herndon, “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers form European contact to Indian removal 1500-1850 by Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell, ed. (Taylor & Francis, Inc.: 2006), 586 59 In particular, John Locke in 1689 and later Enlightenment philosophers. “Property was, in a sense, foundational to culture, since English political economy rested on the private ownership of land, and the political economy, in turn, largely structured social relations. With the development of capitalist markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, private property had become increasingly important, and revolts against this change, like the Digger protests of the 1640s and 1650s, were met with violent censure…If, at the level of political theory, identity would soon be defined as ownership of one’s self, property had already become identity at the level of popular belief—what one owned defined who one was.” Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. (Vintage Books, New York: 1998), 76.

41 As colonists constructed fences to keep Native peoples out of the lands they had relied on for countless generations, the husbandry of livestock encroached on the rest of New England, drastically altering the ecosystem. Livestock that the colonists kept would range freely, destroying clam beds, corn, hunting grounds, and other crucial sources of food for Native

Americans in New England. In this way, the fences served to keep Native peoples out of private property created by colonists—a physical and psychological reminder that colonists saw Native peoples as savage and animal-like. Free-range livestock destroyed Native peoples’ food-ways while also subtly reinforcing the constant possibility of settler expansion. This colonial logic that privileged land and property development over Native American life and life-ways would play a large part in the legal proceedings surrounding and corroborating the Atherton Purchase of

1660.

As the English courts’ definition of Native possession of land narrowed, legal definitions of colonial land possession expanded. In mediating land disputes between Native peoples and

English settlers, the colonial court systems incentivized English notions of property development as the prevailing evidence of land claims and ownership. The English acknowledged Native claims to planting grounds and fishing places, but only if Native peoples could convince a colonial court that they had claims to these spaces. Otherwise, all other land was “accompted the just right of such English as already have or hereafter shall have graunt of lands fro[m] this Court & authority thereof.”60 As a result of this colonial land logic, which saw property as inherently privately owned by the 17th century, Native peoples’ relationships to vital food-ways and traditional gardening practices within their lands were severed, leaving them susceptible to starvation.

As colonists settled into the Aquidneck Island region in the Narragansett Bay area, the

General Court at Newport passed an order on September 17th, 1641 that ruled that “no Indian shall fall or peel any trees upon the Islands [the lands of Aquethneck/Aquidneck]; and that if

60 Margaret Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, Ithaca: 2015),114.

42 any be found so doing or carrying off Bark (so peeled upon the Islands) away; it shall be lawfull for all that so finds them, to bring a cause to be brought the Parties so offending before the

Magistrates, who shall order and punish them according to the Law.” 61 These sorts of restrictions on the actions of Native peoples made it increasingly difficult to move through the daily necessities of life that required bark and wood: building wigwams, keeping fires going, building canoes or mishoonash, constructing fish traps and hunting equipment. All of these activities required bark and wood that was now criminal for Native peoples to gather in areas like Newport. Just five years after the establishment of Providence by Roger Williams, Native peoples in the region were restricted from and punished for the traditional ways of land-based subsistence. Colonial institutions of mediation and lawmaking like the General Court in

Newport and the United Colonies security alliance, institutions that would lay the foundations of the U.S. court system after the 1776 revolution, encouraged the privatization of land to the benefit of settlers at the expense of Native life.

This method of colonial institutional punishment of Native peoples and their means of living allowed and encouraged subsequent modes of settler land acquisition. In particular, fining or jailing Native peoples for carrying out their traditional ways of living made Native Americans beholden to colonial systems of debt and wealth accumulation. These methods of punishment for Native peoples in the colonial system would temporarily or permanently clear Native peoples off of land that colonists sought out for their own development. Court rulings codified colonial property development, with one 1640 ruling in the Newport General Court ordering that all colonists who “shall have a Howse lott granted unto them within any of our Townes, shall build a Howse thereon within a yeare after the Grant thereof, or else it shall be forfeited to the Towns use.”62 Those who received a house lot within the emerging colonial towns of Rhode Island had

61 John Russell Bartlett, ed. “The Orders and Lawes Made at the Generall Court, Held Att Newport, the 17th of September, Ano. 1641.” In Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, Vol. I 1636-1663, (Providence, Rhode Island: A.C. Greene and Brothers, state printers, 1856) 117.

62 John Russell, Bartlett, ed. “At the Generall Courte Held on the 6th of May, 1640, at Nieuport.”

43 to quickly develop the lot within a year or cede it to the “towns use”—presumably for other development projects. Although this ruling was later repealed, it represents a typical strategy of colonial construction that granted colonists the civil rights to Native lands, as John Winthrop articulated it. These projects of construction allowed them to make claims to lands that were acquired under suspicious circumstances at best from Native tribes. Evidence of development and property on Native lands softened the sharp lines of colonial land theft and helped justify settler acquisitions of land.

In 1660, Humphrey Atherton purchased Narragansett land from the United Colonies security alliance in what is now Northern Kingstown in southern Rhode Island. A speculator, military official and superintendent of the Praying Indians community, a missionary town that sought to convert Native peoples to Christianity, Atherton embodied the interwoven vectors of religion, military, real estate, and emerging capitalism that enabled English control over Native lands and people. Atherton’s acquisition of Narragansett homelands was made possible by the

United Colonies’ strategic leveraging of debt against the Narragansett community. In order to pay the massive fines levied against them by the security alliance, Narragansett community leaders issued a land mortgage that Humphrey Atherton purchased from the United Colonies. 63

Atherton continually refused Narragansett efforts to pay off their debt, instead ceding the territory to his land company’s shareholders once Ningret, a Niantic sachem, confirmed the default on the mortgage in 1662, effectively giving the Atherton Company rights to the land.

Relentlessly fighting within and outside of colonial systems, the Narragansetts argued their cause in the royal courts in England—seeking out other mechanisms of legal advocacy that might allow them to retain rights to their homelands. The Pricy Council sent an investigatory commission that held hearings into the matter that ultimately declared the mortgage void, but

In Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, Vol. I 1636-1663, (Providence, Rhode Island: A.C. Greene and Brothers, state printers, 1856) 102.

63 Margaret Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, Ithaca: 2015), 136.

44 offered no channels of legal enforcement or mechanisms of protection that could uphold their ruling. 64

Colonial officials within the Rhode Island legal system continued to uphold Atherton’s claim to Narragansett land. An October 30th, 1672 meeting of the Generall Assembly of the

Colony at Newport ruled that, “considering the paine and industry of the said purchasers upon the said land for soe many yeares together, the danger they have been in by reason of the barbarous Indians soe ready to war, and other outrages as hath appeared of late…[that] the said purchasers of said lands, shall be a good and lawfull estate and title thereto.”65 Ultimately, in the eyes of the General Assembly, the work that the colonists had put into developing the land they had not legally purchased was enough justification for Atherton and other speculators to lay claim to Narragansett homelands. It was also seen as a savvy long-term strategy for the colony against the Native peoples in New England who were “barbarous Indians soe ready to war.” In this assembly ruling, the “paine and industry” of the Atherton purchases, although it is not specified what exactly was done by them that was so painful and industrious, in combination with the acute colonial anxiety of war from “barbarous Indians,” are taken as just cause to cede

Narragansett land to the Atherton company. This ruling conveniently overlooks the fact that the

Native peoples who are apparently so eager to fight the colonists went through the legal systems of the courts to contest this purchase in lieu of engaging in outright fighting with the colonists.

This ruling demonstrates a sort of verbal deceptiveness and deliberately one-sided

“juridical forum” as Den Ouden calls it where colonists privilege the permissions, logic, and transactions that justify their own means to a colonized end. There is not a forum for Native peoples to “talk back” to the archive to refute their categorization. Instead, Natives are written

64 Margaret Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, Ithaca: 2015),136 65 John Russell Bartlett, ed. “Proceedings of the Generall Assembly of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Held at Newport, the 30th of October in 1672.” In Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Vol. II 1664-1677, (Providence, Rhode Island: A.C. Greene and Brothers, state printers, 1856), 477

45 simply as barbarous and warring—their colonial counterparts are written as pained and industrious.

With the establishment of Providence in 1636 and the Atherton Company’s land speculation in 1660, other parts of Narragansett Country were slated for colonization in the second half of the seventeenth century. 66 While earlier English settlements prior to the

Pettaquamscutt settlement in 1674 had served as buffers in disputed territories between the

Wampanoag and Narragansett, the English settlement in what is now Kingstown hit in the heart of Narragansett Country. 67 Broadly speaking, Narragansett Country denoted the ancestral homelands of the Narragansett—a physical, spiritual, and ceremonial landscape that constituted a shared identity separate from the neighboring Wampanoag and Pequot communities.68 From its inception, the Pettaquamscutt Purchase’s legitimacy sparked intra-tribal tensions, not only because of the significance of the land itself, but also because of the dubious circumstances under which colonists claimed rights to the land. As English settlement of the region began in the 1660s, Narragansett sachems appealed to the surrounding colonies for assistance, claiming that none of them had “sould them [the colonists] any land there.”69 Eventually, after failing to peacefully disperse settlers at Pettaquamscutt, Narragansett sachems sent a formal protest to the United Colonies of New England at Boston—continuing to use whatever means they had at their disposal that might promise to get their land back.70

The Pettaquamscutt Purchase when colonial proprietors made up of five men from

Boston and Newport secured a portion of Narragansett land (twelve square miles in total) by

1764 from Kachanaquat—one of the main sachems in the area.71 The land sale was established through several meetings between many different groups of colonists and Native Americans.

66 Colin Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences” in Rhode Island History Journal Vol. 72, No. 1. Winter/Spring 2014 (Rhode Island: 2014), 5. 67 Colin Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences” in Rhode Island History Journal Vol. 72, No. 1. Winter/Spring 2014 (Rhode Island: 2014), 5 68 Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences,”4 69 Ibid. 70 Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences,” 7. 71 Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences,” 6-7

46 This culmination of meetings allowed the corporation to secure “legal title to the land to perfect an ever larger and more firm claim to portions of Narragansett Country that could withstand legal challenges raised by either Narrangasetts or rival Englishmen.”72 The Pettaquamscutt proprietors paid a total of £151 for the land, with the extension of thirteen coats and a pair of breeches on credit to Kachanaquant—making Kachanaquant in debt to the proprietors for £13 and 15s.73

The proprietors also had an earlier deed between Kachanaquant and the colonists signed by Kachanaquant’s three sons as a “confirmation.”74 The appendix states that the sons had purchased land from other Narragansett sachems—Ninigret and Wanomachin—giving them almost all of the land south of the Pettaquamscutt Rock to the Atlantic coast and westward beyond Great Swamp. According to Colin Porter, the presence of this confirmation suggests that the Pettaquamscutt Proprietors feared that Kachanaquant’s sons might have legal claim to a large portion of their purchase. In 1674, these fears were assuaged when the Proprietors somehow persuaded Kachanaquant’s sons to sign a document quit-claiming interest in the land, thereby granting any and all rights to the land to the Proprietors themselves.75

As English settlement of the region began in the 1660s, Narragansett sachems appealed to the surrounding colonies for assistance, claiming that none of them had “sould them [the colonists] any land there.” 76 Eventually, after failing to peacefully disperse settlers at

Pettaquamscutt, Narragansett sachems sent a formal protest to the United Colonies of New

England at Boston—continuing to use whatever means they had at their disposal that might promise to get their land back.77

However, much like the rulings in the Atherton Purchase and purchases made around

Providence, colonial legal assemblies and powerful colonial actors in the region upheld these

72 Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences” 7 73 Colin Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences” in Rhode Island History Journal Vol. 72, No. 1. Winter/Spring 2014 (Rhode Island: 2014), 7 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid.

47 purchases. In turn, parcels of the Pettaquamscutt Purchase were sold by colonial proprietors for upwards of three hundred percent higher than what they had paid for it.78 These court rulings enabled colonial speculators to establish wealth that would help fuel Rhode Island’s entry into the transatlantic slave trade, and helping to solidify regional colonial claims to fertile

Narragansett land.79

This sort of colonial discourse within court systems, literature, and religious institutions would help to silence and delegitimize Native knowledge systems and rights to the lands that constitute New England today. These case studies also remind us that the colonial legal system was never an equal or objective mediator. While Native women and men could petition the

General Assembly and the Royal Crown for their rights, the courts were some of the primary actors within colonization, helping to justify and rationalize English expropriation of land and the later “subjugation of Native peoples to governance by their invader.”80 At the end of the day, these colonial apparatuses operated in the best interests of their English creators. Native grievances were redressed only inasmuch as it served the interests of different English parties.

These tactics worked to gradually subject Native tribes to the laws and ways of living that were imposed over Native landscapes and life-scapes allowed colonists to map a colonial understanding of land, laws, and life onto a Native relationship to land and ways of living.

Colonial institutions and written documents, including land deeds, letters, and literature about Native peoples and the “New World” all worked to bring Native peoples into the region as subjects of an expanding colonial empire. These methods of colonial discourse had real material, physical, spiritual and psychological consequences for the Narragansetts, Wampanoag,

Niantic and Nipmuc tribes in the region and constituted an arsenal of colonial tactics weaponized against Native peoples within New England for the purpose of acquiring land,

78 Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences,” 10. 79 A notable example includes the Hazard family plantation, which would be built on the land of the Pettaquamscutt Purchase. See Colin Porter, “Uncomfortable Consequences” in Rhode Island History Journal Vol. 72, No. 1. Winter/Spring 2014 (Rhode Island: 2014), 9 80 Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. (University of Nebraska, Nebraska: 2005), 65.

48 resources, and regional power. Colonial methods of discourse were interwoven with and sustained by more militant and physically violent acts against Native peoples, helping to justify

English acts of violence when the time to do so came along.

Native Narragansetts, Niantics, Nipmucs, and Wampanoags in the region continued to fight against the colonization of their lands, but with increasing colonial refusal to treat Native peoples as their equals, and with continuous attempts at coercing Natives into ceding land through debt, “crime,” and land deeds that assumed transferal of land as property into the hands of colonial officials. These forms of colonial violence within the records they kept are part and parcel of understanding the life-or-death tensions that created the regional powder keg leading up to King Philip’s War—one of the bloodiest wars in New England and the United

States.

By the eve of King Philip’s War, both the Narragansett leader who had allowed Roger

Williams to settle in Providence, Miantonomi, and the Wampanoag leader who would begin the uprising, Metacom, spoke the same languages against colonization. As early as 1641, Miantomi traveled to Long Island to meet with local leaders in an effort to encourage them to join together with the Narragansett against the English.81 While he was there, a speech that he delivered called for Native tribes to join together, “for so are we all Indians,” he said, “as the English are, and say brother to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall all be gone shortly.’’82 On the eve of the war in June of 1675, Metacom sent a list of grievances to John

Easton, the Rhode Island magistrate, which included English trespasses on Native land, the damage of English livestock on Native hunting ground and crops and the English tactics of

Native land dispossession through illegal land sales and deed manipulation. Both leaders understood that land loss meant cutting down and severing sense of self. In Long Island,

81 “The Wampum Trade in 17th-Century Narragansett Country” by Paul A. Robinson, in What a Difference a Bay Makes, 28 82 Ibid.

49 Miantonomi articulated the loss that Native communities up and down the Atlantic coast in the

Northeast were facing:

“…our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer…and turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English, having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes felled the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our banks, and we shall be starved.” 83

Miantonomi and Metacom both understood that whatever friendly greetings may have been initially exchanged during the founding of Providence could not undo the loss that they were now facing underneath the new colonial regime of Rhode Island. The floodgates for colonial land acquisition and speculation were opened with Roger Williams’ initial land deed and, for at least three decades—from 1641 when Miantonomi visited Long Island to 1675 when Metacom declared war—Native peoples within the emergent colony were the facing life-threatening consequences of colonial expansion. There had not only been a loss of relationships to the lands but there was also a destruction of the physical, material, and spiritual world around them that grounded their sense of self. At the rate that colonization was happening, many leaders and community members saw the impending consequences: “…we shall be starved.”84

83 Paul A. Robinson, “The Wampum Trade in 17th-Century Narragansett Country.” What a Difference a Bay Makes, Rhode Island Historical Society, Rhode Island Department of State Library Services, ed. (Providence, Rhode Island: 1993). 28 84 Paul A. Robinson, “The Wampum Trade in 17th-Century Narragansett Country.” What a Difference a Bay Makes, Rhode Island Historical Society, Rhode Island Department of State Library Services, ed. (Providence, Rhode Island: 1993). 28

50

51

“I think a lot of things happened, death, a lot of death happened, I think people being displaced happened, I think war happened, and I think Christianity happened.”85

-“We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân,” Film by Anne Makepeace

85 Anne Makepeace, We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân, (Documentary, Film. Bullfrog Films, 2010), 4:29-4:49.

52 Chapter 2:

Speaking Silence

Native American Removal in New England after King Philip’s War

This chapter analyzes the different forms of violence towards Native peoples during and after King Philip’s War. The war itself wrought unspeakable damage. 86 The numbers, descriptions, and accounts of violent loss cannot quite capture the consequences of the war, but still the pages that follow make an attempt at ensuring that these damages are known, even if they cannot be fully understood or articulated. By the war’s end in 1676, thousands of Native peoples in New England were killed in fighting, while thousands more died of disease, starved, or were shipped to the West Indies as slaves.87

Just as the previous chapter argued for an understanding of colonial violence as an ongoing process which had unfolded long before the war’s beginnings, what happened after King

Philip’s War must also understood as a continuation of that same colonial violence. The war resulted in a physical removal of Native peoples from their lands through captivity and enslavement, but also in a rhetorical removal of Native presence within colonial maps of the

86 Nicole M. Guidotti Hérnandez, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). 87 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), xii. Lepore also begins the book with a quote from Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion that speaks to the unspeakable nature of such violence, “Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye. I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”

53 region after 1676 and, gradually, from the historical memory of the region. This process of colonial erasure effectively removed Native peoples from the records of New England’s history after King Philip’s War while simultaneous processes of colonization, captivity, and genocide physically removed Native peoples from their homelands in New England. Jean O’Brien has called this historical amnesia a “New England replacement narrative,” in which locally constructed histories of New England allowed colonists to construct their own origin stories on

Native American land—casting Native American and African peoples and their descendants as understudies within “authentic” histories about colonial institutions.88

In this chapter, I argue that the hybrid of both rhetorical and physical removal of Native peoples can be understood as a continuation of the logical underpinnings of Rhode Island’s founding. Each of these tactics of removal were meant to de-legitimate Native land claims while extracting resources from lands and peoples. These tactics also provided Rhode Island colonists with the opportunity to speculate in the trade of peoples in the transatlantic slave trade, allowing them to establish plantations using the wealth from African and Native American slaves. The first section of this chapter discusses these aspects of the war’s legacy.

