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8 Recovering Histories of Struggle
9 In September of 1736 Mohegans held a ceremony on their reserved land
10 to name a new leader. This land, where perhaps three hundred or more
11 Mohegans were known to “dwell and plant” (Connecticut Archives, “In-
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dians” [hereafter ind], 1st ser., vol. 1:122), was engulfed by the town
13
of New London and was the remaining fragment of what had been a [1], (1)
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much larger reservation, long known to Connecticut officials as the “se-
15
questered lands” (1:89) or the “Mohegan fields” (1:122). 1 Three decades
16 Lines: 0 to 4
prior to this leadership ceremony, Mohegans initiated what became a
17 ———
lengthy and complex legal dispute with the colony of Connecticut in
18 10.60088
an effort to protect their reserved planting and hunting lands. In 1704
19 ———
Mohegan sachem Owaneco petitioned the English Crown to complain
20 Normal Pag
against dispossession at the hands of the Connecticut government; by
21 PgEnds: TEX
1705 an imperial commission determined that the lands in question had
22
23 been unjustly appropriated and should be restored to Mohegans. In set-
24 ting this order before the colony, the decision described Mohegans as “a [1], (1)
25 considerable tribe or people . . . [who] cannot subsist without their lands”
26 (Governor and Company of Connecticut, and Mohegan Indians, by their Guard-
27 ians: Certified Copy of Book of Proceedings before Commissioners of Review, 1769
28 [hereafter Proc.] 1769:29, emphasis in original).
29 This notion that the presumably conquered Indians in their midst
30 existed as distinct political entities – as peoples who possessed an inherent
31 and enduring right to their reserved lands – was to become a gnarly bone
32 of contention for the Connecticut government. 2 Indeed, in eighteenth-
33 century Connecticut disputes over Native rights to reservation land, and
34 reservation communities’ tenacious struggles to preserve these lands,
35 posed a challenge to colonial authority and called into question colo-
36 nial notions about conquest itself. 3 As Native women and men resisted
37 colonial encroachment on their reserved lands, so too did they argue
38 for the future of their communities and their collective rights to their
1
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Dilemmas of Conquest
1 remaining lands. Their efforts to resist dispossession in the era follow-
2 ing the devastation wrought by European disease, the major “Indian
3 Wars” of southern New England, and the extensive expropriation of in-
4 digenous lands during the seventeenth century were in no sense a flight
5 of fancy. 4 The eighteenth-century struggles of reservation communities
6 were grounded in and produced by their own knowledge of the past and
7 of the colonial world in which they were enmeshed. This book examines
8 these histories of struggle and the cultural and political facets of colonial
9 relations of domination beyond the period of military conquest.
10 Native women and men defending their reservations against en-
11 croachers and colonial pillaging of their ever-diminishing economic re-
12 sources well understood the tenuousness of colonial justice. This they
13 made clear in their protests, some of which were articulated in petitions [2], (2)
14 to the Connecticut government requesting its intervention or protection
15 in land disputes. In much rarer instances, Native communities opposing
16 both dispossession and government intrusion into their own political Lines: 41
17 affairs overtly defied colonial authority, as was the case with Mohegan ———
18 resisters who brought their complaints to the Crown and mounted a 0.0pt P
19 public protest in September 1736. The colonial government did not take ———
20 such defiance lightly, and its responses to Native resistance in this period Normal P
21 offer important insight into the cultural and legal machinations of colo- PgEnds: T
22 nial power in the context of nonmilitary (but not necessarily nonviolent)
23 confrontations with indigenous people.
24 I have begun with the Mohegan leadership ceremony to suggest that [2], (2)
25 Native resistance to conquest – conquest, that is, as an ongoing, multi-
26 form process extending beyond the seventeenth-century period of “con-
27 tact” and “pacification” – was central to the production of local Na-
28 tive histories in the eighteenth century. Moreover, the 1736 ceremony
29 is elicited to begin to demonstrate that the locus of this challenge to
30 colonial domination was reservation land: land that was “set apart” or
31 “sequestered” for a particular Native people or community, and that was
32 acknowledged and ostensibly protected by colonial law. In profound and
33 persistent ways these lands proved not to be wholly conquered terrain.
