J. KEHAULANI KAUANUI:
So I want to--
also want to acknowledge the
Narragansett and Wampanoag
peoples as well as acknowledge
the Pokanoket in their claim
here to acknowledge this
land and the enduring
sovereignty of the indigenous
peoples whose homeland
this place sits.
Thanks to the organizers of
this event and the sponsors,
the Center for the Study of
Race and Ethnicity in America,
the Center for Latin American
and Caribbean Studies,
the Sawyer Seminar on Race and
Indigeneity in the Americas.
Mahalo nui loa.
Also, for those of
you who have just
come into the foyer on--
the foyers on either side,
there is a streaming room.
Believe it's the south
common room upstairs.
AUDIENCE: It's
directly above us.
J. KEHAULANI KAUANUI: Also,
especially for other Kanaka
'Oiwi, Kanaka Maoli in the
room, a quick note in terms
of [NON-ENGLISH]---- although
I'm not new to most of you.
But I know there could be
other people in the room.
As my surname indicates, I
come from the Kauanui 'ohana.
I am a diasporic
daughter born and raised
in Southern California
on Gabrielino territory
and then moved to
Juaneno territory.
And I'm Hawaiian on
my father's side.
And we hail from--
at least in the
most recent decades,
my closest kin live in on
Anahola Hawaiian homelands
on the island of Kauai.
And the Kauanui line is
my grandfather's line.
Both my father's
parents were Kanaka.
And Kauanui takes us to Kanakaki
homelands on Moloka'I. And we
trace back to [? Nakihoa ?]
[? kau ?] [? muali'i. ?] And
on my father's mother's line,
we trace all the way through
various parts of Maui and
[? Mokuo ?] [? kiave ?] through
my mother's mother-- my
grandmother's mother,
[? Annie ?] [? Ko'ohoeikani. ?]
Can you hear me in the back?
It's a little awkward, because
I'm so tall, and the mic--
I'm used to the mic
being a little higher.
Coming to you from
Connecticut, I reside and work
in a place known as Middletown.
The traditional place name is
Mattabesset or Mattabessec,
homeland of the Wangunk people,
who thrive in the 21st century.
Wangunk-- the people at
the bend of the river.
The Wangunk historically
presided over
both sides of the
Connecticut River--
in present day, Middletown,
Portland, Cromwell, Durham,
Haddam, Wethersfield,
East Haddam, East Hampton,
Glastonbury, and Portland.
I moved to Middletown from
Santa Cruz, California in 2000.
The city of Middletown
was celebrating
its founding, its settler
founding, its 350th year.
And I saw in the newspaper
that they were going
to have a parade and pageantry.
And so I called city
council and asked
if the Indian tribe
whose homeland we're on--
and I didn't know at
the time who that was,
that they were the Wangunk.
And I wanted to know--
I had been looking to try and
find out whose land I was on.
It wasn't clear to me
before I moved there.
This is something I learned how
to do, first and foremost, when
I was an undergraduate
at UC Berkeley
and heard Kawaipuna Prejean
give a talk in 1989.
And we were already
bringing up Kanaka Maoli.
I was working with native
Hawaiian community in the Bay
Area.
And we were bringing
up our speakers
to talk about the
Hawaiian land situation.
And this is prior to the US
apology for the overthrow.
So everything was a battle.
Because the US
hadn't acknowledged
the illegality of that overthrow
of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
And I was so excited to
meet Kawaipuna Prejean.
And he said--
I had just gotten there.
I had transferred from community
college in Southern California.
And it was my first semester.
And he said, if you're
going to do that work,
you have to work with the people
of the land where you are now.
And he knew that
through his own ethics,
but also because he had
gone to the United Nations,
and had also worked with the
international Indian Treaty
Council.
So this was part of how I was--
cut my teeth politically.
And so I was
searching to find out
whose land I was on when
I moved to Mattabesset--
Middletown-- 19 years ago.
When I called city
council and said,
will there be any
of the native groups
of this land in
that ceremony, they
said, well, of course,
people whose families
who have been here
for 350 years.
The natives will be here.
And I said, no, I don't mean
white people as natives.
I'm talking about
American Indians.
And what's the
name of the tribe?
Well, they didn't even
actually know what I was asking
or what I was after.
There was deep confusion
and irritation on the line.
I got put on hold.
Somebody brought a
supervisor on the phone.
Ma'am, is there a problem?
Well yes, there is.
I'm just trying to
figure out two things--
the name of the
tribe of the place
now called Middletown,
whose land we
are on, and if
they'll be taking part
in this 350th commemoration.
He responded, they're extinct.
So I asked, well, who are they?
Or who were they?
His answer-- well, I don't know.
Maybe you could call somebody
at Foxwoods Casino and ask.