In addition, the removal of Native peoples from the landscape of Rhode Island’s history has had important ongoing material consequences for Native peoples in this area, which the second portion of this chapter will discuss. Of particular note is the detribalization of the

Narragansetts by the Rhode Island state legislature in 1880, which took place in large part because of the perception that the Narragansett tribe was no longer truly Native American. This section will look at the legal codifications of “Nativeness” in Rhode Island and how those definitions helped justify colonial claims to land. It will also look at the ongoing process of

Native resistance against this extinction/replacement narrative, focusing primarily on the 1977 court case Mashpee Tribe v. New Seabury et. al in which the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe gained federal recognition as a tribe.

88 O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, Indigenous Americas Series., (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) xxiii.

54 “Some place farther more from us”: 89 Landscapes of Native American Removal in New England, 1675-Present

The real and symbolic territorial disputes of King Philip’s War were fundamental contestations over assertions of Native and English identity and life-ways. The damage that was wrought on the English psyche by the destruction of virtually all New England towns and property created a physical and psychological crisis within colonial society in New England, which saw private property as integral to notions of self and to the creation of hierarchies between colonists and Native peoples. This underlying crisis would, at the war’s end, lead to colonial desires for violent assertions of property rights on New England land and the erasure of

Native presence from New England’s memory.90

A year into King Philip’s War in 1676, a map of colonial New England territories was published in London. Its makers had carefully outlined in teal an area labeled “Naragansett.”

Just across the bay, an area outlined in green is labeled as the New Plymouth colony. But within this same area, the authors have also inscribed “King Philip’s Country.” Similarly, within the teal territory the designation “the Naragansetts” has been written. Each of these names allude to the colonial recognition of Native territorial presence and people in the New England area at the end of King Philip’s War. The variation between the use of “Naragansett” and “the Naragansetts” suggest the recognition that this region is named “Naragansett” because of the presence of

Narragansett peoples. At the same time, this map is also an eerie foreshadowing of the process of Native American removal that would be catalyzed by the war’s end. As Native peoples were killed off, forcibly removed, or captured and sold into slavery in the war’s aftermath, a parallel process of removal would occur in which Native peoples were removed from the memory of New

89 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), 140. 90 Lepore, 72-95.

55 England. Less than a century later, these areas that had once been recognized in official colonial documents as territories that had Native peoples within them would be re-named, and the presence of Native peoples in the region would be gradually erased. By 1755, the area called “the

Narragansetts” would become South Kingstown and “King Philip’s Country” would become

Bristol and Mt. Hope. This re-naming process speaks the removal of Native peoples and presence within the making of colonial New England that would occur after King Philip’s War in

1676.

“A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virgina.” Sould by Robert Morden at ye Atlas…and by William Berry at ye Globe. Printed in London, 1676. Original Print Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library. Map cropped to show New England area.

In 1676, the use of “King Philip’s Country” and “the Nargansetts” as names to denote territories suggests that, at the end of the war, colonial officials and documents recognized the presence of Native peoples within New England. But, this was also a foreshadowing of what was to come in the aftermath of the war, as Native peoples were physically removed from their homelands, the memory that any Native people existed in New England would also be removed from settler colonial histories.

56 “A map of the most inhabited part of New England containing the provinces of Massachusets Bay and New Hampshire, with the colonies of Konectikut and Rhode Island…” Thos. Jefferys, geographer to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales near Charing Cross. London, November 29th, 1755. Original print courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

By 1755, the area called “the Narragansetts” would become South Kingstown and “King Philip’s Country” would become Bristol and Mt. Hope. This re-naming process speaks the removal of Native peoples and presence within the making of colonial New England that would occur after King Philip’s War in 1676.

In August of 1676, Wampanoag sachem Metacom,91 known as King Philip to the English,

and the leader of the Native uprising that began King Philip’s war, was captured by Captain

Benjamin Church in a swamp near Mount Hope, within the map territory labeled “King Philip’s

91 Different historical texts also call him “Metacomet” or “Pometacom,” within this paper, I will refer to him by Algonquin name of Metacom rather than these variations or his English name of “King Philip.” For more discussion on name variations of Metacom, Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), xv.

57 Country.” Metacom was beheaded and quartered, and the quarters were hung up on trees. His wife and nine-year-old son had been captured not long before. They were sent to Plymouth to be tried and were likely shipped off to the West Indies as slaves in the sugar cane fields.92 This dismemberment—not only of the physical body of Metacom but also the dismemberment of his community and family—echoes the dismemberment of Wampanoag and Narragansett land that took place in order for planter and colonial society to be built within Rhode Island.93

This sort of brutal violence against Metacom and his family typified King Philip’s War. It was not only a gruesome display of physical violence against Native peoples, but also a violence that threatened the existence of Native American selves. Within this web of colonization, this sort of dismemberment and dispossession of the physical, emotional, and psychological relationships to the lands that Native communities derive their sense of self from extends and up and down the eastern coasts of the American continents and encircles the Caribbean islands.

This web also enmeshes the opposite shores of the Atlantic along the African coasts within the transatlantic slave trade. The sale of Metacom’s family into the slavery in the Caribbean is a symbolic and physical reminder of the inextricable ties that Rhode Island’s formation has to both Native displacement and the transatlantic slave trade. One could not have been realized without the other. This sale into slavery—for both Native Americans and African Americans— also represents a form of dismemberment in which the people who are intimately tied to the lands they walk on, the lands that they understand themselves to be a part of, the lands that give them life, tying them to their past, grounding them in their present, and allowing them to

92 Colin Calloway, “Surviving the Dark Ages” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, 2–28, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 1-2. Some sources, like Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity maintain that Metacom was shot to death—it is possible that both Calloway and Lepore are correct and that he was shot and then beheaded and quartered. Lepore also cites one of Church’s Native soldiers, John Alderman, as being responsible for Metacom’s death. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999). 93 This notion of dismemberment of Native land vis-à-vis colonization is central to Jonathan Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio’s book, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887, (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).

58 stretch out into their future, are uprooted, roots are severed. The people are dismembered from their lands and violently placed into other lands cleared of their Native inhabitants.

Cited as the bloodiest per capita fight in American history,94 King Philip’s War “proved to be not only the most fatal war…but also one of the most merciless.”95 As settler colonial land claims and attempts at exerting regional power became more brash, Native trade systems, agriculture, and tribal power relations were disrupted. Spiritual practice was undermined by colonial missionary and conversion efforts. Food sources were jeopardized, and tensions rose as a Native futurity and sense of self became harder to realize and imagine. With English land acquisition came livestock and agricultural practices that fundamentally inhibited Native subsistence practices, as one Native Narragansett man wrote to Roger Williams, “You have driven us out of our own Countrie and then pursued us to our Great Miserie, and Your own, and we are Forced to live upon you.”96 As Metacom pointed out to John Easton, “when the English boft [bought] land of them [the Natives] that thay [the English] wold have kept ther Catell

[cattle] upon ther owne land,” yet even if tribes moved some thiry miles from English settlements, they were still unable to “kepe ther coren from being spoyled [by livestock].”97

On June 24th, 1675, within days of the executions of Tobias, and Mattashunannamo—the

Wampanoag men accused of killing John Sassamon—Wampanoags attacked Swansea in the

Plymouth Colony, sparking the beginning of the war. For fourteen months, English towns were razed to the ground. Wampanoag, Nipmucks, and Naragansetts, alongside the Pocomtucks and

Abenakis attacked Middleborough, Dartmouth, Plymouth and Mendon in the span of a single month. Later destruction would include Brookfield, Springfield, Hatfield, Northamption,

94 See Jill Lepore The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), xiii, Calloway, 1-3, James David Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676. Edited by Colin G. Calloway and Barry O’Connell. Native Americans of the Northeast Culture, History, and the Contemporary. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 1-15, Jean M O’Brien,Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Indigenous Americas Series, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 32-33, etc. 95 Jill Lepore. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, xiii 96 Lepore, 95. 97 Ibid.

59 Patuxet, Lancaster, Medfield, Groton, Longmeadow, Marlborough, Simsbury, and Providence.98

To many colonists in New England, it seemed as though “The Indians risen almost round ye country.”99 The English retaliated with the help of Pequot, Mohegan, Mohawk, and Christian

Indians who sided with the English either out of fear for their own peoples’ fate at the hands of the English if they did not ally with them, or because of longstanding tensions with other Native communities engaged in the uprising.

As they swept through New England, the English and their allied forces burned wigwams and villages, killing women and children who were not fighting, and selling Native captives— both friends and foes—into slavery in the Caribbean. For colonial officials throughout New

England, captured Native peoples and their lands were the spoils of war. Captives could either be used as labor within the colony to help re-build the colonial infrastructure or sold into the lucrative business of the emergent transatlantic slave trade.

At the war’s end, selling Native peoples into captivity often promised capital to enrich colonial officials enough to establish themselves and their families as wealthy slave traders and land speculators. Within three months in 1676 alone the Massachusetts Bay Colony sold some

188 prisoners of war into slavery for £397.13.100 To put this in perspective, the profits from the sale of Native peoples into captivity in New England in three months allowed the Massachusetts

Bay Colony to make enough money to buy two and a half times the land purchased in the

Pettaquamscutt Purchase of the previous chapter. For the colonists, the ability to harness Native labor and land through enslavement after King Philip’s War would help repair the physical damage to private property by allowing them to enter into the global slave market and purchase new lands and property—including people. Through their entry into the transatlantic slave trade, post-King Philip’s War era colonial responses to Native and African American peoples

98 Lepore, xi. 99 Mather, Increase, Samuel Green, ed., Diary of Increase Mather, March, 1675-December, 1676 (Cambridge, Mass: John Wilson & Son: 1900), 18. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), xii 100 Lepore, 154.

60 entailed even stricter colonial policing of boundaries and hierarchies between Europeans and the “other.”

The massive destruction of English towns left an indelible mark on settler colonial attitudes towards Native peoples after King Philip’s War—a mark that would inform and shape their policies around Native peoples and their resources. 101 English property destruction also evoked intense anxiety, dredging up questions about regional power, settler colonial identity, and the ability of the colonists to secure material wealth in an emerging market of European capitalism—much of which was based on the growing slave trade and developing notions of property rights.102 As Jill Lepore notes, “with the development of capitalist markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, private property had become increasingly important, and revolts against this change…were met with violent censure.” King Philip’s War can be read as a

Native revolt against settler colonial insistence on private property and the ties private property held to a larger market of capitalist, agrarian, economies. Subsequent settler memories of the war and the Native peoples who waged it can be described as a censure of sorts that sought to erase or, as O’Brien theorizes, “purify,” the land and its historical record of Native peoples and presence in the era that followed King Philip’s War.

While the psychological and physical damage of the war on the English side was significant, the resulting damage to Native communities—both Christian and non-Christian, allied and non-allied—was significantly worse. An account of English fatalities during the war estimated that “in all, Men Women and Children, above eight hundred [English settlers],” had died “since the War began.”103 Yet by the war’s end, some six thousand Native peoples in New

101 Between 1675 and 1682—in the eight years after the war had begun, some twenty-one different accounts by colonial English writers had been printed in multiple editions, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999) 49-52. 102 See John Locke’s theories of government and property in 1689 and Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, (New York, New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2014), Simon P. Newman’s Newman, Simon P. A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic. The Early Modern Americas, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) for discussions of European capitalism, property rights and ties to slavery. 103 Nathaniel Saltonstall, July 22, 1676, in Lepore 71-2.

61 England had been killed, enslaved, or otherwise “subdued”— a euphemism that suggests the colonists now considered Native populations under control in the aftermath of wartime violence.104 The Great Swamp Massacre, at the site of present-day South Kingstown, stands out as a brutal testament to the damage wrought on Native peoples by the English in just one day.

As many as three to four thousand Narragansetts, most of whom were women and children hidden in the swamp for protection from the war, were at the Great Swamp encampment when a coalition of English soldiers attacked, setting fire to the wigwams and waiting for them to flee their homes before gunning them down.105 Colonial accounts of the war often served to justify wartime violence against Native peoples, portraying the Native populations they killed as barbarous heathens at best, whose inherently “savage” behaviors necessitated their deaths.

Benjamin Tompson’s New England’s Crisis gives an account of the massacre has an eerie buoyancy, using rhymed couplets to recount the gruesome scene of death at the Great Swamp

Massacre where colonists “fried” the wigwams of Native families:

Sundry the flames arrest and some the blade By bullets heaps on heaps of Indians laid. The flames like lightning in their narrow streets Dart in the face of everyone it meets Here might be heard an hideous Indian cry, Of wounded ones who in the wigwams fry.106

Benjamin Thompson’s poem reads almost like a Western Dime Novel—a sensational tale of colonial cowboys versus Indians within the New England frontier. As the colonial view of

Native peoples changed throughout the region during King Philip’s War, so too did colonial literary portrayals of Native Americans. Where Native peoples were once seen as potential converts to Christianity, the war changed colonial opinion of Native peoples in way that now

104 Lepore, 77. 105 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), 89. 106 Benjamin, Tompson, New England’s Crisis, Reprint, Early American Poetry, I, New England’s Crisis by Benjamin Tompson. (The Club of Odd Volumes, Boston, 1894), 19. https://books.google.com/books?id=4LmQdeVRvAkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v =onepage&q&f=false

62 marked them as irredeemable and inherently violent savages.107 Native death, therefore, was something that could be taken lightly, so much so that a brutal massacre of a Native community became something that could easily be rhymed about in a long poem about their “grand defeat.”108

As these acts of wartime violence continued, the distinctions that the English made between “good” and “bad” Natives became increasingly blurred or irrelevant. With colonial anxiety running high during King Philip’s War, English public opinion turned more and more distrustful of Christian Natives. In Massachusetts, authorities from the United Colonies, the same security alliance that had facilitated the Atherton purchase in 1660, removed Christian

Indians from the praying towns that had been set up to convert local Native populations where they were living and on to islands in Boston Harbor like Deer Island. Other Native residents of praying towns were shipped to the West Indies as slaves alongside “enemy” Natives. During this time, Deer Island was effectively turned into an internment and work camp.109 The confinement on the island was bleak—with some five hundred men, women, and children starving from lack of food and dying from lack of clothes or housing. Yet some colonists believed that confinement was a good treatment for any and all Native peoples.110 Others wanted to take revenge against those who were living on Deer Island, or believed that any and all Natives ought to be removed to “some place farther more from us.”111 Many more colonists were apathetic to the plight of those who were on Deer Island. This confusion and chaos around who was a Native ally or enemy, or who had surrendered to the English, became even more commonplace as the war

107 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), 45. 108 Benjamin, Tompson, New England’s Crisis, Reprint, Early American Poetry, I, New England’s Crisis by Benjamin Tompson. (The Club of Odd Volumes, Boston, 1894), 20. https://books.google.com/books?id=4LmQdeVRvAkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v =onepage&q&f=false 109 Margaret Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, Ithaca: 2015), 152-3 110 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), 135-139. 111 Lepore, 140.

63 came to a close and the need to “quickly dispose of Indians” in territories that the English had now solidified claims to became more urgent. 112

At the war’s end, colonists sought to expand their private property and colonial enterprises through land speculation in post-war Rhode Island and by entering into the transatlantic slave trade with Native American war captives. These initial wartime profits would allow them to solidify their claims to Wampanoag and Narragansett homelands while also profiting off of the labor of African and Native American slaves within the colony and throughout the Atlantic world. These systems of colonization, private property, and slavery produced a web of violence for people of color that was intended to dispossess them of their lives, lands, and sense of self so that English life, claims to land, and notions of self could be asserted.

If it is true that “during the war it seemed to many colonists that all that had made them

English and all that had made the land their own—their clothes, houses, barns churches, cattle, and crops—were being threatened,” then after King Philip’s War, these elements of colonial settlement that had “made the land their own” were aggressively reasserted. 113 Land was bought up and cleared of its Native inhabitants after the war, towns were rebuilt and the areas that had once been labeled as “the Naragansetts” and “King Philip’s Country” on colonial maps were renamed: Washington County and Bristol or Mount Hope.114 The large swaths of land that made up these re-named territories were laid claim to by Rhode Island settlers who would re-enter the emerging capitalist market and re-assert their property rights with the establishment of plantation economies after King Philip’s War. These actions would re-inscribe the removal tactics of previous generations of colonists by removing Native peoples from their homelands as well as from the popular memory of New England.

112 Lepore, 156. 113 Lepore, 77. 114 See maps in Appendix A for reference.

64 “A Doomed Race”115 New England Replacement Narratives in the Colonies and Native Erasure

Native peoples within Rhode Island and throughout New England did not disappear or vanish after King Philip’s War—although it would be hard to know that from the colonial historical record and subsequent New England histories that emerged after 1675. Within Rhode

Island, Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Niantic peoples continued to live their lives as they always had as much as was possible after the war. This meant continuing to live off of their ancestral homelands and in their communities by moving within and outside of tightening colonial legal jurisdictions, while also finding ways to continue to outwardly resist colonial mandates and adapt their cultural practices, kinship ties and knowledge of land bases to the colonial landscape that was being mapped onto Native life-ways. These methods of indigenous survivance116 have involved a long legacy of legal battles over land rights and recognition. In some cases this meant outward guerilla resistance of colonial land encroachment, as was the case with Abenakis throughout Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire,117 moving within and against the system of indentured servitude and enslavement that emerged in Rhode Island after the war, adapting traditional practices like basket-making and whaling to an emerging tourist industry and capital market in the 19th century,118 and maintaining cultural teachings, oral stories, physical and spiritual connection with the land, and passing down languages to their younger kin.