34 Bound up in eighteenth-century disputes over reservation lands were
35 questions about legal ownership and Native land use, intertwined with
36 competing interpretations of history, Indian identity, and the possible
37 future of Native communities. These disputes embroiled members of
38 reservation communities, encroachers, government officials, colonial
2
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Dilemmas of Conquest
1 “guardians” of reservation land, and missionaries in debates that pro-
2 duced and contested notions of Indianness, conquest, and cultural le-
3 gitimacy that were to have lasting consequences.
4 A brief introduction to the legally and culturally contentious matters
5 of the Mohegan case elucidates this point. Connecticut refused to com-
6 ply with the 1705 decision and did not let pass the suggestion that the
7 Mohegan people constituted something akin to an autonomous or sov-
8 ereign political entity: in its appeal to the Crown, Connecticut’s repre-
9 sentative Sir Henry Ashurst asserted that Mohegans were instead “in-
10 considerable Indians” (Proc. 1769:153–55). As the eighteenth century and
11 reservation communities’ opposition to dispossession wore on, such
12 disparagements came to be no minor point in Native-Anglo disputes
13 over rights to reservation land, and in fact, Connecticut’s characteriza- [3], (3)
14 tion of Mohegan people in its response to the 1705 decision hinted at
15 the emergence of a colonial Indian policy that would divert attention
16 from the problem of illegal encroachment on reservation lands and focus Lines: 45 to
17 instead on the presumed cultural and political illegitimacy of reservation ———
18 communities and particular Native identities. 0.0pt PgV
19 Indian policy and colonial laws directed at Native populations in eigh- ———
20 teenth-century Connecticut recycled and sustained European ideas Normal Pag
21 about Indian “savagery” that had infused colonial relations of domi- PgEnds: TEX
22 nation in the seventeenth century, such as the notion that Indians did
23 not “improve” the land and thus did not have property rights compa-
24 rable to that of their “civilized” European conquerors. But colonial de- [3], (3)
25 bates over the legal status of reservations reflected shifting and com-
26 peting colonial notions about the nature of indigenous land rights, and
27 about Indianness as well. Colonists who sought to claim reserved lands
28 for themselves, and the government officials from whom reservation
29 communities sought redress for encroachment, occasionally asserted
30 conflicting views about the nature of Native rights to reserved lands.
31 In one rather telling instance, town leaders in Groton petitioned the
32 Connecticut General Assembly in an effort to bring an end to the “long
33 controversy” over who held the right to “improve” Mashantucket Pequot
34 reservation land (ind 2nd, 2:109), which was encompassed by the town
35 of Groton at the time. This controversy, they argued, “appears likely to
36 continue and the matter somewhat doubtful, how far said Proprietors
37 [those who controlled the town’s “undivided” or “common” lands] have
38 a right in said lands or whether said Indians have any more than a right
3
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1 to the use and improvement of s[ai]d lands according to their ancient
2 manners of improvement of lands and not the absolute fee thereof [i.e.,
3 the legal title to the land] – and the courts have judged variously relating
4 thereto” (2:109). Colonial assessments of Natives’ agricultural practices
5 and of the value of their labor were thus infused into the legal debate
6 over rights to reservation land. And if colonial legislators did not defini-
7 tively establish the nature of Natives’ land rights or the validity of their
8 “ancient manners,” encroachers sometimes resorted to more aggres-
9 sive means of appropriating reservation land: targeting Indian labor and
10 laying waste to a reservation community’s crops – by employing such
11 tactics, for instance, as “cut[ting] our Stoaks [cornstalks]” before the
12 corn was ready for harvesting – was not an uncommon practice among
13 encroachers (ind 1st, 1:227, 1:231; see chapter 5 for further discussion). [4], (4)
14 Mashantucket Pequots reported in 1735 that “wee Shold be Glad if thare
15 Cold be a Stop Put to it the Stoake being our own Labbour wee Shold be
16 Glad to have them for our own use” (1:227). Lines: 49
17 Although encroachers and colonial officials alike obscured or ignored ———
18 it in the eighteenth century, the fact remained that the colony of Con- 0.0pt P
19 necticut had set down a precise definition of Native rights to reserva- ———
20 tion land in a 1680 law, which stipulated the following: “what land is Normal P
21 allotted or set apart for any parcels of Indians within the bownds of any PgEnds: T
22 plantation, it shall be recorded to them and the same shall remayn to
23 them and their heirs for ever; and it shall not be in the power of any
24 such Indian or Indians to make any alienation thereof; and whatsoever [4], (4)
25 Englishmen shall purchases any such lands layd out or allotted to the
26 sayd Indians, he shall forfeit treble the value of what he so purchases
27 to the publique treasure, and the bargain shall be voyd and null” (Pub-
28 lic Records of the Colony of Connecticut [hereafter CR], 3:56–57). The phrase