I was incensed.
I should note that
I did not even
get an easy answer
on the phone when
I telephoned the Connecticut
Historical Society.
But eventually, I did find
out, through scholar Paul
Grant-Costa, who
was then completing
his doctorate in history
at Yale University,
that it was the Wangunk.
And literally,
within a week, I had
been going through parts
of the northwest corridor
of Connecticut, where
the first Hawaiian was
Christianized, Opukaha'ia,
also known as Henry Opukahaia.
And I wanted to see this place
of early Hawaiian presence
in Connecticut in the
early 19th century.
He arrived in 1809 on Captain
Britnall's ship in New Haven.
And I was excited.
I had just moved there.
I was trying to figure out
the place and get my bearings.
And I saw this place that said
"Polynesian all-you-can-eat
buffet."
And I'm like, yes.
It was neither.
But there was a placemat that
was an antiquated outline
map of Connecticut.
And it had Wangunk right
in the middle of it.
I would later see
this reproduction
in Amy Den Ouden's
book Beyond Conquest.
So it's a colonial map that they
had made into paper placemats
at this fake, not
all-you-can-eat,
non-Polynesian buffet.
I took it as a sign.
OK, I was like, should I go back
to California, go to Hawaii?
No.
So as I would eventually
learn, while the official state
doctrine still claims that
the Wangunk are extinct,
there are 21st century Wangunk
people alive and thriving
today.
My talk here today seeks to
examine that contradiction,
the legacy of erasure
and invisibility
and how to confront
this history.
The Wangunk people have
endured colonial encroachment
by the Dutch, the English, and
the Americans for centuries.
And despite contemporary
US settler colonialism
and its attendant erasure
and denial of their presence,
there are Wangunk
people who still reside
in their traditional territory.
And for those of us who
are not Wangunk and who
live in their homeland,
the time is long overdue
to negotiate ethical
relationships
to the indigenous
people of that place.
This necessarily entails
confronting what decolonization
can mean in a settler
colonial context with a focus
on learning the
history of erasure
and the erasure of history.
As such, decolonization
then includes
a commitment to
decoloniality, should
impact historical
interpretation,
and by extension,
studies of race,
and ethnicity, and
indigeneity that challenge
the logic of elimination.
In hegemonic legal
discourse, as well as
dominant academic paradigms,
discussions of decolonization
most often take former
franchise colonies
as their point of reference.
Post-colonial theory
itself emerged
from the study of the
cultural legacy of colonialism
and imperialism,
and how it endures
after putative decolonization.
An example would be Britain
in North America, a settler
colonial case, as distinct
from Britain in India,
a franchise colonial case.
Additionally, core
theories of decolonization
are based on examples of
African slave societies
and emancipation from
white supremacist
violence and domination.
Thus, in tending to
settler colonialism
as an ongoing structure
of domination,
what decolonization
must entail will
differ than in other
colonial situations.
In Patrick Wolfe's theorization
of settler colonialism,
he argued that this
model of domination
operates by the logic of
elimination of the native.
And that's his phrasing
and his concept.
And he argues that that is
the guiding or underriding,
overarching logic, because
the acquisition of land
is the central feature
and hallmark of settler
colonialism.
As Wolfe noted, because settler
colonialism, quote, "destroys
to replace," it is, quote,
"inherently eliminatory but not
invariably genocidal."
He was careful to point out
that settler colonialism is not
simply a form of genocide, since
there are cases of genocide
without settler colonialism,
and because, quote,
"elimination refers to
more than the summary
liquidation of
indigenous peoples,
though it includes
that," end quote.
Hence he suggested that
structural genocide
avoids the question of degree
and enables an understanding
of the relationships between
spatial removal, mass killings,
and coercive forms of
biocultural assimilation.
In other words, the logic
of elimination of the native
is about the elimination
of the native as native.
And yet to exclusively focus
on the settler colonial
without any meaningful
engagement with the indigenous
can reproduce another form
of elimination of the native,
right?
And we're seeing this in terms
of the ascendancy of settler
colonial studies
that people think
is a gloss for native studies.
And they're two
different things.
They're related,
certainly, right?
So people will go to the
American Studies Association
Conference and say,
look at all the--
Robert Warrior has
written about this.
And he'll be in Honolulu
next week, I believe.
They'll say, look at
all the native studies
panels on the program.
You're like, not so much, right?
And again, it's relational.
Because settler colonialism is a
land-centered project entailing
permanent settlement--
or at least,
settlers bid for permanency--
as Wolfe points out in the
same essay I'm citing, quote,
"Settler colonizers
come to stay.
Invasion is a structure,
not an event," end quote.
But indigeneity
itself is enduring.