115 Colin, Calloway, ed. “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages.” In After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, 2–28, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 7. 116 Survivance, as defined by Gerald Vizenor, is distinct from survival. Instead, or in addition, survivance entails “ ‘moving beyond our basic survival in the face of overwhelming cultural genocide to create spaces of synthesis and renewal.’ (p53)” or as he elaborates elsewhere, also includes “…a native sense of presence, the motion of sovereignty and the will to resist dominance. Survivance is not just survival but also resistance, not heroic or tragic, but the tease of tradition, and my sense of survivance outwits dominance and victimry. (p93)” quoted in Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40, 422. 117 Colin, Calloway, ed. “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages.” In After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, 2–28. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 7. 118 Patricia Rubertone, “Anthropology 1624: Indians, Africans, and Colonists in New England.” Fall Semester 2016 Class at Brown University.

65 But colonial historical records that emerged after King Philip’s War erased the presence of Native peoples within New England—portraying Native Americans as gradually fading from sight or somehow impure or inauthentic descendants of their greater ancestors who had come before them while edging Native peoples off of their lands.119 Of course, these portrayals of

Native Americans within a more contemporary 18th and 19th century New England history conveniently forgot that traditional life-ways had always been dynamic, constantly reworking themselves to adapt to changing circumstances long before colonial encounters. These historical portrayals also forgot that traditional life-ways were leveraged against Native peoples to justify colonial conquest of New England and taken as a sign of inherent Indian backward-ness. Either way, within this colonial catch-22 of settler logic, Native Americans were increasingly pushed to the margins of New England’s history of itself, with an eye towards eventually erasing their presence within the physical and imagined landscapes of New England.

The main goal and consequences of the historical and imagined erasure of Native peoples and presence from Rhode Island was and still is land acquisition. In order to solidify colonial claims to Native lands, New England colonists had to construct a history and collective memory of themselves that allowed them to make claims that they were the first people on this land to make institutions and social orders worthy of notice.120 These historical and social constructions of themselves not only served the purpose of justifying their claims to Native lands in a post-King Philip’s War era, but also allowed New England colonists to make claims of modernity about themselves while elevating New England above other English colonies throughout the Americas.121 In particular, local New England histories and literature told of

Native peoples who had disappeared or were about to disappear, inevitably ceding themselves and their lands to a more modern people in a natural arc of progress. Eighteenth century French

119 Colin, Calloway, ed. “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages.” In After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, 2–28. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 7. 120 Jean M. O’Brien, O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Indigenous Americas Series. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xii. 121 O’Brien, xiv

66 writer Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur wrote that the Native Americans in New England “appear to be a race doomed to recede and disappear before the superior genius of the Europeans.”122

It is through this process of New England historical construction and categorization that

Native peoples and their histories within New England are rendered invisible, irrelevant or somehow inauthentic—a view of Native peoples in New England that persists today.123 As Jean

M. O’Brien points out, this disappearance act of Native peoples within New England history occurs through “precise declarations that the ‘last’ of them [Native peoples] has passed,” and that the colonial regime constructed on Native lands is “the ‘first’ to bring ‘civilization’ and authentic history to the region.”124 These declarations of Native American disappearance, while socially constructed within historical tellings of New England’s past, have had real material consequences for Native peoples throughout New England.

In 1880, the Rhode Island legislature declared the Narragansett people to be extinct, taking away their tribal status, authorizing the public sale of all their lands except for two acres that contained the tribal church and cemetery. 125 Further north in Massachusetts, the state government removed all protections from Native “wards” of the state and their ancestral homelands and instead tried to assimilate Native peoples by granting them citizenship and giving them voting rights in 1869.126 This policymaking effectively destroyed state recognition of

Native peoples as communal entities, allowing unrestricted sales of Native lands within

Massachusetts.

Perhaps pointing to the internal logics of white supremacy within colonization (or lack thereof), many of the last names of prominent plantation owners are the shared last names of the Narragansett community members within the detribalization rolls of the 1880s in Rhode

122 Colin, Calloway, ed. “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages.” In After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, 2–28. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 7. 123 O’Brien, xiv 124O’Brien, xv 125 Calloway, “Surviving the Dark Ages,” 9. 126 Colin, Calloway, ed. “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages.” In After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, 2–28. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 9.

67 Island.127 The reappearance of these names: Brown, Champlin, Condgdon, Gerdner, Hazard,

Helm, Robison, Stanton, and Wilcox, suggest that many of the Narragansett people on the detribalization roles were “direct descendants of those who had taken on their masters’ surnames in earlier centuries, and thus that many of the Native Americans working on the

Narragansett Plantations were indeed Narragansett people.”128 Even as Native peoples were forced to work their homelands within the colonial plantation systems established after King

Philip’s War, they could not gain tribal recognition within that system a century later.

This decision to detribalize speaks to Rhode Island’s ongoing history of using legislation as a vehicle of violence towards Native peoples. It also speaks to the ways in which anti-Blackness and notions of racial purity were legally codified in Rhode Island’s attitudes towards Native

American communities in New England—many of whom were also the descendants of African

Americans who had been brought over to Rhode Island in the previous century as slaves. As

Jean O’Brien writes, “[colonial] ideas about racial and cultural purity [would] disqualify Indians of mixed descent for Indianness in the New England imaginary,” which would in turn operate against colonial “recognition” of Native peoples. 129 The nineteenth century detribalization process in Rhode Island was not unique to the colony. Instead, it represented a larger trend of

New England colonies’ desire to bring racial expectations of Native peoples as racially pure into alignment with political processes by terminating the political statuses of tribes. Surrounding colonies like Massachusetts and Connecticut also took complex measures to detribalize the surrounding Native communities in the mid to late nineteenth century. These notions of racial purity have their origins in the eighteenth century colonial society that emerges after King

Philip’s War, which becomes deeply immersed in the global economy of the transatlantic slave trade.

127 Tyler, Jackson Rogers, “‘AlterNative Narratives of Slavery and Indigeneity’ Race and Unfree Labor in Colonial Rhode Island,” (Ethnic Studies Capstone, Brown University: Providence Rhode Island, 2012) 12. 128 Ibid. 129 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Indigenous Americas Series, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxiii.

68 Within the post-King Philip’s War era of the eighteenth century, colonial officials began to create different channels for dispossessing Native peoples of their lands. At the same time, they also began to form legal and societal ideas of what it mean to be “Indian” that were deeply rooted in European notions of racial purity and anti-Blackness. These views informed the daily processes of dispossession that were enacted through the bureaucracy and business built around the slave trade in Rhode Island in the eighteenth century.

The transatlantic slave trade was crucial to Rhode Island’s institutionalization of colonial power after King Philip’s War. Increasingly, colonists relied on labor provided by Native servants—many of who were indentured at the time—and a rapidly increasing number of African

American slaves to help them rebuild the towns that had been razed during the war and, later on into the eighteenth century, to maintain the colony’s various investments in the slave trade.130

As the slave trade became central to the colony’s maintenance of its regional and global power,

Native American and African American peoples were central to the production of the colony and the maintenance and creation of its institutions.

In 1652 and 1675, legislation in Rhode Island banned the enslavement of African and Native

American peoples respectively within the colony.131 But even while these bans were in place,

Rhode Islanders were able to legally circumvent them, especially in the context of King Philip’s

War where the sale of war captives into slavery was permitted. As a result, just as Rhode Island was enacting these bans it was also entering into the slave trade through the sale of Native war captives and the purchasing of Black slaves. By 1708, Rhode Islanders acknowledged that both forms of slavery were present in the colony. By 1750 Rhode Island held the highest percentage of slaves in New England: ten percent of its population (3,347) was enslaved.132 In Rhode Island in

1774, John Sainsbury estimated that 35.5% of all Native peoples in Rhode Island were to be

130 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1999), 154 131 Christy Mikel, Clark-Pujara. “Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842” (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 2009), 32. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4956/

132 Christy Mikel, Clark-Pujara. “Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842” (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 2009), 32. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4956/

69 found residing in non-Indian families as indentured servants.133 Within this context, Native and

African American communities that were enmeshed in the plantation system as indentured servants and slaves, and who lived outside of the plantation system as free people, often intermarried and lived alongside one another.

Colonial bureaucracies and plantation systems, failing to take into account complex notions of kinship, relations, and belonging within African American and Native American societies failed to recognize people of color beyond the rigidly imposed hierarchies of racial belonging that they had conceptualized within the colony. This often meant that the people who were

African and Native American were written into census and plantation records within a black/white binary, combining European notions of racial purity with a desire for Native

American land and African American labor.134 While the system of indentured servitude that colonists used for Native American labor often blurred the already vague boundaries between slavery and servitude in the colony, the system of indentured servitude could, theoretically, allow for the possibility of freedom after a certain time. Classifying someone as a slave almost completely removed that possibility save for manumission.

Additionally, categorizing people within Rhode Island who were Black and Native American as “negro” allowed plantation owners to de-legitimate Native claims to land, while also enslaving them to work their homelands. Consequently, census takers in the colony often deflated or omitted the number of Native Americans in New England, unable to conceive of Native peoples who did not fit within the rigid European notions of race and belonging.

These processes of state scrutiny and the repeated, systematic attempts to erase Native

New England peoples from the fabric of New England—both within a legal context and within

133 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Indigenous Americas Series, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 52. 134 Christy Mikel, Clark-Pujara. “Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842” (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 2009), 15 http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4956/ and Joanne Pope-Melish, “The Racial Vernacular: Contesting the Black/White Binary in Nineteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in Race, Nation, & Empire in American History, ed. James T. Campbell, Matthew Pratt Guterl and Robert G. Lee (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 2007).

70 the daily functions of colonial bureaucracies—has continued well into the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. At the same time, Native communities have also kept up the ongoing fight against their erasure, demanding that their enduring presence here in New England is known and that their voices are heard. Between the 1906s and 1970s, Native communities throughout New

England were gradually able to re-gain some of the land that had been violently dispossessed from them through colonial processes of the previous centuries. Court claims by the Gay Head

Wampanoag Tribe in Martha’s Vineyard, the Charlestown Narragansetts, Western Pequots, and

Mohegans, among others, initiated claims for redress of ongoing colonial grievances and land dispossession.

But with these fights for reclamation of Native homelands, the settler-colonial logic that undergirds much of how New England continues understand itself as an imaginative project was cast in stark relief to Native claims to space, place, and community. In a notable example of this enduring settler-colonial logic and its pervasiveness in the state systems that have been established within New England, in 1976, the Mashpee Wampanoag community sued in federal court for possession of 16,000 acres of land that constituted Mashpee—what had formerly been known in earlier colonial times as “Cape Cod’s Indian Town.”135 As the federal court case unfolded, it became clear that the case not only entailed a legal debate over the Mashpee claim to their homelands, but was also a state interrogation of the Mashpee Wampanoag community’s fundamental claims of self.136 A central component of the unprecedented trial was to determine whether or not the Masphee Wampanoag community was in fact an Indian tribe, and if it was in fact the same Indian tribe that had lost its lands through a series of legislative acts in the mid- nineteenth century. 137

135 James, Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988), 277. 136 Ibid. 137 James, Clifford. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988) 277.

71 The 1977 court case, Mashpee Tribe v. New Seabury et. al heard over forty-one days of testimony in Federal District court. 138 Many of the Mashpee community members were of mixed descent—Native Mashpee, and Black, Hessian [German army deserters from the

Revolutionary War], white and other Native tribes. According to the federal judge, in order to proceed to a land-claim trial, the Boston jury had to first determine if the Mashpee Wampanoag community could file suit as the Mashpee Tribe that had been stripped of collectively held homelands in the mid-nineteenth century.139 The court case involved a complex interplay of racialization of the Native plaintiffs, court scrutiny of religious beliefs of the Cape Cod Indian town, questioning of their lack of knowledge of the Massachusett and Wampanoag languages— as they had stopped being commonly spoken among residents after 1800. 140 The framework of the defense’s case, and the initial court need to establish the “legitimate” indigeneity of this community, are primarily based in enduring colonial notions of Native American racial purity, which demand that the recognition of a tribal community and an individual’s “indian-ness” is based off of colonial constructions of race rather than indigenous standards of community, place, and belonging. At the same time, the scrutiny of the Mashpee Wampanoag community that undergirded this court case conveniently forgot the larger historical context of colonization under which changing religions, conversion to Christianity, language loss, and “vague” contours of tribal government were made possible.

Despite these enduring notions of Native invisibility and inauthenticity that continue to pervade even the highest courts of law in New England some three hundred years after King

Philip’s War, the plaintiffs of the Mashpee Tribe case continued to affirm and re-affirm connections of the past and present to the cultures, teachings, ways of life and ancestors throughout the landscape and homelands that they were fighting to hold on to. As members of the community gave court testimony, they recounted the enduring connections that they had to

138 Clifford The Predicament of Culture, 279 139 Clifford The Predicament of Culture, 278 140 Clifford The Predicament of Culture, 278-285

72 the landscape and water-scape of the Atlantic coast—telling stories of the community’s closeness to and with the sea and their long traditions of whaling, shellfishing, fishing, and “aqua- farming.”141 But, as anthropologist James Clifford notes in his writings on the court case,

“Mashpee Indians suffered the fate of many small Native American groups who remained in the original thirteen states. They were not accorded the reservations and sovereign status (steadily eroded) of tribes west of the Mississippi. Certain of the eastern communities, such as the Seneca and the Seminoles, occupied generally recognized tribal lands. Others…possessed no collective lands but clustered in discrete regions, maintaining kinship ties, traditions and sporadic tribal institutions. In all cases the boundaries of the community were permeable. There was intermarriage and routine migration in and out of the tribal center—sometimes seasonal, sometimes longer term. Aboriginal languages were much diminished, often entirely lost. Religious life was diverse—sometimes Christian (with a distinctive twist), sometimes a transformed tradition…Moral and spiritual values were often Native American amalgams compounded from both local traditions and pan-Indian sources….Eastern Indians generally lived in closer proximity to white (or black) society and in smaller groups than their western reservation counterparts. In the face of intense pressure some eastern communities have managed to acquire official federal recognition as tribes, others not.”142

Early English colonization within New England resulted in different legal statuses of

Northeastern Native communities. Some communities did not have federally recognized

“reservation” lands or sovereign tribal status in the same way as other tribes who were subject to

English colonization later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, colonial legal constructions of Native peoples often saw Native communities as static and incapable of the same type of dynamic movement and change as English colonial societies. Thus, Native communities within New England whose members intermarried, migrated, or changed languages and religion were often seen as inauthentic Native communities because they did not adhere to the fixed colonial notions of how Native peoples lived.

This legal battle within the arena of the courtroom is demonstrative of the larger ways in which the erasure of Native peoples from popular imaginings of New England beyond the seventeenth century have facilitated ongoing dispossession of Native lands and life-ways. This court case alone spanned 32 years, with the tribe finally gaining federal recognition on February

141 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988), 287-88 142 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 288.

73 15th, 2007.143 Within these examples throughout the historical landscape of New England, we can see how more symbolic stories and histories about Native American extinction reinforced, reworked, and justified very real bureaucratic and legal processes that attempted to fulfill this

“prophecy” of Native American erasure from the landscapes of New England. Within these imagined and physical geographies of New England as a colonial project, both memory and topography are “purified” and cleared of Native Americans.144

Each of these policies of removal served the purpose of strengthening colonial power within the region by solidifying colonial claims to Native lands. This process of creating a “New

England replacement narrative” also involved creating a hierarchy in which the “institutions and practices of New Englanders are posited as the epitome of modernity.”145 The removal of Native peoples from the colony after King Philip’s was therefore not just a physical removal, but also a rhetorical one. The violence of colonial removal was a long and ongoing process that involved multiple dimensions of uprooting before and after King Philip’s War. After 1676, colonists were able to profit off of the removal of Native peoples from their lands through the dual processes of land speculation and the sale of Native American captives into slavery in the Caribbean. Both of these mechanisms of profit would in turn allow settlers to build “modern” institutions of civilization that could also continue the colonial project of Rhode Island.

The institutions built within the colony included physical constructions like towns, governments, and universities, but we can also think of the construction of New England’s history as an institution-building process. Within the process of creating history for Rhode

Island, Native peoples in the colony are described as extinct, inauthentic, and invisible. This rhetorical erasure continues to have present-day material and psychological impacts on Native communities in the region.

143 Ryan, Andrew. “Mashpee Tribe Wins Federal Recognition.” The Boston Globe, February 16, 2007., accessed online April 14th, 2016. http://archive.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/02/16/mashpee_tribe_wins_federal_recogniti on/. 144 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Indigenous Americas Series, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxiii 145 O’Brien, xxii

74

75

“Those who commit the murders write the reports.” 146 –Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law In All Its Phases,” 1893

146 Ida B. Wells,“Lynch Law In All Its Phases,” Our Day magazine, 1893. http://www.blackpast.org/1893-ida-b-wells-lynch-law-all-its-phases.

76 Chapter 3:

Ghosts of Founding

Tracing the Brown University Charter to the Transatlantic Slave Trade

When the charter for Brown University was written in 1764—then as the College of

Rhode Island—the first powers within the university that the corporation endowed themselves with were the powers to receive and hold private property. In particular, there is one line that reveals the intricacies of who and what is considered private property in eighteenth century

Rhode Island by the time of Brown’s founding. The corporation members grant themselves the power to “have, take, possess, purchase, acquire or otherwise receive and hold lands, tenements, hereditaments, goods, chattels, or other estates.”147 This simple line within the founding document raises important questions for us in examining the larger historical and global contexts that surround Brown and its founders in 1764.