29 in the 1680 reservation law that was to become most problematic for
30 the Connecticut government in the eighteenth century – “shall remayn to
31 them and their heirs for ever” – not only acknowledged Natives’ collective
32 rights to their reserved lands but also acknowledged the land rights of
33 the future generations of those “parcells of Indians” possessing reserva-
34 tion lands. This notion that a Native people or community held rights to
35 their reserved land as a collectivity, in perpetuity (a notion encoded in this
36 colonial law after English military supremacy had been finally established
37 over the Native peoples of southern New England with the culmination
38 of “King Philip’s War” in 1676) embodied a key dilemma for colonial
4
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Dilemmas of Conquest
1 authority in the eighteenth century: that the claim of conquest – as the
2 historical and “legal” grounding of colonial legitimacy – was to be miti-
3 gated not only by the persistence of indigenous identities in the colonial
4 world but by Natives’ own assertions of historical continuity and polit-
5 ical autonomy. If military conquest was to have initiated the inevitable
6 disappearance of Indians from the landscape and was thus to have paved
7 the way for ever-expanding, unobstructed colonial “settlement,” reser-
8 vations and the Native communities that continued to live upon and de-
9 fend them were an historically evocative and legally unsettling presence
10 in the eighteenth-century colonial world.
11 The documents that recount disputes over reservation land in eigh-
12 teenth-century New London County indicate that this presence, espe-
13 cially as it was manifested in sometimes overt expressions of Native re- [5], (5)
14 sistance to colonial authority, was keenly felt by colonial officials and
15 encroachers alike, eliciting, not surprisingly, affirmations of conquest as
16 well as derogations of Indianness and Indian land use. And in the eigh- Lines: 51 to
17 teenth century, new tactics of surveillance and control emerged as those ———
18 who sought to circumvent the 1680 reservation law determined that it 0.0pt PgV
19 was not colonial encroachment that required monitoring, but reserva- ———
20 tion communities themselves: their size and the numbers of adult men Normal Pag
21 among them, their use of reservation land, and indeed their Indian iden- PgEnds: TEX
22 tity. 5
23 During the course of the legal disputes over both the Mohegan and
24 Mashantucket Pequot reservations in eighteenth-century New London [5], (5)
25 County, examined at length in chapters 4 and 5, the 1680 law was evoked
26 by Native complainants and obfuscated by their opponents. In the Mo-
27 hegan case, for instance, the 1680 law was submitted to confirm the
28 illegality of the colony’s appropriation of reserved Mohegan land, and
29 thus it offered a legal counterpoint to Connecticut’s claim that all Mo-
30 hegan lands were ultimately “conquest lands” won via the massacre of
31 Pequots in 1637. The very idea of military conquest, and the presumption
32 that it had erased indigenous land rights as well as indigenous histories,
33 weighed heavily upon reservation communities in eighteenth-century
34 Connecticut. Yet, as Mohegans made clear in September 1736, Native
35 women and men continued to view themselves as agents in, and inter-
36 preters of, their own histories.
37 It was perhaps the audacious claim to both political autonomy and
38 historical relevance that most vexed Connecticut officials contending
5
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Dilemmas of Conquest
1 with Mohegan resisters in 1736. Squelching Mohegan resistance to dis-
2 possession during the three decades following the 1705 decision turned
3 out to be a difficult endeavor, and as chapter 4 illustrates, colonial of-
4 ficials and usurpers of reservation land deployed both legal chicanery
5 and conventional colonial strategies of cultural domination (i.e., “civiliz-
6 ing” and “Christianizing”) in an effort to “quiet” Mohegans’ complaints,
7 as officials would phrase it in that era. The interweaving of these tac-
8 tics, and the Connecticut government’s efforts to undermine and control
9 Mohegan sachems, served to mask the illegality of dispossession. As I
10 explain in chapters 3 through 6, such legal and cultural manipulations
11 were not necessarily subtle discursive maneuvers, nor were they wholly
12 detached from threats of force. Indeed, it was ultimately raw exertions of
13 colonial power, buttressed and legitimized by the language of colonial [6], (6)
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law and the mission to “civilize,” that silenced Native resistance and
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trampled reservation communities’ rights to their lands. In colonial sit-
16 Lines: 57
uations power is both veiled and conveyed by discourse; and in the con-
17 ———
text of Native-Anglo disputes over reservation land in eighteenth-century
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Connecticut, colonial claims to legal and cultural legitimacy continued to
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depend upon the production and dissemination of politically expedient
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notions of Indianness.