The operative logic
of settler colonialism
may be to eliminate the
native, but indigenous
people and peoples--
that is, as individuals and
as collective polities--
exist, resist, and persist.
Settler colonialism
is a structure
that endures indigeneity even
as it holds out against it.
Taking settler
colonialism as a structure
seriously allows US
scholars, for example,
to challenge the
normalization of dispossession
as a done deal relegated to
the past rather than ongoing.
Mark Rifkin's book Settler
Common Sense is useful here.
He examines how, even while
settler colonialism can
be characterized as a structure,
a system, and a logic,
affective networks
need to be explored
as part of understanding
how settler
colonial governmentality
comes to be lived
as the self-evident condition of
possibility for settler being.
Examining how canonical
American writers take part
in the legacy of displacing
Native Americans,
he asks, "How do varied
administrative projects
of settlement and accompanying
legal categories, geographies,
and subjectivities become
part of everyday life
for non-natives?"
Rifkin addresses that
feeling of givenness,
and the kinds of
social trajectories
from which it emerges,
and which it engenders.
Instead of suggesting that
quotidian forms of settler
sensation, selfhood,
and possession
follow obviously from policy
and official legal mandates,
he argues that the shifting
boundaries of settler
governance help provide
orientation, inclination,
and momentum for non-native
experiences of the everyday.
Two key scholars whose
respective works on native New
England speak to that concept
of settler colonialism
as a structure--
and they're, notably, Amy Den
Ouden, whose book I mentioned,
and Jean O'Brien.
Den Ouden has documented the
complex cultural and political
facets of Native
American resistance
to encroachment on
reservation lands
during the 18th century
in southern New England.
In her book Beyond Conquest--
and the subtitle is Native
Peoples and the Struggle
for History in New
England-- she conceptualizes
indigenous histories and
debates over native land rights
with a focus on Mohegans,
Pequots, and Niantics
living on reservations in New
London County, Connecticut,
where they were under
siege by colonists
who employed various
means to expropriate
their reserved lands.
At the same time, these
indigenous peoples
were also subjected to the
policies of colonial government
that sought to
strictly control them
and that determined native
land rights by depicting
reservation populations as
culturally and politically
illegitimate.
And I want to just
have a footnote.
What she also noted is
that they did that also,
at the time, not only
when native people,
for their own survival,
were bringing in--
intermixing, which is
a euphemism, right--
rebuilding community with
people of African and European
descent, but also when
women, native women,
were holding down
the reservation.
Because native
men needed to part
to find labor in the
wage economy, and often
were working on the ports.
So that illegitimacy was
also-- the deemed illegitimacy
was also a gendered process.
However, reservation
communities and their leaders
engaged in multiple forms of
resistance to dispossession.
Beyond Conquest demonstrates
how the current white scrutiny
and denial of local
Indian identities
is a practice with a long
history in southern New
England, one linked to
colonial notions of cultural,
and ultimately,
"racial" illegitimacy
that emerged in the
context of 18th century
disputes regarding
native land rights.
So for those who are familiar
with the Hawaiian situation,
think about every
time Kanaka Maoli,
Kanaka 'Oiwi talk about
Mauna ke Ea or 'Aina,
the sacredness of our
homeland, often what happens
is that person will
be personally attacked
as to whether or not they're
really Hawaiian, right?
They go for the jugular.
And you'll see in
the newspapers,
oh, pinky finger Hawaiian.
Or do they even have anything?
So it's a personal attack.
That's where comes from.
It comes from here, right?
It comes from here.
The first missionaries
came from here, right?
They're from
southern New England.
So it's the same kind of logics.
And that's not to conflate the
experiences of Kanaka Maoli--
that is, native Hawaiians--
with indigenous peoples
in this region.
But it's to show that the
colonial logics at hand
are also enduring, and that
they take root in other places.
Works on local settler history
and settler governmentality
explain the structure.
Jean O'Brien, in
Firsting and Lasting--
Writing Indians Out of
Existence in New England,
theorizes the persistent
myth of the vanishing Indian.
She argues that local histories
become a primary means by which
European Americans assert their
own modernity while denying it
to Indian peoples.
O'Brien examined more
than 600 local histories
from Massachusetts,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island,
ranging from pamphlets to
multi-volume treatments.
These narratives
shared a preoccupation
with establishing the
region as the center
of the Anglo-American nation,
the Anglo-Saxon nation,
and the center of a
modern American culture.
They also insisted,
often in lamenting tones,
that New England's original
inhabitants had become extinct,
even though many Indians still
lived in the very towns being
chronicled.
And as she notes in the
book, the same person, say,
who's at the town center and
making a proclamation in front
of a monument would
have written--
in their private diary,
was complaining about, say,
a Nipmuc family sitting
in the same church pew
at the same time they're
pronouncing that there's
no more Nipmuc people, right?