The naturalized language of possession and rights to land and people reveals the violence that is hidden in plain sight in the college’s founding. Who is considered property, or “chattel,” to be possessed and purchased? How does the ability to acquire and receive “hereditaments” capture and codify an intergenerational transatlantic slave system and trade within Rhode

Island at this time? How can the ability to possess, purchase, and acquire Narragansett and

147 Brown University, “The Charter of Brown University with Amendments and Notes: 1945.” (Akerman-Standard Press, 1945) 7-8. https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/corporation/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.corporation/files /uploads/charter-of-brown-university.pdf.

77 Wampanoag homelands after King Philip’s War continue the colonial violence that precipitated the war? And, lastly, in what ways are the colonial acts of possession, purchase, and acquisition of bodies and lands that do not belong to them integral to the university’s genesis?

The line alone reveals to us the ways in which colonial notions of private property, the transatlantic slave trade and Native American displacement facilitated Brown’s founding and sustained its continuation. The college charter also reveals to us something important about who the original founders of Brown were—land-owning, slave-owning men of importance in Rhode

Island colonial society. Some of them would go on to be governors if they hadn’t already held the position.148 Some would participate in wars that sought to solidify more colonial claims to Native lands, like the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution. Many of them had made names for themselves through the intergenerational land speculation and slave trade that took place in the colony after King Philip’s War, or through missionary work in the colonies. It was within the hyper-local context of Rhode Island and the more global arena of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization that these corporation members articulated their ideas about private property, freedom, and the creation of an institution “for liberal education.”149

Within this chapter, I argue that, individually, many of the corporation members represent powerful and wealthy families of eighteenth century Rhode Island: Easton, Hazard,

Brown, Clarke, and Hopkins, to name a few. But when taken together as a group corporation members can tell us a crucial story about how wealth, power, and institutions were created in

Rhode Island and the lineages of violence that were central to these processes. In many ways, these names of the founders each represent their own thread of the colonial web that entrapped

Native and African peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. The corporation members were

148 See for example, Stephen Hopkins who served as the governor of Rhode Island from 1755 to 1768 who was one of the original corporation members or Nicholas Easton, who served as the governor under the Royal Charter of 1663 from 1672-1674, both of whom were founding corporation members. Easton was also one of the founders of Newport in 1639. http://rihs.minisisinc.com/rihs/scripts/mwimain.dll/7/1/1/1800?RECORD&UNION=Y 149 Brown University. “The Charter of Brown University with Amendments and Notes: 1945.” (Akerman-Standard Press, 1945) 5. https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/corporation/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.corporation/files /uploads/charter-of-brown-university.pdf.

78 therefore just that—a corporation—engaged in the business of colonization, slavery and the business of building a university. And although the school was chartered with a certain degree of religious tolerance, with the hopes that it might help form “the rising generation to virtue”150 in

Rhode Island, these lofty ideals cannot be divorced from the larger political and historical contexts in which they were formed.

In 2003, the University itself sought to answer some of these questions when former president Ruth Simmons put together a task force to look into Brown University’s legacy and involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. What was produced was the 2006 Report of the

Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. While formative, the main focus of this report was on the involvement of the Brown family, namely the Brown brothers, in the transatlantic slave trade in Rhode Island after the founding of Brown University in 1764.151 In this paper, I aim to demonstrate that the university’s foundational links to the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as a practice was part of a larger and longer history of colonial wealth acquisition in Rhode Island that was interwoven with Native land dispossession after King

Philip’s War (1675-76).152

This chapter will trace the lineage of several of the original corporation signatories and significant donors to the University, for whom buildings and other physical spaces on campus have been named, back to the plantations of Rhode Island. Namely, these families include the

Hazard family153 of South Kingstown, Rhode Island the Hopkins family, and Jeremiah Niles of

150 Brown University. “The Charter of Brown University with Amendments and Notes: 1945.” (Akerman-Standard Press, 1945) 5. https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/corporation/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.corporation/files /uploads/charter-of-brown-university.pdf 151 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 14. “In its research, the committee paid particular attention to the University’s namesake family, the Browns of Providence.” 152 Rather than just a business venture. 153 The 1764 corporation member George Hazard, was one of the founding members of Brown University and one of its original signatories, trustees, and corporation members (see Brown University charter). He was also a descendant of the Hazard family, one of the largest planter families in South Kingstown, where a majority of Rhode Island plantations were located Robert K Fitts, Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island. (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 73.

79 South Kingstown.154 For the purposes of this chapter, I will discuss the involvement of the

Brown family for background, but do not make them the center or my inquiry, as their implication in the Rhode Island slave trade has been extensively covered in the Steering

Committee’s 2006 report. Instead, I will trace the involvement of other corporation members and their families in the slave trade in Rhode Island after 1675 and up to the founding of Brown in 1764 as evidence of a broader university involvement in local/global colonial systems of wealth accumulation and racial capitalism from the very moment of Brown’s conception.

These corporation members, like many other colonial families in Rhode Island, bought into a global system of colonization and enslavement in order to build their personal fortunes.

The result of this “buy-in” to these global systems was two-fold. These corporation members and other Rhode Island colonists reproduced racialized forms of exploitation on a micro/local level within Rhode Island through local colonization and enslavement. In addition, they also bought into the complex transatlantic trade network that was built off of slave labor by supplying goods to British Caribbean plantations while funding slave ventures directly to West Africa.155

This accumulation of wealth allowed Rhode Island plantation owners to replicate an elite lifestyle similar to those of the plantation owners in the West Indies, American South, and the elite of England. The material aspects of this lifestyle were intended to symbolize their status, wealth, and power in the region, and to impress other elite colonists who had made their wealth through the slave trade within the Atlantic world. Establishing a lifestyle that symbolized their status solidified the place of Rhode Island planters in a larger colonial hierarchy that put white slave owners and wealthy land-owning colonists at the top, while relegating Native Americans and Africans to the bottom. For the colony of Rhode Island then, the business of the slave trade

154 Listed as one of the largest documented slaveholders in Narragansett, Robert K., Fitts. Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island, (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998) 85, table 3.7, listed in South Kingstown as on 1774. Also one of the signatories of the Brown University charter. 155 Fitts, 17-64.

80 pervaded the daily life of colonists at every level of the economic system.156It was within these deeper roots of colonial labor and land dispossession of African Americas and local Native

Americans that the corporation and charter forming Brown University coalesced.

Lastly, demonstrating the extent to which Brown University’s founding members were involved in this larger process of colonization through slavery and dispossession of Native lands necessarily involves discussing the historical silences or absences that exist in Rhode Island’s popular memory—this discussion will be the focus of the final section in this chapter. Rhode

Island, like many other Northern states, has been and continues to be reluctant to admit or believe the extent of its role in the slave trade. A 2010 statewide ballot to change the name of the state, “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” to the “State of Rhode Island,” is telling of the attitudes and beliefs about Rhode Island slavery. The editorial board in The

Providence Journal wrote of the word “plantation” in the state’s name, “Some are offended by

‘Plantations’ in the state’s name because it reminds them of slavery, which was practiced on a vast scale on Southern cotton, rice, and tobacco plantations before the Civil War. But the word itself really has nothing to do with slavery. It was commonly employed in the 1600s to describe colonial settlements in America that depended heavily on agriculture.”157 This minimization of

Rhode Island’s role in the transatlantic slave trade is indicative of a larger attitude regarding

Northern involvement in slavery. As the Slavery and Justice Report points out, “New

Englanders, in particular, have contrived to erase the institution’s presence from their collective memory.”158 New England, and Rhode Island in particular, have failed to seriously deal with the

156 The Steering Committee Report writes the following, “Even those who did not invest directly in the trade often depended on it for their livelihoods. Boatwrights built ships, and blacksmiths and block-makers fitted them out. Sail lofts and ropewalks prepared canvas and rigging. Caulkers scraped and sealed hulls. Carpenters built shelving below decks to hold the ship’s human cargo. Distilleries churned out rum, sealed in barrels fashioned by coopers from local pine, oak, and iron. Factories and foundries produced whale oil candles, cloth, and iron bards, all important trade goods on the West African coast. Farmers supplied beef, flour, tobacco, and onions. In the words of historian Rachel Chernos Lin, one of the speakers sponsored by the steering committee, the Rhode Island slave trade was literally the business of “the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.” Steering Committee Report, 10-11. 157 The Providence Journal editorial board, “Don’t Change the Name,” The Providence Journal, B6 quoted in “AlterNative Narratives of Slavery and Indigeneity: Race and Unfree Labor in Colonial Rhode Island” by Tyler Rogers, Ethnic Studies Capstone Essay at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. May 2012. 158 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues,

81 ways in which the American North was integral to the business of slavery, especially at the height of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century.159

The historical distance that has placed between the business of slavery and Rhode Island in the present day has effectively displaced blame, while also misunderstanding the ways in which the slave trade as a transatlantic business was conducted. This chapter outlines the ways in which slavery and the slave trade in Rhode Island transcended the boundaries of the colony— merchants of the slave trade, plantation owners, and other colonial elites throughout the English

Atlantic colonies made their money in the slave trade in many different locations. To live in

Rhode Island as a colonial official and businessman often meant having plantations within the colony of Rhode Island, in South Carolina, or in the West Indies, or sending slave ships to West

Africa, Antigua and Barbados, and then back to the ports of Newport, Bristol and Providence.

“Building on Distinction”: Rhode Island Wealth and Slavery after King Philip’s War

Here is a ghost of founding:

In 1745, Isaac Royall Jr. began to build an estate on the top of Mount Hope. The estate overlooked Narragansett Bay, where ships coming into the bay exported sugar cane and slaves and sent out rum, horses, and food to the West Indies. Some ships arrived from West Africa, while others returned from the Caribbean: Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, Surinam, and Antigua, perhaps from Isaac Royall Jr.’s own plantations there.160 Wherever the ships came from, Isaac

James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 8. 159 Christy Mikel, Clark-Pujara. “Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842” (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 2009), iv. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4956/

160 Isaac Royall Jr. owned a plantation in Antigua and his family, the Royall family, was among one of the wealthiest and largest slave-holding families in New England. “About the Farm,” Mount Hope Farm, accessed May 4, 2016. http://www.mounthopefarm.org/about-the-farm. “The Royalls,” The Royall House and Slave Quarters, accessed May 4, 2016. http://www.royallhouse.org/the-royalls/

82 Royall could likely have seen the ships flow in and out of the bay each day, standing on top of

Mount Hope.161

Perhaps Isaac Royall had forgotten, standing on Mount Hope, that this had been “King

Philip’s Country,” the Wampanoag homelands that King Philip’s community lived in for so long before Isaac Royall. Perhaps Isaac Royall had forgotten that this was a place of incredible resistance and incredible violence. This was the place where Metacom was beheaded and quartered in a swamp nearby less than a century ago, where his body was displayed by colonists at the end of the war on a tree, a message about what would happen when Native peoples opposed the colonization of their lands.

But it is likely that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, at the height of the transatlantic slave trade, this sort of colonial violence had become even more commonplace, hidden in plain sight. The unspeakable violence of the slave trade within Rhode Island had begun with the unspeakable violence of King Philip’s War. After the war, captives like

Metacom’s wife and son, who were on one of the early ships to leave from New England on its way to the Caribbean, were sold into a “living death” of slavery on the Caribbean sugar cane plantations. 162 In exchange, Rhode Island colonists received slaves from West Africa or plantations in the Caribbean, jumpstarting the emergent slave trade in the colony.163

Other Native peoples of New England were dead from disease after war or had been killed by English colonists. Some had managed to flee north and west to join other tribes, or had converted and gone to Christian missionary towns in an effort to survive.164 Others may have stayed behind at Mount Hope, working odd jobs, continuing to live on the land base even as the

161 “Rhode Island ships cleared for the Caribbean on an almost daily basis…” Allen, Brenda A., Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al., “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice,” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006) 11.

162 Colin, Calloway, ed. “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages.” In After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, 2–28, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997) 2 163 Allen, Brenda A., Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006) 8. 164 Calloway, 6.

83 land was claimed by Plymouth colony in 1680 and then sold to four wealthy Boston merchants:

John Walley, Nathaniel Byfield, Stephen Burton and Nathaniel Oliver.165 The Wampanoags, like other New England Native tribes, had been forcibly scattered and removed from their homes by the war—leaving large tracts of land in the Narragansett Bay area vacated but not vacant.166

While some communities did manage to stay behind, they did not hold the same regional strength that they had held before the war. The areas of Rhode Island where Wampanoags and

Narragansetts had predominated were rapidly seized by settlers like Walley, Byfield, Burton and

Oliver in the years after King Philip’s War—speculators who were eager to make profits and resell the land to other colonists looking to rebuild their wealth, property, power, and identity.

The land bought up, or awarded to colonies by royal charter after King Philip’s War, was the same land that had once been labeled “King Philip’s Country” and “the Naragansetts” on previous colonial maps in 1676—an indication of the regional presence that Native peoples had held in the colonial imaginary prior to the war. It is no coincidence that these are also the same parts of Rhode Island that will yield some of the largest plantations in New England’s history, along with some of the wealthiest slave traders in Rhode Island—and North America. Property and boundary disputes between colonies kept many settlers from purchasing farms in the

Mount Hope and Narragansett areas—an opportunity that allowed wealthy individuals like

Walley, Byfield, Burton and Oliver to buy up the Mount Hope region, while speculators from the

Aquidneck Island bought up large tracts of land in the Narragansett area. Purchasers were then able to sell unwanted plots and build farms on better areas of the fertile bay land with the capital they had acquired from land sales. In this way, a number of families were able to acquire large

165 “About the Farm.” Mount Hope Farm. Accessed May 4, 2016. http://www.mounthopefarm.org/about-the-farm. 166 That is to say, Native presence—while often erased in canonical histories of the region—has endured and always been a facet of the region’s history and reality, whether or not it has been recognized or validated by prevailing recollections.

84 amounts of fertile land and capital that they then used to enter into the global market of slave- based capitalism and trade.167

Isaac Royall Jr. was the beneficiary of one such lineage of settler land speculation. His wife, Elizabeth MacIntosh Royall Jr., inherited Mount Hope from her grandfather, Henry

MacIntosh, who had purchased the 550 acres from his father-in-law, Nathaniel Byfield.168 It is through this lineage, born out of Native displacement from King Philip’s War, that Isaac Royall

Jr., like so many other members of wealthy New England planter families, could stake a claim to land in the region. This wealth then allowed him to expand and continue his role in the global network of slave-based wealth accumulation. This is the lineage of violence is present at the moment when he looks out over the bay in 1745, undeniably beneath him in the land he stands on and unfolding before him in the waters that carry the transatlantic slave trade into and out of

Rhode Island.

The Mount Hope Farm would later become property of Brown University in 1955.169

This small but distinct hill and the history buried within it, encapsulate the haunting ways in which the history of Native American displacement, African American enslavement, and the wealth that built Brown University are all carefully, quietly interwoven in the landscape of New

England today. And so when we think about these roots of violence and roots of power, it is necessary to remember who is marked as disposable in the founding of institutions, in the creation of wealth. When we think about how Isaac Royall Jr. looked out over the bay, we must also ask who the people working on his estate behind him were? Who were the people who laid foundations of his Mount Hope Farm, quietly building on his distinction as a gentleman in

Rhode Island? And who laid the foundations of institutions like Brown University so that we could build on distinction?

167 Robert K. Fitts, Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 73. 168 “About Us,” Mount Hope Farm website: http://www.mounthopefarm.org/about-the-farm 169 As part of a donation from the Haffenreffer family, specifically, Rudolph Haffenreffer II, who allegedly “had a true passion for Native Americans.” (mounthopefarm.org “About Us”)

85 Although New England had already begun to import Africans to the region in 1638 by exchanging captives from the Pequot War, the slave trade was revisited on a far greater scale in the aftermath of King Philip’s War.170 This marked a new settler colonial relationship to land and private property—one that was inextricably linked to buying into the emerging markets of capitalism that coded chattel slaves as crucial aspects of private property.

Along the shorelines of the Narragansett Bay, a massive slave-based economy was unfolding in eighteenth century Rhode Island. The colony was in the midst of building its distinction as the largest hub of the transatlantic slave trade in North America—with some sixty percent of slave trading voyages launched within North America originating from Rhode Island

(and in some years as much as ninety percent of the voyages).171 By the close of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, Rhode Islanders had “mounted at least a thousand voyages, carrying over one hundred thousand Africans into New World slavery.”172 Rhode Island was, in essence,

“the commissary of the Atlantic plantation complex.”173

The families of Rhode Island were therefore involved in a much more complex network of international trade that began with the plantations of Narragansett Bay, but extended within and amongst the many slave-based plantation economies of British colonies in the Americas.