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Tracing the machinations of colonial power during the course of the
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Mohegan case thus becomes important to our understanding of how
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24 new or refined tactics of subjugation – particularly those infused with [6], (6)
25 such malleable cultural meanings – were produced and sustained af-
26 ter colonial military supremacy was established. But eighteenth-century
27 contests over rights to reservation land are also immensely important be-
28 cause they reveal connections between relations of power in the past and
29 those that shape Native struggles in the present, particularly in south-
30 ern New England, where the practice of interrogating and denying the
31 authenticity of Native identities has been a popular Euro-American re-
32 sponse to Native communities’ efforts to assert their sovereignty and
33 land rights or narrate their own histories. In Connecticut, Euro-Amer-
34 ican scrutiny and disparagement of particular Indian identities – com-
35 monly expressed in distinctly racialized and racist terms – has been the
36 prevailing response to federal acknowledgment petitions over the last
37 decade and has been an effective means of silencing local Native histo-
38 ries.
6
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1 The surveillance of Native identities, and the production of specific
2 notions of Indian “illegitimacy,” became strategic means of eliding the
3 legal question of Native land rights in eighteenth-century Connecticut.
4 In the 1730s, Connecticut’s governor Joseph Talcott sought to control
5 political leadership within the Mohegan reservation community in order
6 to thwart Mohegans’ legal case against the colony. Ben Uncas II was to
7 have been the Mohegan sachem of compliance for the colony; but Mohe-
8 gans themselves had embraced another as their rightful representative:
9 Mahomet II, who had journeyed to England in 1736 with Mohegans’
10 second complaint against Connecticut in hand. Talcott, seeking to un-
11 dermine Mahomet’s leadership, claimed that he was an “impostor,” nei-
12 ther a legitimate sachem nor a legitimate Mohegan. In an effort to prove
13 this, Talcott dispatched an official to the Mohegan reservation with or- [7], (7)
14 ders to interrogate Mohegans and extract from them “Evidences of their
15 Discarding of Mahamit the 2” (Talcott Papers [hereafter TP], 1:337, 350).
16 The operative, however, informed Talcott in February 1736 that he could Lines: 60 to
17 gain no such evidence against the rebellious sachem (1:350). Mahomet ———
18 II, whose mission to England had threatened colonial authority enough 0.0pt PgV
19 that his own identity – as both a sachem and a Mohegan – was subjected ———
20 to what we might refer to today as a smear campaign, died of smallpox Normal Pag
21 in August of that year while still in England. PgEnds: TEX
22 The testimony of the two colonists present at the September 1736
23 ceremony indicates that word of Mahomet’s death had not yet reached
24 the reservation community. Nonetheless, the account of the event reveals [7], (7)
25 that it was not only their sachem but the broader population of Mohegan
26 people who had become defiant, refusing to yield to the will of the Con-
27 necticut government. These were the people who had been described
28 by Talcott’s investigator just months before as unworthy of the Crown’s
29 attention since they were, he claimed, “not only few but miserable pore
30 [poor]” (TP 1:350). The ceremony’s colonial observers, however, offered
31 a contrasting view of Mohegans on September 10, 1736, when, as they
32 reported, “a very great number of Moheagan Indians” gathered “on the
33 Indian land at Moheagan,” the “general seat and rendezvous of the said
34 Indians,” and announced that “the principal cause of their meeting or
35 dance” was to “establish Anne the daughter of [deceased sachem] Ce-
36 sar . . . to be their ruler until Mahomet [II] returned” (Proc. 1769:235–
37 36). During the ceremony Mohegans also declared their support for Ma-
38 homet’s endeavor in England and their rejection of Ben Uncas II, who
7
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1 had, it seemed, crumpled to the will of colonial officials and encroachers
2 alike. 6
3 As chapter 4 explains in further detail, the September 1736 ceremony
4 was a significant act of political protest, one that chafed at the presump-
5 tions of colonial authority. It marks an important moment not only in
6 Mohegan history but in the history of colonial debates over Native land
7 rights in the region. For one thing, both the Mohegan land case and
8 the broader question of Native land rights had become a rather trou-
9 blesome legal matter for Connecticut. Mohegans had raised the possi-
10 bility that yet another imperial commission would be assigned to in-
11 vestigate the legality of colonial claims to Mohegan land. Moreover, in