Even if slaveholdings in Rhode Island were smaller than in other British colonies, the planters of

Rhode Island were no less implicated in the continuation of slavery than their Caribbean partners—with the aid or “commissary” of Rhode Island plantations, the British Caribbean and

Southern slave systems were able to operate in their full and brutal capacities. Many planters in

Rhode Island also had plantations in the South and the Caribbean—and many more helped finance slave ship ventures to West Africa in order to keep a steady influx of slave ships traveling to other British colonies. Rhode Islanders also helped fuel the sugar cane plantation economies

170 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006),8. 171 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 10. 172 Ibid. 173 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 11

86 by setting up rum distilleries. In the year of Brown’s founding, Rhode Island “boasted some thirty rum distilleries, including twenty-two in Newport alone.”174 After the molasses and sugar cane sent to Rhode Island from the Caribbean were distilled, the rum was shipped to West

Africa in exchange for slaves, who were then shipped back to the Caribbean to keep the process of sugar cane production going.175 In these ways, Rhode Island planters in Narragansett Bay played a central part in the international slave trade of the eighteenth century. This was a fact that Samuel Ward, the Governor of Rhode Island in 1740 and one of the Brown University corporation members, proudly boasted of in a report to the Rhode Island Board of Trade,

“The neighboring governments have been in a great measure, supplied with rum, sugar, molasses and other West India goods by us brought home and sold to them here. Nay, Boston, itself, the Metropolis of Massachusetts, is not a little obliged to us for rum and sugar and molasses which they distil into rum, for the use of the fishermen &c. The West Indies have likewise reaped great advantage from our trade, by being supplied with lumber of all sorts suitable for building houses, sugar works and making casks; beef, pork, flour and other provisions, we are daily carrying to them, with horses to turn their mills and vessels for their own use; and our African trade often furnished them with slaves for their plantations.”176

Ward’s comments highlight the interdependence between the English West Indian colonies and Rhode Island within the transatlantic slave trade. Although slave ship ventures to

Africa were a crucial component of Rhode Island’s involvement in the slave trade, it was the bilateral trade between the West Indies and Rhode Island was central to the colony’s economy in the eighteenth century. As the sale of Native captives from King Philip’s war at the close of the seventeenth century established this bilateral business, colonial access to the bays and inlets of the Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples after King Philip’s War enabled its continuation. In the eighteenth century, the profits from sugar in the Caribbean colonies were so large that little else was produced on the plantations. As a result, West Indies colonies imported the vast

174 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 10. 175 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 10. 176 John Russel Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England vol. V 1741-1756, “Report of Governor Ward, to the Board of Trade, on paper money.” (Providence: Knowles, Anthony and Company, 1859), 5:14 quoted in Christy Mikel, Clark-Pujara. “Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842” (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 2009), 39. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4956/

87 majority of goods they needed.177 Rhode Island was the main colony that supplied these goods to the West Indies—sending meat, wool, timber, iron, candles, shoes, tar, tobacco, barrel hoops and staves, salt cod, which was the main protein source for West Indian slaves, dairy products, and horses.178

Within Rhode Island, much of the supplies produced for sale into the Caribbean and the southern colonies of North America came from Narragansett and Newport. Narragansett plantations supplied the West Indies with dairy products and horses, developing an extremely fast riding horse called the Narragansett Pacer which was prized by Caribbean planters— presumably for the amount of slave control and oversight a fast horse could offer large plantations.179

But the main export that Rhode Island moved through the Atlantic within the slave trade was rum. In 1713, the liquor was introduced on the African coast, replacing French brandy as the trading good of choice for the slave trade.180 Rum distilleries and production facilities set up in

Rhode Island used the sugar cane and molasses produced in the plantation colonies of the

Caribbean to produce and export rum in exchange for more slaves along the African coast, who were then sold primarily in the Caribbean colonies. Rum was also used on the plantations within the sugarcane colonies as part of the rations given to slaves, incentive for performing difficult or unpleasant tasks, or for holidays and special occasions with managers of one plantation in

Jamaica called the York estate setting aside 800 gallons of rum each year for use on the plantation.181 In essence, Rhode Island’s hub of rum distilleries—at least thirty were in the colony by 1764, twenty-two of which were in Newport alone—produced the fuel of the

177 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006),11. 178 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 11, and Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave relations in eighteenth-century Narragansett Rhode Island, 76-77. 179 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 11 and Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave relations in eighteenth-century Narragansett Rhode Island, 76-77 180Christy Mikel, Clark-Pujara. “Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842” (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 2009), 37. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4956/ 181 Frederick H Smith, “Spirits and Spirituality: Alcohol in Caribbean Slave Societies” published by the J. Kilask Foundation (Miami, Florida) http://www.kislakfoundation.org/prize/200102.html

88 transatlantic slave trade. 182 Additionally, the bilateral trade between Rhode Island and the

West Indies colonies meant that the merchants, government, and farmers of the colony were deeply interwoven with some of the largest slave societies in the Americas.183

In Rhode Island the slave trade was not only crucial to colonial economic development, but also central to the formation of the colony’s political and social autonomy, as well as its institutions of government. As Christine Clark-Pujara writes, “slave trading and political power went hand in hand. During the colonial period most Rhode Island governors were of the merchant class. In fact, many were slave traders.”184 The city of Newport functioned as the main site of central government in the colony and also served as Rhode Island’s mercantile epicenter.185 It was no accident that the first location of Brown University was in Warren, Rhode

Island—part of Washington County—or that the first meeting of the College Corporation members took place in September 1764 in Newport, Rhode Island rather than Providence.186

The areas of Rhode Island in which plantation life and slave traders had amassed wealth: banks, lavish homes, distilleries, plantations, and so forth, were the areas that had the most political and social clout in the colony.

The decision to found an educational institution therefore involved some of the largest names of the Rhode Island slave trade. According to the report of the Brown University Steering

Committee on Slavery and Justice Committee, at least thirty members of the original Brown corporation owned or captained slave ships, and many of them were involved in the trade during their years at the University.187 Brown University could have therefore just as easily been called by another familiar name of colonial Rhode Island: Hazard, Clarke, Hopkins, Niles—the list goes

182 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006),10. 183 Christy Mikel, Clark-Pujara. “Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842” (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 2009), 34. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4956/ 184 Clark-Pujara, “Slavery, Emancipation and Black Freedom,” 27-28. 185 Clark-Pujara, “Slavery, Emancipation and Black Freedom,” 32. 186 Janet.Philips, A Short History of Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island: Office of Public Affairs Brown University, 2000), 15 187 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 12

89 on. The Brown family in particular became the University’s namesake largely because of their early and intergenerational donations of both land and capital—much of which had been gained through business ventures within the slave trade and through the settlement of Native lands in

Rhode Island.

When the University was founded in 1764 as the College of Rhode Island, the generation of four Brown brothers: Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses, supported the school in various dimensions. Nicholas Brown was one of the original petitioners, corporation members and trustees. Moses Brown championed the idea of moving the University to Providence from its original location in Warren, Rhode Island—part of Bristol County. Joseph Brown designed the plans for University Hall, referenced in the Report of Brown University Steering Committee on

Slavery and Justice as the College Edifice, and John Brown served as the treasurer of the

Corporation for four years and laid the cornerstone for the College Edifice.188 The College of

Rhode Island changed its name to Brown University in 1804 when Nicholas Brown Jr. donated

$5,000 to the University and gave money for several of the buildings on the Main Green today.

Later generations of Brown family benefactors would follow.189

The Brown family was not the largest family of slave owners and traders within Rhode

Island. But as the namesake of the University and as one of the families in Rhode Island with the largest documentation of their involvement in the slave trade, it makes sense that the Steering

188 The rest of the building was, however, built using goods and labor from Rhode Island’s involvement in the slave trade. Wood for the building was donated by Lopez and Rivera, one of the largest slave trading firms in Newport. Some of the donors honored their pledges of gifts to the University by providing the labor of their slaves, including at least four enslaved men who worked on the building, one named “Pero,” another named “Abraham” and two more men who are listed as “Mary Young’s Negro Man” and “Earle’s Negro.” The task of finding endowment money that would start Brown involved going to Charlestown, South Carolina, where some £3,700 Carolina pounds were raised by Baptist minister Hezekiah Smith. Smith solicited donations from several hundred of the wealthiest elite in South Carolina who had made their money in the slave trade. This list of benefactors included Governor William Bull, who owned a 3,000 acre rice and indigo plantation on St. Helena Island, Gabriel Manigault, a merchant and planter who owned 4,000+ acres and almost 500 slaves and who had handled the sale of the first enslaved Africans who had been brought to South Carolina on Rhode Island slave ships. For more discussion on this, see Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 13-14. 189 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 14-15.

90 Committee’s Report focused primarily on the Brown family as a cade study.190 The Brown family came into Rhode Island alongside Roger Williams—Chad Brown, the great-grandfather of the generation of Brown brothers who were active in the transatlantic slave trade and Brown

University’s founding. The plot of land that Chad Brown acquired within the early years of the colony’s founding would later be the same plot of land donated to the University by the Brown family on which the Main Campus stands today.191 It has been difficult to trace exactly how Chad

Brown acquired the Native homelands he used to first settle in the region, and it is also not clear whether this parcel of land was included in the deed between Roger Williams and Canonicus and Miantonomi, or if the land was acquired separately. Either way, we can begin to see the interwoven threads of colonial founding, Native displacement, the transatlantic slave trade, and

Brown University beginning to emerge within this familial lineage.

A little over four decades after King Philip’s War is when we see records of the Brown family beginning to purchase slaves. In 1728, Captain James Brown, the father of the Brown brothers who were involved in the University’s founding, began purchasing slaves, leaving four slaves in his estate when he died in 1739 and launching the first slave ship to sail from

Providence, the Mary, which traveled to Africa and then to the West Indies carrying enslaved

Africans for the family’s use.192 By the early years of Brown University in the 1770s, the Brown brothers owned at least fourteen slaves, some of whom were owned commonly by all four of them. Most of the people who the Brown brothers owned as slaves worked as domestic and agricultural workers.193 The Brown brothers also continued the family’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, funding several ship ventures to Africa. Of particular note within the

Steering Committee’s Report is the Sally, which sailed to Africa the same year of Brown’s founding in 1764. The violence of the slave ship Sally is indicative of the interwoven physical

190 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 14. 191 Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of an Idea. (Thames & Hudson: 2015) Providence, Rhode Island. Brown University. 32 192 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006),14. 193 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 15

91 and rhetorical violence towards Black and Native peoples that were central to the founding

Rhode Island its attendant institutions.

Just as the corporation members signed the founding charter of Brown University on

October 24th, 1765, the slave ship the Sally, lead and financed by the Brown brothers and captained by Esek Hopkins, the brother of another corporation member and future chancellor of the college, Stephen Hopkins, sailed from West Africa to the West Indies. As Brown comes into being with the 1765 charter, the violence of the Sally’s voyage couches the circumstances of the

University’s founding. The day before the charter was completed, one woman and man who enslaved aboard the Sally died—the day after the charter’s completion another woman died. The ship records kept by Captain Esek Hopkins aboard the Sally also reveal the rhetorical violence of the slave ship and the business of enslavement.

In a system that relied on the commodification of people and the treatment of them as private property, Hopkins’ account book during the voyage spends over eighty pages detailing the acquisition of people through the trade of goods: gallons of rum, beads, cloth, guns listed in exchange for slaves. The last two pages of his account book are unmarked graves—tallying the deaths of 108 of the 196 slaves aboard the Sally and burying the collective action against enslavement that took place aboard the ship within a single line of text: “Slaves rose on us was obliged to fire on them and destroyed 8 and several more 1 thye & ones ribs broke.”194 Here we are met with yet another rhetorical violence of the Rhode Island colonial archives. The collective resistance that the people who were enslaved aboard the Sally showed against Hopkins and the ship’s crew was physically silenced when Hopkins was “obliged to fire on them” and rhetorically silenced in the only remaining archive we have of this uprising. We know more about the gallons of rum Hopkins traded for each enslaved person than we do of the enslaved people themselves.

In between these lines of silence on the lives of the enslaved, we are met with questions we

194 Esek Hopkins, “Brig Sally’s account book, September 11th, 1764-December 20th 1765.” http://library.brown.edu/cds/catalog/catalog.php?verb=render&id=1161038386638650&view=pageturner&pageno= 86

92 cannot answer, an empty record that refuses to say more about them, and the violence of the record that echoes into the present day.195

The Brown family’s involvement in the slave trade offers us an important case study through which to understand larger institutions of slavery, power, and colonization within

Rhode Island, as the Steering Committee has importantly pointed out.196 But expanding our lens of inquiry to include other corporation members also offers us an opportunity to understand just how deeply tied the institution of Brown University—and its founders—were to the processes of nation-building, colonization, and slavery. Understanding how these processes are interwoven with one another also allows us to conceive of how this “web” of colonization within Rhode

Island operated in the century after King Philip’s War. From this understanding we can hopefully begin to trace the roots of power in Rhode Island, tracing where they lead us in the past and, in turn, thinking about how they grow and follow us into the present.

Simply put, studying the larger web of colonization in the eighteenth century allows us to understand how America and its institutions were built at the expense of other peoples’ freedoms. After captaining slave ships like the Sally, Esek Hopkins would later go on to serve in the Revolutionary War as a Naval Commander to fight for independence from English rule in the colonies. The creation of the American Navy deployed in the Revolutionary war was financed in part by William and Samuel Vernon, merchants based out of Newport who had sponsored more than thirty slaving ventures.197 Stephen Hopkins articulated liberal ideals of freedom in

The Rights of Colonies Examined—one of the most influential pamphlets circulated during the

195 Sadiya Hartmann poses this important question in her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” “…how does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features?...Can we, as NourbeSe Philip suggests, ‘conjur[e] something new from the absence of Africans as humans that is at the heart of the text”? And if so, what are the lineaments of this new narrative? Put differently, how does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?” in “Venus in Two Acts,” (Small Axe 12, Number 26, no. 2, June 2008: 1–14), 3. 196 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006),10. “But the real story of the Rhode Island slave trade is not of a few great fortunes but of extremely broad patterns of participation and profit.” 197 Brenda A. Allen, et. al., “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,”10.

93 revolutionary era—writing that “Liberty is the greatest blessing that men can enjoy, and slavery is the heaviest curse that human nature is capable of…those who are governed at the will of another, and whose property may be taken from them…are in the miserable condition of slaves.”198 And yet, at the same time, these notions of freedom were forged within the contexts of slavery, slave ownership, and slave-based societies. Just as Hopkins articulated these liberal ideals of what it meant to be free, he simultaneously owned slaves and had presided over Rhode

Island as governor while the colony’s involvement in the slave trade was at its height.199 These were the articulations of liberal ideals that were behind Brown’s founding charter, and behind the founding documents of the United States—and they were also forged within the institutions of colonialism and slavery.

In looking at the people, institutions, and capital that fueled American independence and freedom, we can observe a web of connections to the transatlantic slave trade and colonial expansion in North America. Rhode Island is an important site for understanding how this web of connections functioned. Stephen Hopkins’ involvement in Brown’s founding, the governance of Rhode Island, the slave trade, and the French and Indian War in 1755 offers us a glimpse into how processes of founding, colonization, and slavery moved together in Rhode Island. Just as the colonization of Native homelands in Rhode Island had allowed colonists to enter into the transatlantic slave trade after 1676, the capital accrued from the transatlantic slave trade in turn allowed English colonists to fight for their right to expand into other Native peoples’ homelands in the French and Indian War of 1754-1763.

In the eighteenth century, Rhode Island’s involvement in the wars of colonial expansion within Native homelands was funded by the colony’s ongoing slave trade. In 1755, a receipt from

Governor Stephen Hopkins paid Jonathan Nichols thirty six hundred pounds in exchange for

4,000 gallons of molasses. These molasses were to be shipped to New York “to pay for Battols

198 Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of Colonies Examined, quoted in Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 12. 199 Brenda A. Allen, et al. “Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice,” 12.

94 [battles] and Supply us with other Necessaries for the present expedition [the French and Indian

War].”200 The familiar use of molasses as a trading good for the supplies of war is a reminder of how colonial profits in the slave trade fueled the English colonization of other regions of North

America. As English settler colonialism within Rhode Island facilitated the colony’s entry into the slave trade, the profits and goods of the slave trade in turn facilitated new English colonial settlements and claims to Native territories.

A 1760 letter written by Stephen Hopkins to a colonial official details how the facilities of the slave trade within Rhode Island were reworked and maintained during the French and

Indian War. Hopkins explained that many of the merchants who had “always carried on a considerable trade by sea” were now reworking their business in the slave trade to suit the current political climate by changing “the course of their common trade, into that of privateering.”201 This process required that Rhode Island’s ships travel to the French islands in the Caribbean with French prisoners who had come into the colony in exchange for English prisoners. In order to ensure that no ships traveling out of Rhode Island were bringing “any warlike stores” or “provisions for sale” to French colonies, while also ensuring the exchange of prisoners, Rhode Island commissioned its merchants to supposedly carry French prisoners to the French islands. Using thirty vessels, “mostly small sloops,” Hopkins promised that these merchants were not bringing any warlike stores or provisions, save for “lumber, dry goods of

British manufacture…and in return have brought back some sugars, but mostly molasses.”202

This letter correspondence between Stephen Hopkins and Secretary Pitt maneuvers around the reality of Rhode Island’s slave trade activity during the French and Indian War.

Prisoner exchanges under “flags of truce” were often a ruse used by Rhode Islanders to evade

200 Stephen Hopkins, “Stephen Hopkins Et. Al to Thomas Richardson, Order by the Committee of War to Pay Jonathan Nichols for Supplies for the Expedition against the French,” June 10, 1755, (Stephen Hopkins Collection, Folder 1 (1754-1755). Rhode Island Historical Society. 201 Stephen, Hopkins. “Governor Hopkins to Secretary Pitt (1751).” In Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Vol. VI 1757-1769, edited by John Russell Bartlett, (Providence, Rhode Island: A.C. Greene and Brothers, state printers, 1856), 264. 202 Hopkins, Stephen. “Governor Hopkins to Secretary Pitt.” In John Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island Vol. VI, 264.

95 British restrictions on trading voyages with the French during the French and Indian War. In

1758, the Rhode Island sloop Speedwell sailed to New Orleans carrying wine, candles, ten slaves and one French prisoner.203 It was precisely because it was wartime that Rhode Island’s business of slavery continued on as usual with whomever the businesses needed to be done with— including France. These are the nodes of a colonial web comprised of westward expansion into

Native homelands, the transatlantic slave trade, and eighteenth century society in Rhode Island.

The powerful Hazard family of Rhode Island produced two original corporation members involved in the founding of Brown University in 1764—George Hazard and Thomas

Hazard.204 While the lineage of George Hazard is somewhat difficult to trace due to the overlapping use of first names within the family,205 we can look more broadly at the Hazards’ place in the landscape of Rhode Island to understand what role George Hazard might have played in the colony. For Thomas Hazard, on the other hand, a clearer lineage can be gleaned from the archival records.

Thomas “College Tom” Hazard, one of the first corporation members and trustees of

Brown University, came from the Hazard family, who settled in South Kingstown in 1689.206 The

Hazard settlement in South Kingstown was later called Peace Dale, and the land was purchased

203 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006),15. 204 In the corporation documents, Thomas “College Tom” Hazard is spelled as “Haszard,” as the spelling of his name seemed to have varied between “Hazard,” “Haszard” and sometimes “Hassard.” He is referred to in the pages that follow as Thomas Hazard. For more information about Thomas “College Tom” Hazard, who was one of the original corporation members of the University, see “Subgroup 3: Papers of Thomas ‘College Tom’ Hazard (1720-1798)” in Guide to the Hazard Family Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society Library compiled by Richard D. Stattler, Robert Bellerose, and Allison Cywin. For clarity’s sake, Thomas Hazard is referred to as Thomas “College Tom” Hazard as needed in this discussion to avoid possible confusion with his grandfather, who shared his name. Thomas “College Tom” Hazard was so nicknamed as a means of distinguishing him from other Thomas Hazards in Rhode Island at the time and because he had attended Yale University. For more information, see Guide to the Hazard Family Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society Library. 205 Within the Hazard family at this time, one son would often get the name of his father, and grandfather, and then name his own son the same name, such that within the Hazard family tree there are multiple generations of “George” and “Thomas.” Because of this, it is not always readily apparent which generation of George or Thomas Hazard is being referred to in any given document unless explicitly specified. For more information, see Caroline E, Robinson, and Daniel Berkeley Updike. The Hazard Family of Rhode Island 1635-1896: Being a Geneaology and History of the Descendants of Thomas Hazard, with Sketched of the Worthies of This Family, and Anecdotes Illustrative of Their Treais and Also of the Times in Which They Lived. Boston, Massachusetts: Printed for the Author, 1895. 206 Stattler, Richard D., Robert Bellerose, and Allison Cywin, eds. “Introduction.” In Guide to the Hazard Family Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society Library, (Providence, Rhode Island: Rhode Island Historical Society, n.d), vii.

96 by Thomas Hazard—the grandfather of Thomas “College Tom” Hazard—from land speculators, who had likely acquired the Narragansett homelands in the 1674 Pettaquamscutt Purchase. The family owned upwards of 4,000 acres in the Narragansett area by the mid-eighteenth century, and supplied crucial dairy exports to overseas plantations in the Caribbean.207 Through their dairy exports and Narragansett plantations, the Hazards became known as the “largest and most powerful of the Narragansett Planters,” owning slaves and rising to regional power as the

“aristocracy of stock farmers and dairy men.”208 Just a year shy of the American revolution,

John Hazard, Col. George Hazard, Jonathan Hazard, George Hazard [who may have been the other Hazard signatory on the Brown charter], and Jeffrey Hazard owned a combined total of 61 slaves.209

While members of the Hazard family, including Thomas “College Tom” Hazard, were also long noted for their opposition to slavery, they facilitated Rhode Island’s involvement in new dimensions of the slave trade with the development of the Peace Dale manufacturing company—a firm that was at the forefront of the Negro cloth trade.210 Thomas Hazard himself owned at least two slaves in 1762 with the passing of his father, Robert Hazard. A receipt from

Thomas’s sister Sarah granted him the portion of their father’s estate that had been willed to her, including “my Negro woman Billor Isabel…also my negro child call’d Phebe.”211 It is unclear if Thomas Hazard might have manumitted Billor Isabel and Phebe by the time he began his efforts to prohibit the slave trade in Rhode Island in 1783. But his son, Rowland Hazard,

207 Robert K., Fitts. Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island. (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 74. Table 3.1 208 Dunn, Christine. “History runs deep in Peace Dale,” The Providence Journal. March 2nd, 2014. Accessed online May 2, 2016: http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20140302/BUSINESS/303029909 209 Fitts, 85, Table 3.7 “Narragansett’s Largest Documented Slave-holdings” 210 Negro cloth was the “distinctive coarse wool clothing” worn by southern slaves made by northern factories in the antebellum era. See Cristy Clark-Pujara’s Christy Clark-Pujara, “Slavery, Emancipation and Black Freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842,” dissertation at Graduate College of the University of Iowa. December 2009, 1 and Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006),28. 211 Sarah Hazard, “Receipt, May 28, 1762, from sister Sarah Hazard for, among other things, ‘my negro woman Billor Isabel…also my negro child called Phebe,” in the Hazard Family Papers, Subgroup 3, Papers of Thomas “College Tom” Hazard (1720-1798). Item No. 3. Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island.

97 certainly continued the family tradition of involvement in the slave trade, partnering with South

Carolina merchants in 1789 to organize cargo ships that traveled from Rhode Island to South

Carolina and the Caribbean. Afterwards in 1802, Rowland Hazard would invest in textiles, including a carding machine in South Kingstown—which would later serve as the infrastructure for the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company.212 Outside of Thomas Hazard serving as a founding corporation member of Brown, the Hazard family was a major donor to Brown University.213

Nearby the Hazard’s plantation in South Kingstown, another corporation member,

Jeremiah Niles, owned a total of thirteen slaves on his plantation in 1774—making him one of

Narragansett’s largest documented slave-holders.214For the Hazards and Jeremiah Niles, the numbers of slaves found in the plantations of South Kingstown were not as large as the plantation populations in the Caribbean. However, the average slave owner in Narragansett and the average slave owner in Virginia owned comparable amounts of slaves at the time.215 It is also important to keep in mind that just as the commerce of the slave trade was, by definition, transatlantic and therefore not relegated to any one colony, slaveholding among the colonial elite was inter-colonial. Slaveholding in Rhode Island and slaveholding in the West Indies and the American south were not mutually exclusive practices. Although plantation owners like the

Hazards and Jeremiah Niles did not own plantations in other colonies, families like the Royalls and the DeWolfs made their wealth off of their plantation holdings in Caribbean colonies, with the DeWolfs of Bristol, Rhode Island holding the title as the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history.216

212 See Hazard Family Papers, Subgroup 4, Papers of Rowland Hazard (1763-1835) and Mary (peace) Hazard (1775- 1852) and Rowland Hazard’s biography in “Guide to the Hazard Family Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society Library” compiled by Richard D. Stattler, Robert Bellerose, and Allison Cywin. Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island. 213 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 28. 214 Fitts, 85, Table 3.7 “Narragansett’s Largest Documented Slave-holdings” 215 Ibid. 216 DeWolf, Thomas Norman. Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave- Trading Dynasty in U.S. History (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2008)

98 Elite farmers and planters like Jeremiah Niles, the Brown family, and the Hazard family, dominated local politics. In South Kingstown, “from 1723 to 1774 the Hazard, Robinson,

Gardiner, Potter, Watson, and Niles families served seventy percent of the colony and county office terms held by South Kingstown men,” thereby allowing planters to protect their economic interests while also harnessing colonial authority that they needed to control slaves and retrieve runaways.217 The founding of Brown was, from its inception, a founding rooted in power for many of the corporation members and trustees—it was yet another element of regional and global control that allowed them to monitor and steer the direction of the colony’s future and education. This act of founding, at its time, can also be read as part of a colonial network of plantation control in which foundings and participation in regional governance allowed the wealthy elite to erase the memory and presence of the Native peoples who had inhabited the land they made claims while also maintaining a role in shaping the politics of that time in their favor so that slavery could continue.

Government participation and the sociopolitical lifestyles of elite planters in Rhode

Island also helped reinforce a social hierarchy in the colony. As Narragansett planters built wealth from their stake in the slave trade, they also “adopted the material culture that was associated with the British gentry.”218 This was a more implicit form of social control, but it is significant in demonstrating that Rhode Island planters sought to identify and align themselves with other planter-gentry abroad, while also reinforcing local notions of “civility” in the colony.

The creation of lavish homes, social clubs, sporting events, and lifestyles that showcased planter wealth was commonplace in Rhode Island. It is a tradition that still lives on today with the tourist attraction that places like Narragansett bring each year. This gentrification, or buying into a “gentry” lifestyle that was built off of plantation wealth, attracted other inter-colonial wealthy guests who had build their status off the slave trade. The planter elite of other colonies

217 Robert K., Fitts. Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island. (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 94. 218 Fitts, 95

99 in the South and the Caribbean, including the Governor of Bermuda and Thomas Pinckney of

South Carolina, came to Rhode Island as a place to summer and visit. As George Champlin

Mason writes,

““Everything was done to make the stay of visitors in Newport agreeable. The Boston Company of players opened the theatre, French dancing and music masters offered their services for the improvement of the young, and there were instructors who taught the young girls how to ‘make all sorts of gold, silver work for men and women’s wear;’ how to ‘clean gold, silver, and silk work’…It was customary with the leading families of the place to seek out and visit all persons of standing who were passing the summer here.”219

This elite lifestyle described above, and the regional hold that planters maintained in governance, solidified their property-based claims to power in a post-King Philip’s War colonial

New England. It also solidified their place in a global market of chattel slave-based property holdings, and their place in a colonial racial hierarchy that was forming within Rhode Island. As the colonists began to adopt more “civilized” ways of living: philosophical clubs, horse racing, hunting, hawking, fox chasing, portrait commissions, practicing trade and governance within and among other British colonies, any collective memory of their own brutality during King

Philip’s War was forgotten or conveniently brushed aside. These ornaments of civility helped them to justify what they had done and were continuing to do to the African slaves and Native peoples in Rhode Island: because these people did not display the same measures of “civility,”220 they could more easily be de-valued, de-civilized, and de-humanized.

But even within the multidimensional landscape of colonization in Rhode Island, which sought to devalue people of color, those who were made to be “subjects” of Rhode Island still wove a landscape for themselves that moves against and outside of colonial subject-hood. As

Christine Clark-Pujara importantly intervenes, while slavery and the plantation economy of

219 Champlin, George, Reminisces of Newport, (Newport, RI: Charles E. Hammett Jr., 1884), 11. Thomas Pinckney’s family owned multiple indigo plantations in South Carolina while Pinckney himself owned several rice plantations along the South Santee River. “National Register Properties in South Carolina: Fairfield Plantation, Charleston County (McClellanville vicinity).” South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Accessed April 21, 2017. http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/charleston/S10817710079/ Champlin also writes, “For many years before the war there was an active trade between the West Indies, Charlestown and Newport…many families from the West Indies and the Southern states made it a point to pass their summers here.” Champlin, 9. 220 Which were so deeply tied to wealth and resources—which few Native tribes or African slaves had at the time because the colonial wealth accumulation was so heavily dependent upon their labor and/or their lack of access to resources.

100 Rhode Island “created the framework” for the lives of the enslaved, it did not define or control them.221 Instead, modes of daily resistance and negotiation were a crucial component of how the enslaved were able to alter, map, and re-map the landscape of colonial rule that had been drawn onto Rhode Island. Clark-Pujara’s Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island makes use of public documents and archives throughout the colonial period to demonstrate the daily ways in which African and Native American slaves and indentured servants refused to be treated as chattel and reinforced their agency, countering attempts by colonial enslavers to view and treat them as commodities.222 Finding pleasure in and uses for their bodies and the landscapes they moved in that were independent of the enslaver’s uses were part of the constant disruptions and contestations of the Rhode Island slave economy.223 From transforming waterways and the landscape of Rhode Island into channels of escape and refuge, to ensuring that there were days of community building through cookouts, these daily modes of resistance disrupted and resisted

Rhode Island’s business of slavery at every level.224

In studying the larger web of colonization in eighteenth century Rhode Island, we can better understand how America and its institutions were built at the expense of other peoples’ freedoms. The project of American nation building in the eighteenth century was a dual project of freedom and enslavement. After captaining slave ships like the Sally, Esek Hopkins would later go on to serve in the Revolutionary War as a Naval Commander to fight for independence from English rule in the colonies. The creation of the American Navy deployed in the

Revolutionary war was financed in part by William and Samuel Vernon, merchants based out of

Newport who had sponsored more than thirty slaving ventures.225 Stephen Hopkins articulated liberal ideals of freedom in The Rights of Colonies Examined—one of the most influential

221 Christy, Clark-Pujara, “Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island,” University Lecture, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, February 5, 2017. 222Ibid. 223Ibid. 224Ibid. 225 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006),10.

101 pamphlets circulated during the revolutionary era—writing that “Liberty is the greatest blessing that men can enjoy, and slavery is the heaviest curse that human nature is capable of…those who are governed at the will of another, and whose property may be taken from them…are in the miserable condition of slaves.”226 And yet, at the same time, these notions of freedom were forged within the contexts of slavery, slave ownership, and slave-based societies. Just as

Hopkins articulated these liberal ideals of what it meant to be free, he simultaneously owned slaves and had presided over Rhode Island as governor while the colony’s involvement in the slave trade was at its height.227 These were the articulations of liberal ideals that were behind

Brown’s founding charter, and behind the founding documents of the United States—and they were also forged within the institutions of colonialism and slavery.

So perhaps it makes sense then, when we revisit the words of the charter, that Brown’s founding members boldly endowed themselves with rights to “have, take, possess, purchase, acquire, or otherwise receive and hold lands, tenements, hereditaments, goods, chattels, or other estates; all of which they may and shall stand and be seized…”228 That the corporation members gave themselves so much power over property—property of persons and land that was not their own and never had been—was no accident, but was instead another step that secured their claims to power in Rhode Island. We can therefore think of the University’s founding as a moment in which corporation members engaged in the long business of colonization and slavery within Rhode Island are able to continue that business through the creation of an educational institution. This also means that when we think of the University’s origins and mission, we cannot separate the University from the violent sociopolitical contexts in which it was founded.

226 Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of Colonies Examined, in Brown University Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice 227 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 11. 228 Brown University. “The Charter of Brown University with Amendments and Notes: 1945.” (Akerman-Standard Press, 1945) 7-8. https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/corporation/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.corporation/files /uploads/charter-of-brown-university.pdf.

102 If we still have not come to terms with these violent realities of our past, then it is also necessary to understand that we have not come to terms with the violent realities of our present.

Although the abolition of slavery within New England happened earlier than it did in the South, racial equality was not suddenly realized within the region. The descendants of the slaves who were brought to Rhode Island are still subject to ongoing public disbelief regarding the severity of Northern slavery. 229 This is one of the many symptoms of a society that has yet to come to terms with the severity of the deeply entrenched racism in many of its founding institutions.

This public disbelief around slavery in Rhode Island also represents a historical erasure: that of the reality of slavery and abolition in New England. Even after abolition in most parts of

New England, the desire to erase the region’s history of slavery had dire consequences for Black

New Englanders. As Joanne Pope Melish writes, “the promise implicit in antislavery rhetoric and abolition [was that] by ending ‘the problem’—the sin of slavery and the troublesome presence of slaves…the eventual absence of people of color themselves [would follow].”230 The post-abolition era in New England saw white New Englanders employ a variety of strategies to physically and symbolically erase, or “purify” in O’Brien’s words, the area of its ex-slave populations. These acts included digging up corpses, conducting official roundups and

‘warnings-out’; rioting in and vandalizing Black neighborhoods, and efforts by organizations like the Colonization Society, whose demonizing portrayals of free people of color were intended to raise funds in order to ship them back to Africa.231 But these acts of racialized violence are not relegated to nineteenth-century New England either. Instead, once we understand this racialized

229 One letter to the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice wrote, “You disgust me, as you disgust many other Americans. Slavery was wrong, but at that time it was a legal enterprise. It ended, case closed. You cite slavery’s effects as being the reason that black people are so far behind, but that just illustrates your ignorance. Black people, here and now, are behind because some can’t keep their hands off drugs, or guns, or can’t move forward, can’t get off welfare, can’t do the simple things to improve their life…They don’t deserve money, they deserve a boot in the backside over and over until they can find their own way…Can your ignorant research and can Ruth Simmons [then president of the University] too.” Brenda A. Allen, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice,” 9. 230 Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 2. 231 Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 2.

103 violence to be something that has been ongoing throughout the history of Rhode Island, we then have to ask ourselves what racialized violence continues to exist in the society we live in today.

For those of us who are still reeling from the damage that colonization has caused, these histories do not stay buried beneath Brown or the Mount Hope estate—they are carried with us and they are difficult to erase. And even within the foundations of Brown, and the estates that line the Narragansett Bay in Newport, or the charter of Brown University, our presence can still be seen, felt, and heard. But you have to look closely and listen carefully.

104

105

“Every tradition forbids the asking of certain questions about what has really happened to you.” 232

-John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man

232 Berger, John, and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man, Verso, 2010, 104.

106 Chapter 4:

What Happened Here?

History Repeated in the 250th Anniversary of Brown University

Within the construction of New England’s popular history, the violence of colonization is often represented as lamentable and tragic, but ultimately justifiable means to a good end. At worst, New England narratives of the past completely downplay or erase the violence inherent in the founding and maintenance of Rhode Island. These narratives create a second layer of rhetorical violence by pretending that Native Americans, African Americans, and their descendants, had nothing to do with the larger project of historical memory in the region.

This chapter argues that the violence towards marginalized peoples in the colonial founding of Rhode Island should be central to our understanding of New England history.

Within dominant or prevailing understandings of New England history, there is a pernicious erasure of this violence, which has had continued consequences for the way in which power is produced and reproduced within Rhode Island. Brown University’s own production of its history during the 250th anniversary celebration campaign that took place in 2014 offers us a microcosmic study of the ways in which the violence that was central to colonial founding is overlooked or understudied in New England in favor of celebratory narratives about exceptionalism and nation-building.

107 In recent years, members of the Brown University community have done important work with the examination of Brown’s role in the transatlantic slave trade in Rhode Island. These efforts on campus have led to tangible outcomes on campus like the Center for the Study of

Slavery and Justice and the 2004 Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on

Slavery and Justice. However, recent celebrations and histories produced around the 250th celebration of Brown’s founding demonstrate that there is still much more work that needs to be done in contending with the University’s colonial origins, and how those origins affect Brown

University in the present day. Projects of University celebration like the “Imagine Brown 250+” campaign in honor of the 250th anniversary of Brown successfully decontextualized the moment of founding that it sought to celebrate.233

A “New History for Brown”? The “Imagine Brown 250+” Campaign

The 250th anniversary celebration was a way for Brown to celebrate itself and its origins during a significant moment in its history. Through this celebration, the University hoped to

“build community, enhance external relations and profile” while also campaigning for the 2014 plan put forth by the University, “Building on Distinction: A New Plan for Brown.”234 In a somewhat ironic beginning to the University’s 250th campaign, Brown seemed to take the same approach to University-wide celebration that it had taken for University-wide reconciliation with the transatlantic slave trade: it convened a steering committee. The beginning stages of this event therefore involved the organization of a 250th Anniversary Steering Committee in 2011, which was charged with the task of “overseeing the development and implementation of a range of activities, events, and materials to reflect and showcase the University’s distinctive history, character culture, traditions, and future, engaging alumni, faculty, students, and their families,

233 Michel-Rolph Truillot. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995),131 234 “Planning Priorities,” in “Planning Brown’s 250th” Imagine Brown 250+ website, http://250.brown.edu/planning- brown-250. Accessed April 18th, 2017.