12 eighteenth-century Connecticut there were other struggles over reserva-
13 tion land running concurrently with that waged by Mohegans and posing [8], (8)
14 multiple legal dilemmas for the colony. New London County – which
15 encompassed Connecticut’s largest combined population of indigenous
16 peoples as well as the four largest reservations in the colony – was a Lines: 65
17 critical site of Native resistance in the period beyond military conquest. ———
18 During the first half of the eighteenth century, Mohegans as well as 0.0pt P
19 their neighboring reservation communities in New London County – ———
20 Mashantucket Pequots at their reservation in Groton, Eastern Pequots in Normal P
21 Stonington, and Niantics in Lyme – had submitted petitions to the Con- * PgEnds: E
22 necticut General Assembly that detailed the acts of encroachers, invoked
23 colonial laws established to protect reservation land, and called upon the
24 Connecticut government for justice. In September 1736 these struggles [8], (8)
25 against dispossession converged when Mohegans were joined by Pequot
26 and Niantic supporters “at a general meeting” during which “the whole
27 body of them did renounce Ben Uncas [II]” (Proc. 1769:218). Coincid-
28 ing, then, with the Mohegan leadership ceremony, this concerted act of
29 protest was compelling evidence of the formation of a political alliance
30 among these reservation communities, communities that colonial reser-
31 vation boundaries were to have rigidly demarcated and contained, but
32 that were nonetheless connected by ties of kinship, as well as a common
33 history of struggle against ongoing processes of conquest. 7 In this in-
34 stance Mohegans, Pequots, and Niantics openly proclaimed their con-
35 sciousness of that shared historical experience, and their willingness to
36 act upon it.
37 In recounting these histories of struggle, I have sought to identify
38 and examine the moments and expressions of dissent that suggest that
8
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38 Reservation Communities in New London County, Connecticut, ca. 1700
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Dilemmas of Conquest
1 reservation communities envisioned a past, and a future, that challenged
2 the history dictated by their presumed conquerors. Thus I begin to trace
3 the course of disputes over reservation land and articulations of Na-
4 tive resistance to dispossession in the early eighteenth century, after
5 the fundamental institutions of colonial power – that is, military force
6 and an imposed “rule of law” – were to have precluded the possibility
7 for politically effective or historically significant opposition to colonial
8 domination.
9 As I argue in chapter 2, colonial discourse played an extremely impor-
10 tant role in producing ideas about Indianness that underpinned colonial
11 claims to land and justified dispossession and domination of indigenous
12 peoples long after colonial military supremacy was established in south-
13 ern New England. In the context of eighteenth-century struggles over [10], (10)
14 reservation land, the evocation of certain constructions of Indianness,
15 particularly those that were forged in colonial narrations of Connecti-
16 Lines: 87
cut’s foundational moment of military conquest – the so-called Pequot
17 ———
War – infused colonial assessments of Native land rights. And as chap-
18 10.200
ters 4 and 5 illustrate, “Pequot conquest” was invoked and referenced at
19 ———
crucial junctures during the disputes over both Mohegan and Mashan-
20 Normal P
tucket Pequot reservation land. Indeed the idea of “Pequot conquest”
21 PgEnds: T
took on a renewed significance for colonial authority in the early eigh-
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teenth century, serving to justify encroachment on reservation lands and
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obfuscate Native histories. [10], (10)
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26 Narrations of Power and the Cultural Claims of Conquest
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28 Legitimacy is the central dilemma of conquest, one not to be resolved by
29 military “victories” over indigenous peoples. How it is to be manufac-
30 tured and normalized is a cultural problem that is intertwined with the
31 material, inherently violent project of imposing and enforcing a system
32 of domination. Conquest must be understood, then, as entailing varied,
33 imbricated material and discursive processes. The process of disposses-
34 sion that lies at the core of the European and Euro-American geographic
35 conquest of North America has not only entailed physical acts of ex-
36 propriation. It has also required the construction and naturalization of
37 particular cultural concepts and representations: the concept of land,
38 for instance, as a commodity or as “property”; representations of in-
10
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