108 staff and communities and partners here in Rhode Island and around the world.” The resulting anniversary campaign was named “Imagine Brown 250+.” The celebration was reportedly global, and over a year long—lasting a total of 444 days from March 7th, 2014 to May 24th,

2015.235 In addition to the stated planning priorities of building community and enhancing external relations and profile, the anniversary celebration sought to “be true to Brown’s past, explore Brown of today and imagine Brown of tomorrow,” while also being “representative of and inclusive of Brown’s diverse global community,” with celebrations that would “range from serious to whimsical.” The celebration was therefore seen as a “moment in time to last well beyond 250th concluding events”—hence the university’s call to “Imagine Brown 250+.”236

Preparations for the opening of the anniversary included a branding campaign that was put up around campus and in bookstores, a live website dedicated to the anniversary, videos and multimedia celebrating Brown and detailing the anniversary events, and regional “Birthday in a

Box” Celebrations around the world, where “clubs and class organizations around the world receive funding and 250 supplies to bring 250 into their communities.”237 Celebrations began on

March 7th with a kickoff weekend on Brown’s campus and around the globe. On the Main Green of Brown’s campus, a “Friday night party” was hosted. Fireworks were set off above and in front of University Hall, student performances including a birthday song written for Brown were performed on stage, and a 600-pound cake replica of University Hall was cut by the President,

Chancellor, and Vice Chancellor, and distributed among onlookers—an invitation for everyone to have a slice of the 250th celebration.238

Although much of the campaign called on participants to celebrate Brown’s present while imagining Brown’s future, the University also placed an emphasis on the remembrance of

235 “Planning Brown’s 250th.” Imagine Brown 250+, accessed April 18, 2017. http://250.brown.edu/planning-brown-250. 236 “Planning Priorities: Planning Brown’s 250th.” Imagine Brown 250+, accessed April 18, 2017. http://250.brown.edu/planning-brown-250 237 “250 Overview Calendar,” Imagine Brown 250+, accessed April 18, 2017. http://www.brown.edu/web/documents/250/CalendarOverviewPublic.pdf 238 “A Celebration for the Ages: Anniversary in Review,” Imagine Brown 250+, accessed April 18, 2017. http://250.brown.edu/anniversary-in-review

109 Brown’s “unique and distinct” history as a way of bringing the wider community together.239 The roster of events, activities, and writings about Brown’s history focused primarily on a narrative of historical optimism and, perhaps, whimsicality. Early historical exhibits within the 250th campaign included an exhibition by the Haffenreffer Museum entitled “In Deo Speramus: The

Symbols and Ceremonies of Brown University.” Other historical notes about Brown included an interactive timeline and stories of Brown’s history that could be found on the 250th website.240

The Steering Committee of the 250th celebrations also sought to present “an honest and accurate account of Brown’s history…with plenty of celebratory high points, but also inclusive of the challenges that have faced the University over the years.”241 In particular, the University planned a dedication of the Slavery Memorial in September of 2014, along with the dedication of a new home for the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.242 While the 250th celebration does make the University’s relationship to the transatlantic slave trade known, there is little proliferation of the important research and findings outlined in the 2006 report by the Steering

Committee on Slavery and Justice in the rest of the 250th website.

Within the webpage entitled “Brown’s History,” there is no explicit mention of the slave trade, or the long process of colonization that allowed Brown to be founded in Warren and then move to Providence. “Brown was founded in 1764,” the page reads, “the third college in New

England and the seventh in Colonial America. Brown was the first Ivy League school to accept students from all religious affiliations, a testament to the spirit of openness that still typifies

239 “History Repeated: Anniversary in Review” Imagine Brown 250+, accessed April 18th, 2017. http://250.brown.edu/anniversary-in-review. 240 Ibid. 241 Ibid. 242“History Repeated: Anniversary in Review” Imagine Brown 250+, accessed April 18th, 2017. http://250.brown.edu/anniversary-in-review. From the website: “It is important to the Steering Committee that an honest and accurate account of Brown’s history be presented, with plenty of the celebratory high points, but also inclusive of the challenges that have faced the University over the years. In September 2014, as part of the Fall Celebration, hundreds assembled on the Front Green for a dedication of the Slavery Memorial, a work by the American sculptor Martin Puryear that was commissioned on the recommendation of the 2006 final report of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. The report was an investigation of the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade…The following month, the University dedicated the new home of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice which hosted an inaugural exhibition titled ‘Black Experiences at Brown.’”

110 Brown today.”243 The only mention of the slave trade here is a hyperlink to the Report of the

Committee on Slavery and Justice in a section at the bottom of the page entitled “More

Information.” It is the last link listed. That the history section of this website allocates more space for the discussion of religious freedoms and Brown’s “spirit of openness” in lieu of discussions about the involvement raises several important questions. This raises several important points about what is overlooked when we celebrate Brown’s founding commitment to religious freedom. In particular, although Brown University was founded as a place that accepted students from all religious affiliations, it was also founded as a Baptist college that could produce intellectuals and missionaries of the Baptist faith. The Baptist missionary work within New England that would foreground the need for Brown University was grounded in missionary work within Native communities. The practice of missionary work within New

England placed severe restrictions on Native American religious freedoms, and was also intimately linked with colonial expansion.244 Lastly, in order to build an institution that would be able to secure claims to religious freedom, the land first had to be colonized and clearer of

Native peoples through war and other means of acquisition, and the institution then had to be built using the labor of enslaved African American and Native American peoples.

Elsewhere, in the interactive timeline that has been set up on the website, there is mention of who lived on College Hill before the founders of Brown. In a section entitled

“Indigenous peoples,” the Brown timeline reads, “In the 1600s, the area now known as Rhode

Island had long been populated by various indigenous peoples, including the Narragansett, the

Niantic, the Wampanoag and the Manisseans.”245 This is the only mention of Native peoples in

New England in the timeline, effectively relegating the domain of Native peoples within the

243 ““Brown’s History,” Imagine Brown 250+, accessed April 18, 2017. http://250.brown.edu/browns-history 244 See Anne Makepeace, We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân, film, Bullfrog Films, 2010 for more discussion of missionary work, Native religious freedom, and colonization. In particular, “Monequassen, whole former Confession, read before the Elders, was as followeth” (32:02-32:30) written as follows: “When I first heard instruction I believed not, but laughed at it and scorned praying to God. I did think of running away because I cared not for praying to God. But because I loved the place where I lived I thought, ‘I will pray to God so that I can still stay at that place,’ therefore I prayed not for the love of God but for the love of the place I lived in.”244 245 “Indigenous Peoples.” Brown: A Timeline. Imagine Brown 250+. Accessed April 18th, 2017. http://250.brown.edu/timeline.

111 landscape of New England squarely within the past. This text also makes little mention of the processes by which Brown University was able to call other peoples’ homelands home.

The timeline also makes some mention of slavery and its relationship to Brown. Under the heading of “An Uncomfortable Truth,” the website notes the Brown family’s participation in the slave trade and the use of slave labor in building the College Edifice were components of the

University’s founding. The timeline entry for “An Uncomfortable Truth” includes a photograph of the archived donor pledges that started the University, with several donors’ pledges of slave labor for certain periods of time to build the College Edifice. “Building records for the College

Edifice, now known as University Hall,” the caption reads, “show that in addition to funds, donors pledged labor by their slaves. This document and others related to the University’s past were brought to light by the work of the Slavery and Justice Committee, appointed by Ruth

Simmons in 2003.”246 Beyond this reference to the Brown brothers’ involvement in the slave trade and the slave labor used to build University Hall, little else is mentioned of how central the slave trade was to Rhode Island and Brown University at the moment of the college’s founding in 1764.

So while it can be said that there is some mention of Native American and African

American peoples in relation to the University’s founding, there is a historical decontextualizing of the founding of Brown that is still taking place. From reading the history that Brown constructs within the 250th anniversary celebration, we would know very little about the long processes of colonization and the transatlantic slave trade within Rhode Island that can be traced back from Brown’s founding and its founders.

Overall, the history that is told of Brown within the 250th anniversary website and throughout the itinerary of celebrations between 2014 and 2015 offer important insights into the ways in which Brown continues to view itself. It is within this history, and the tradition of other master narratives like it, that Brown University continues on what Jean O’Brien terms a “New

246 “An Uncomfortable Truth,” Brown: A Timeline. Imagine Brown 250+ website. Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Accessed April 18th, 2017.

112 England replacement narrative,” in which New England colonists and the institutions of memory, place, and history that endure because of them “effect a stark break from the past, with non-Indians replacing Indians on the landscape” in a process of “purification that [is] central to the ongoing production of modernity.”247 Similarly, the minimization of Brown’s involvement in the slave trade contributes to an ongoing erasure of the centrality of the transatlantic slave trade to Rhode Island in the eighteenth century. This imaginative project of purifying Brown’s legacy—and by extension the legacy of Rhode Island—involves an intentional forgetting or replacement of the histories of violence that created both Brown University and Rhode Island.

History Repeated? Brown: The History of an Idea and Productions of University History

We can look to other instances of history projects about Brown produced in conjunction with the “Imagine Brown 250+” campaign to think about how these narratives continue to be produced and what effects they have on how we view the past and present. Of particular note is the history of Brown University that came out in 2015, Ted Widmer’s Brown: The History of an

Idea.

As an extension of the celebrations of Brown University’s 250th anniversary, another edition of Brown’s history as an institution was published and advertised on campus. Ted

Widmer’s Brown: The History of an Idea was positioned as a nostalgic look back at the institution’s past, meant to generate a shared sense of community, school spirit, and perhaps inspire a sense of awe in its readers. Widmer’s book was put on display in the front of the Brown

University bookstore for two years after its 2015 release, given its own section on the 250th website entitled “A New History for Brown,” and handed out at alumni events to promote it publicly as the newest edition of Brown’s history.

247 Jean O’Brien. Firstings and Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in Colonial New England.

113 Amidst the 250th anniversary campaign, the book was meant to encourage the greater

Brown community to “feel proud to be a Brunonian,”248 with the composition of “the most colorful and entertaining history of Brown University ever written.”249 It was a “pageant of U.S. history”250 that “captured the spirit not only of the institution, but of the community and the circumstances in which it thrived and grew,” with writing that was “as lively as the ‘lively experiment’ of Rhode Island itself.”251 Within these pages, Widmer’s history of Brown also positioned itself as a history of Rhode Island, connecting the institutional memory built into

Brown with the historical memory of the “lively experiment” of Rhode Island.

Widmer’s history of Brown traces the ancestry of the University back to the “founding father” of Rhode Island and the imaginative project of Rhode Island, an ancestral line that necessarily involves forgetting or co-opting the Native and African American histories, and side- stepping the threads of colonial violence interwoven into the fabric of founding. This project of forgetting is visible from the first page of the first chapter, “Brown Begins,” which Widmer opens with a Narragansett word and English translation quoted from Roger Williams’ A Key Into the

Language of America, written in 1643: “Pápisha. It is Sunne-rise.” That Widmer chose to use

Roger Williams’ translations of Narragansett language in A Key for each of his subsequent chapters’ beginnings speaks to the way in which he positions Brown’s history as a continuation of the work that Williams did in founding the colony of Rhode Island. Williams’ book, A Key

Into the Language of America has had enduring cultural influence on New England histories, and in particular, the way in which these histories talk about Native Americans in New England.

Widmer’s use of Narragansett language for each chapter in the book mirrors Roger Williams’

248 Praise by Tony Horwitz ’80, “author of Confederates in the Attic and Blue Latitudes” in “Praise for Brown: The History of an Idea” in Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of an Idea. (New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015. 249 Praise by Gordon S. Wood, “Pulitzer Prizewinner and Alva O. Way University Professor, Brown University” in Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of an Idea. (New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015). 250 Praise by Tony Horwitz ’80, “author of Confederates in the Attic and Blue Latitudes” in “Praise for Brown: The History of an Idea” in Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of an Idea. (New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015. 251 Praise by Gordon S. Wood, “Pulitzer Prizewinner and Alva O. Way University Professor, Brown University” Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of an Idea. (New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015).

114 translation of the Narragansett language in A Key—each translation is made to serve the larger processes of colonization and college building.

As Particia Rubertone points out in her work, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of

Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians, Williams’ A Key Into the Language of America was not the first written account of the Narragansetts, but it “became the standard by which subsequent generations of European Americans would come to know the Narragansetts.”252

Intended as a work of translation, A Key was meant to enable colonists to trade with, communicate with, and potentially convert the Narragansett peoples they might encounter in the emerging colony of Rhode Island. It is important to note that while this text might appear as a simple cultural translation tool, it also had larger implications within the historical context in which it was created. As a text that enabled colonial translation, trade, and conversion, it also helped to facilitate the channels of communication with the Narragansetts and other Native New

England peoples that were needed to create different dimensions of regional colonial power.

The cultural context that this text has had beyond the colonial period has positioned

Williams’ work as a decisive interpretation of Narragansett peoples, their language, and their lifeways.253 Williams’ “monopoly” on cultural translation has made A Key out to be a timeless and canonical work—and the metric by which subsequent generations of people engaged in the colonial project of Rhode Island can measure Narragansetts in a post-King Philip’s War context.254 This has led to the portrayals of Narragansetts after Williams’ account as somehow less than what they once were in A Key--“broken, defeated people who never quite recovered from the devastating insults of seventeenth-century colonialism.”255 But given this positioning of

Williams’ work as timeless, canonical, and in many ways absolute, the important question must be asked of who is doing the speaking within this work, and about whom? As Rubertone asks,

252 Rubertone, Patricia E. Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Willimas and the Narragansett Indians, (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), xiv. 253 Rubertone, Grave Undertaking, xv 254 Ibid. 255 Rubertone, Grave Undertakings, xiv

115 “What would seventeenth-century Narragansetts have thought of A Key, if they had read it?

Would they have ever acknowledges that Williams…knew more about them than they did about themselves?”256

Both Williams’ work in A Key into the Language of America and Widmer’s use of the text’s translations fail to contend with these questions. This common omission or co-optation of the Narragansett voice, as Michel-Rolph Truillot reminds us, creates certain “presences and absences embodied” in these works.257 These presences and absences are “not neutral or natural,” but are instead narrative structures that have important consequences for the distribution of power within an archive, within history, and within the societies and institutions that claim these stories about themselves.258

There is little mention of Native Americans and their presence in Rhode Island beyond page 24, and what Widmer does include about them is primarily in relation to his discussion of

Roger Williams. Within Widmer’s narrative, the ongoing story of Native American claims to their homelands in Rhode Island, and their existence beyond Roger Williams, becomes a moot point. “This was Narragansett land,” Widmer writes, “and when Williams arrived, he came not as a conqueror but as a supplicant, hoping to live in peace with the Native Americans, whom he befriended…The Indians received him generously and gave him land, including the parcel

Brown sits upon, as part of the original ‘Providence Plantations.’”259 This use of past tense claims to land renders Native peoples in the present invisible and questions about how Rhode Island came to be built on Native homelands become impossible to ask. Williams, “the original Rhode

Islander” in Widmer’s estimation, becomes the translator within this history, the means by which Native peoples are made visible to the reader, and the means by which Native peoples are

256 Patricia Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians, (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), xv. 257 Michel-Rolph Truillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 48 258 Truillot, Silencing the Past, 48-55 259Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of An Idea. 22

116 able to have relevance to the story of Brown.260 But, once Williams has disappeared from the pages of this history, so too do Native peoples.

Instead, what remains of Native peoples within this history of Brown is their language.

Widmer uses translations of Narragansett words taken from A Key to frame the rest of his history: “Pápisha. It is Sunne-rise” for chapter one, “Wuskáukamuck. New ground” for chapter two, “Aukeetaûmitch. Planting time” for chapter three, “Nippauochâumen. We are dancing” for chapter four, and “Núnnowwa. Harvest time” for chapter five. Using Narragansett words that, when strung together might represent some sort of symbolic overarching “harvesting” of the intellectual fruits of Brown University, Widmer writes a history of Brown that falls squarely into the historical “genre” of New England replacement narratives.261 This history follows similar logics of other New England historical narratives, in which “non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of social order worthy of notice.”262 Within the history of Brown’s creation, the only way in which Narragansett language and peoples can fit into the larger narrative is if their presence is relegated to the past and if their language is spoken by a translator: Roger Williams, the “original Rhode Islander.”263

Colonization and slavery are positioned as a lamentable byproduct of founding—cringe- worthy aberrations of a “lively experiment.” But ultimately, these transgressions are redeemed

260 Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of An Idea. 21 261 See Jean O’Brien’s Firstings and Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in Colonial New England 262 Jean O’Brien. Firstings and Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in Colonial New England. 263 This use of the Narragansett language in Brown: The History of an Idea also stands in contrast to the decades- long efforts of local Native language revitalization projects like the Wôpanââk Language Reclamation Project, where land, language, and life are understood to be intimately interconnected with one another. Native language revitalization processes in New England like the Wôpanââk Language Reclamation Project, which began in 1993 with Jessie ‘little doe’ Baird, are excellent examples of Native language revitalization projects that are historical projects by their very definition, as learning a Native language within a revitalization project necessitates asking how and why language fluency was lost in the first place. Today, this project is an ongoing joint collaboration with the Assonet Band of Wampanoag, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah and the Herring Pond Band of Wampanoag. A documentary on the efforts of Jessie ‘little doe’ Baird and members of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) community’s efforts to revitalize the Wampanoag language was made in 2010--We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân. In this film, Jessie ‘little doe’ Baird’s discussion of the Wampanoag word for land loss offers us an example of the ways in which Native language revitalization is tied to a process of learning the history of colonization. “nuhpunoshom.” translates roughly into “I fall down, onto the ground.” Instead, words like “nuhpunoshom” reveal the ways in which life, language, land, and memory are all understood to be interconnected in both the past and the present—to lose one’s land is also to lose one’s self, it is an act of falling down, of becoming destabilized and untethered. See “Project History.” Wôpanââk Language Reclamation Project. Accessed April 18, 2017. http://www.wlrp.org/project-history.html.

117 within the liberal ideals of free thought, speech, expression, and religion that have supposedly won out in the long term. Widmer’s history views the founding ideals of Rhode Island, and of

Brown, as the birthplace of a long American legacy of religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and an overall “theater of greatness” in which the nation we know today was able to come to fruition.264 From its inception with the arrival of the first colonists, “Rhode Island had been devoted to freedom of conscience…and it offered a natural home to the askers of hard questions.”265 The fact that slavery and colonization had to take place in order for colonial freedom of conscience to be realized within Rhode Island is seen as an abnormality rather than central components of founding.

In what is almost a serious contention with how Rhode Island, and Brown University, are both heavily implicated in the slave trade in 1764, Widmer writes, “For all the talk of liberty,

Rhode Islanders were in the forefront of the North American slave trade, carrying more than

100,000 Africans into bondage.”266 But, instead, a moment to discuss the gravity and violence involved in establishing this foundational cornerstone of Rhode Island’s economy—the transatlantic slave trade—is upstaged in this text by the larger story of how Brown became exceptional. For Widmer’s history of Brown, the transatlantic slave trade is just a massive

“contradiction,” one that would “take centuries to resolve and, indeed, it remains a work in progress.”267 Rather than understand how this “contradiction” is central to the formation of

Brown University, this history of Brown quickly moves on.

This contradiction is one that seems to be redeemed by the University’s founding and the liberal values it helped establish. “But,” Widmer writes of the contradictory involvement in the slave trade, “in 1764 it seemed the entire world was beginning anew, and the moment was right to launch a new educational enterprise.”268 This tactic of historical heroism positions Brown’s

264 Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of An Idea. 20 265 Widmer, 18 266 Widmer, 19 267 Widmer, 19 268 Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of An Idea. 19

118 involvement in the slave trade as something that is secondary to the larger business of founding an “educational enterprise.” 269 Is the fact that Brown’s “founding fathers” were deeply entrenched in a colonial society that relied on the slave trade and the colonization of indigenous peoples in New England truly a contradiction within the founding framework of Brown

University? Or does this seemingly contradictory logic of the founders reveal the fundamental shortcomings of the liberal ideals on which the University, the state, and later the nation, were all founded?

The entrepreneurial aspect of the so-called “educational enterprise” of Brown in 1764 is inextricably tied to both the business of the slave trade and the business of Native displacement.

That the world of Rhode Island in 1764 was able to feel as though it was “beginning anew” was precisely because the land base on which Brown was founded had been “purified” and cleared through war, massive population displacement of Native peoples, and the ongoing violence of colonization taking place in the Americas during the eighteenth century. When Widmer notes the population growth in Newport and Providence after Britain’s victory in the French and

Indian War in 1763, he writes that New England’s population had risen 59 percent between 1760 and 1780, offering readers a vivid description of the docks at each port hub, which “teemed with new arrivals, particularly from the British Isles, who brought with them a feeling that history was accelerating—with a quickening sense of economic activity, an inclination to start new ventures, and a sense that America was destined to become a theater of greatness.”270 This description is meant to capture the growth of Rhode Island, the exciting bustle of new beginnings, yet fails to mention what sort of economic activities were bringing in such a robust population boom from the British Isles (the transatlantic slave trade) and how the land on which Providence and Newport were built came to be so sparsely populated by 1760 (English colonization).

269 Patricia Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 22 270 Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of An Idea. 19

119 This connection of Brown’s foundings to an extended genealogy of liberal ideas that would found the United States, “what we take for granted today—the religious freedom enshrined in the First Amendment, the Four Freedoms, and the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights,”271 also connects Brown’s style of history to a long tradition of New England

“replacement narratives,”272 in which the violent history of how this “lively experiment” came to be is relegated to the background. This type of narrative upholds the colonial work done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by producing a local history where the “creation of modernity” is the “exclusive purview of Anglo Americans, and asserts the production of a new social order built on the ideas and practices of modernity”—which are primarily liberal ideas of the Enlightenment Age.273

That founding fathers of Brown University like Stephen Hopkins built names for themselves within the transatlantic slave trade is a fundamental component to understanding the Age of Liberty and Age of Enlightenment—and the institutions and nations build during this time. As historian Edmund Morgan notes, this is the “central paradox” of the Western political thought and societies that emerged from the seventeenth century—the Age of Liberty is also the

Age of Slavery.274 The processes of colonization and slavery produced the wealth that made independence and institutions like Brown possible, while also allowing notions of a liberal, modern, “free man” who “stood at the center of an enlightened world” to take hold in contrast to the imagined project of racial hierarchies and enslavement.275

Absent from Widmer’s historical account, and from Brown’s long historical account of itself, is a serious contention with how colonization of Rhode Island enabled Brown to come into being, and how Brown University, as an institution largely unbothered by its colonial origins for most of its 250 years of existence, has continued to reinforce the powers and hierarchies

271 Ted Widmer, Brown: The History of An Idea. 24 272 Jean O’Brien. Firstings and Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in Colonial New England. xxiii 273 Jean O’Brien. Firstings and Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in Colonial New England. xxiii 274 Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, (New York, New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2014), 6. 275 Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. (New York, New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2014), 8.

120 established by colonization in Rhode Island. When we place the study of these histories of violence at the center of how we understand Brown’s founding, and when we take this violence to be a fundamental component of the University’s origins, it reveals important fundamental shortcomings of the values and systems that shape the master narrative of American history.

The history of Brown is therefore deeply political—it is not just a neutral exercise of nostalgia and celebration. Instead, it has profound consequences for the ways in which we understand

Brown’s connection to the violence of colonization that took root in New England, and the ways in which those vectors of colonialism rework themselves in the present day.

Jean O’Brien has outlined the reoccurring narrative themes of New England which she terms the “New England replacement narrative,” in which locally constructed histories of New

England allowed colonists and subsequent iterations of New Englanders to construct their own origin stories on Native American land—casting Native American and African peoples and their descendants as understudies within “authentic” histories about colonial institutions.276 Christy

Clark-Pujara and other scholars like Joanne Pope Melish, and the researchers of the Brown

University Steering Committee Report on Slavery and Justice, among many others, have all outlined the need for understanding the investment in race-based slavery as a central component of Rhode Island’s history. Yet, even with this strong body of research, the road towards remembering is long, and amnesia about the colony’s violent past continues to be the norm. This is also true today on College Hill.

What is obscured amidst the larger pageant of Brown’s history, from the 250th celebrations to Widmer’s Brown: The History of an Idea, is just as crucial to our understanding of this University as what is mentioned. Searching for what lies within the background of

Brown’s history of itself reveals the breakdown of certain ideals that are taken for granted as markers of exceptionalism and liberty. It is therefore crucial that we understand Brown

University’s founding as part and parcel of a long history of colonization and slavery within

276 Jean O’Brien. Firstings and Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. (xxiii)

121 Rhode Island that made it possible to create this educational institution. Slavery and colonization were not aberrations or lapses of judgment within the founding of Rhode Island,

Brown University, and later the United States. Instead, these mechanisms of violence were central to the realization of liberal ideals like religious freedom and free thought—and their attendant institutions.

122

“As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.”

-Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

123

Conclusion:

Afterlives277 & Anticipated Futures278

What, then, is to be said about how legacies of the past function in our present-day at

Brown University? If we, as an institution, create a report, and an institute, and a memorial because of Brown’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and then, within the same breath of time, have an unprecedented celebration of Brown’s origins that is so global, so large, and so congratulatory that it warrants three years of preparation by a Steering Committee—what have we learned about our history? What do we refuse to learn about our history and, by extension, what do we refuse to acknowledge within the present?

Both Truillot and Hartmann speak to the urgency of understanding histories of violence that have been overlooked or silenced as a means of understanding the current conditions of the present and the imaginative possibilities of the future. In particular, Truillot reminds us that the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and other past horrors are possible only because of the renewal of practices of power and domination. “Thus,” he writes, “even in relation to The Past our authenticity resides in the struggles of our present. Only in that present can we be true or false to the past we choose to acknowledge.”279 If we are to think about the present-day renewal of systems of power that have their origins in the past, and if we are to think about “a history of the

277 Saidiya Hartmann, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, (New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6 278 Saidiya Hartmann, “Venus in Two Acts,” (Small Axe 12, Number 26, no. 2, June 2008: 1–14), 4. 279 Michel Rolph-Truillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 151.

124 present that strives to illuminate the intimacy of our lives with the dead,” as Hartmann notes, then the un-interrupted celebration of Brown’s 250th anniversary, as well as the current landscape of Brown University, both serve to replicate and renew the structures of power that facilitated the University’s founding.

This thesis has tried to contend with the violence of Brown’s founding, and the ways in which this violence continues on into the present day when we refuse to acknowledge what happened here so that Brown could begin its history. While important work around understanding this violence has been started with the creation of the Center for the Study of

Slavery and Justice and the research of the 2006 report by the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, the celebrations of the 250th anniversary and its attendant histories like Brown: The

History of an Idea demonstrate that this work is far from finished. Furthermore, in order to understand the full gravity of these histories of racialized violence, we need to view the history of colonization and slavery in Rhode Island together as a web of interwoven violence against

African and Native American peoples.

When we talk about Brown University’s implication in the racialized violence of the slave trade, we can name and examine the history of the Brown family in particular, but can also look to the members of the founding corporation as a whole for a larger understanding of how the business of slavery facilitated the business of building a university. These histories of the slave trade in Rhode Island are incomplete if we do not also talk about how the colonization of Native peoples and lands unfolded within Rhode Island. Land dispossession, war, and other forms of colonization within Rhode Island allowed colonists to clear the land of Native peoples, send them into slavery in the West Indies, and then profit off the sale or cultivation of their homelands. These profits established in the early stages of the Rhode Island colonial project would facilitate the colony’s entry into the slave trade in the eighteenth century. In the areas where Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples had lived prior to King Philip’s War, plantations, ports, and factories were built to facilitate the colony’s businesses in the transatlantic slave

125 trade. Sacred homelands and waterways were reconfigured to prevent Native peoples from having access to the landscapes they depended on, while also facilitating colonial entry into the slave trade. Within Rhode Island, therefore, there is no study of Native Americans and their history that doesn’t involve African Americans and the slave trade and, in Rhode Island, there is no study of African Americans that doesn’t involve Native peoples and colonization in the region.

On the legacies of slavery in the present day, Saidiya Hartmann writes, “if slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days…but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery…”280 The practice of studying about colonization and the transatlantic slave trade and their relationship to Brown University is therefore not just an exercise born out of the desire to constantly look to the past, but rather an attempt to contend with the “afterlives” of slavery and colonization as they manifest themselves in the present day. It is an attempt to trace the deep roots of the “racial calculus” and “political arithmetic” that continue to perpetuate violence towards people of color within and outside of the United States.

In thinking about these histories of violence as histories with enduring “afterlives” that echo and reach into the present day, we have to also think about the ways in which Brown

University continues to support and shape the present-day manifestations of these systems of power and violence. And we also have to think about how to re-conceptualize the process of grieving, mourning, and remembering these painful histories as we also move within the painful realities of the present. Yazir Henri and Heidi Grunebaum of the Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory in Cape Town, South Africa, offer important insights into thinking through histories of violence and trauma and creating notions of time and space that might allow for

280 Saidiya Hartmann, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6

126 these processes in their work, “Re-Historicizing Trauma: Reflections on Violence and Memory in Current-day Cape Town.”

“The time of the everyday development has a different temporality to the time of mourning, self-reclamation and of recovery. The challenge of slowing down and making sense of what the new moment of peace means must neither be taken for granted nor lost to the new war. Claiming back hope, giving time to reclaim time back from the abjected zones of pessimism and fracture to co-create collective spaces for practices of recovery is also to resist. Peace must include the plan to repair the lives and communities who were destroyed.”281

For Henri and Grunebaum, the time of the “everyday development” has a different speed, and a different “temporality” than the time of mourning and reflection that is needed in order to think through these legacies of the past as they work and re-work themselves into the present. If this is the case, then the rapid development of the “everyday” at Brown University has a very different relationship to time than the processes of mourning, hope, and resistance that are part of dealing with these histories. That Brown University can include an unveiling of a memorial dedicated to Brown’s involvement in the slave trade within a celebration of its 250th anniversary suggests that these processes of “everyday development” and “mourning, self- reclamation, and of recovery” continue to exist in very different temporal spaces on this campus.

As a result, these temporal differences also produce different understandings of what our obligations to the past and present are.

At the end of its report, the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice made a number of recommendations on what the University could do to think through how its legacies of involvement in the transatlantic slave trade echo into the present day and what the University might do about it. The recommendations it made included important suggestions around maintaining high ethical standards in regard to investments and gifts, writing that, “although slavery is no longer legal, it persists in many other parts of the world, alongside a variety of

281 Yazir Henri and Heidi Grunebaum, “Re-Historicising Trauma: Reflection on Violence and Memory in Current-Day Cape Town.” Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory (DACPM), (DACPM Occasional papers series, 2005), 6. http://www.worldcat.org/title/re-historicising-trauma-reflection-on-violence-and-memory-in-current-day-cape- town/oclc/485759128

127 many other forms of gross injustice. Given its history, the University has a special obligation to ensure that it does not profit from such practices.”282 The recommendations also included the expansion of opportunities at Brown for those disadvantaged by the legacies of slavery and the slave trade, and using resources of the University to help ensure a quality education for the children of Rhode Island.283

It is true that slavery, in many dimensions, no longer exists within the United States today as it did when Brown was founded, and it is also true that slavery in the form of human trafficking and other “forms of gross injustice” persist in many parts of the world. But, in addition to thinking globally about these issues, we should also think critically about how the dual logics of racial capitalism and slavery still shape labor practices, legal institutions, and mechanisms of policing within the United States. Otherwise, we run the risk of thinking that the

United States is the onward-marching model of progress, that bad things couldn’t possibly happen here—and that the racial logics established in our past bear no weight on our present day. It is also important that, just as Brown University pledges commitment in this document to expand opportunities at Brown for those disadvantaged by the legacies of slavery and slave trade while also ensuring quality education for children in Rhode Island, there is ongoing discussion and reflection on how Brown University may have had a role in these ongoing processes of institutional racism.

We therefore have to think about how the racial logics established within the colonial context of Brown’s founding have reworked and reformed themselves into policies and social realities within the present day. If we are planning to maintain high ethical standards in regards to investments and gifts, we should consider how our investments in fossil fuels, land and property, prisons, pipelines, and police commissioners continue to harm communities of color and reinforce the racial logics that undergirded slavery and colonization. If we are invested in

282 Brenda A. Allen, Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, James Campbell, Ross E. Cheit, et al. “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 2006), 85. 283 Brenda A. Allen, et, al., “Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice,” 85-87.

128 communities damaged by the legacies of slavery, and in expanding opportunities for them, then we need to consider how systems of mass incarceration and policing continue to harm these communities. We also need to consider how fair labor practices within the University like access to unions, higher wages, childcare, and comprehensive health care benefits, to name a few, might be an integral part of reckoning with the legacies of racial capitalism, slavery, and labor exploitation at this university.

The University has not yet contended with the ways in which its founding was implicated in the colonization of Rhode Island. As I have demonstrated in the previous pages, this failure to contend with ongoing legacies of colonization has serious material and psychological consequences for Native peoples in New England and Native students on campus—as well as indigenous peoples globally. Once we think through the local consequences of colonization, we should also ask ourselves how the University and the people who are a part of it continue this

“half-life” of colonization of indigenous lands in the present day.

This failure to contend with colonization at a University level also prevents us from understanding the full depth of interwoven histories amongst Native and African American peoples within the region. In Rhode Island, there is no study of Native peoples and the history of colonization that doesn’t involve African Americans, the slave trade and slavery. In Rhode

Island, there is no study of African Americans and the history of the slave trade that doesn’t involve Native peoples and colonization. These histories must be told together within the same pages.

In closing, I also want to think about what the resistant possibilities of interacting with and moving through the present on campus might be given these ongoing realities. In particular,

I have thought about the moments in which hope and time have been reclaimed from the

“abjected zones of pessimism,” as Yazir Henri and Heidi Grunebaum put it, and where spaces of

“recovery as a method of resistance that is always a daily practice” have existed for me during

129 my time here.284 I think back to the different moments of visible resistance on campus within my own communities here, like when Native Americans at Brown organized to get the University to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day as an official holiday in the Fall of 2015, when the Native

American and Indigenous Studies Initiative began after years of organizing on the part of Native

American faculty. I can think back to hear the drums echo off of University Hall at powwow on the Main Green—loudly asserting presence, claiming space with joy. But it has also been the daily practices of reclaiming time and space that have also allowed me to think of imaginative possibilities of the future while also carrying the past with me. Sometimes these daily practices are loud—loud laughter that leaves behind the unknown space of an echo, masking grief and celebrating joy in the same sounds. Other times, these daily practices are silent—like following the roots of a tree as it pushes through cracks along the concrete. These moments are all the work of recovery as resistance, the daily practices that demand to be remembered, recognized, and seen.

284 Yazir Henri and Heidi Grunebaum,“Re-Historicising Trauma: Reflection on Violence and Memory in Current-Day Cape Town,” Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory (DACPM), (DACPM Occasional papers series: 2005), 6 http://www.worldcat.org/title/re-historicising-trauma-reflection-on-violence-and-memory-in-current-day-cape- town/oclc/485759128.

130

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