So you have these
contradictions.
And they're tied to a bid
for white American modernity
that denounces indigenous
authenticity, especially
in relation to using African
and European mixed ancestry
as evidence of that.
Erasing then memorializing
Indian peoples also served
a more practical colonial goal--
refuting Indian claims
to land and rights.
O'Brien found that, in
order to convince themselves
that the Indians had vanished
despite their continued
presence, local historians
and their readers
embraced notions of racial
purity rooted in the century's
scientific racism and saw living
Indians as mixed, and therefore
no longer truly Indian.
Adaptation of modern life on
the part of indigenous peoples
was also used as further
evidence of their demise.
But Indians did not, and have
not, accepted this effacement.
This formula persists
as a pervasive part
of the contemporary
normalization
of settler colonialism.
So now I want to shift to
my own journey and the work
of anti-normalization, fighting
that erasure by learning
about the elimination
of the native,
or attempts to
eliminate the native,
in Mattabesset and one modest
example that I launched,
as a project, in an
attempt to counter
that logic and practice,
decolonizing indigenous
Middletown.
In fall 2015, I taught
a service learning
course called Decolonizing
Indigenous Middletown--
Native Histories of the
Wangunk Indian People.
The class was designed
in close consultation
with Wangunk elder Gary
O'Neil, a descendant
of Jonathan Palmer, who was said
to have been the last Wangunk.
O'Neil is a genealogist
of the remaining Wangunks
in what is now known
as Middlesex County
and has served as an organizer
and leader of the Wangunks
since the 1970s.
I'll pause just to flag,
if we have time in the Q&A
and anybody wants to ask how
I met Gary O'Neill, that's
a story in and of itself that
would be interesting to share.
And it very much illustrates
some of the themes
that I'm presenting
in my talk today.
O'Neil-- Gary was in
conversation with our class
the entire semester
to guide the students
and share his own
priorities in terms
of what he wanted to see
as outcomes of the course.
The service learning
component of the class
was a partnership with the
Middlesex County Historical
Society.
And I can also talk
about the ethics of that
and why, ultimately, Gary and
I decided that it could not
be him or Wangunk people.
And there's a whole
issue around that
which has to do with the fact
that they're not organized
as a collective polity.
So the short version is it
would have been in partnership
with one lone individual.
And he agreed that the research
that the students unearthed
should go into public archives
that other people, Wangunk
and non-Wangunk, would
be able to access.
But I could say more about that.
Because there's a
whole set of ethics
that came up in the process
of the course regarding
individuation, individual
representation, and Wangunk
people at large.
At the Wangunk County
Historical Society,
students conducted
archival research
from the mid 17th century,
which meant they also
had to learn how to read the
scribe of those town documents.
They conducted archival
research focused on the town
proprietary records.
Debbie Shapiro, then director
of the Historical Society,
enthusiastically worked
with the students
all semester as they conducted
archival research there.
Each logged three hours a week--
this is outside of class--
looking at mid 17th and
18th century documents
in search of any mention or
reference to Wangunk people
in the English colonial
period of Middletown.
Notice I didn't say the
colonial period of Middletown.
We're still in the colonial
period of Middletown.
I said the English colonial
period of Middletown.
At that time, the Middlesex
County Historical Society
had one manila folder that
said "Native Americans."
And it was about twice
the size of this.
And that's all they had in
the entire Historical Society
on native peoples.
And most of it was not
related to Wangunk.
So that's what we
were dealing with.
The students also researched
the digitized issues
of the Middlesex Gazette, which
is now a defunct publication.
And timing-wise,
it was interesting.
Those had only just been
digitized in recent years.
So it was a new development
that they could actually
go online and look at those.
The course also
included field trips
to the Mashantucket Pequot
Museum and Research Center
so we could learn about related
histories in this region,
Indian Hill Cemetery in
Middletown, and Founders Rock.
And I'll talk more
about that momentarily.
Students learned about the field
of settler colonial studies,
the rapidly transforming field
of critical indigenous studies,
along with Native
American history
and historiography addressing
southern New England.
Taking up a
decolonizing approach,
we focused on the erasure
of Wangunk history
and the history of
Wangunk erasure.
The students read
the few scholars
of Wangunk history,
Timothy Ives,
who's the Rhode Island state
archaeologist, Doris Shero,
Paul Grant-Costa, mentioned
earlier, Karen Cody
Cooper, Sarah Schneider
Kavanaugh, Katherine Hermes,
and Alexandra Maravel.
In most cases, regarding
this scholarship,
with the exception
of Ives, each author
has produced one
or two articles.
And not all of them are even
full-length research articles.
So even though I've given
you a long line of names,
I do want to note the
paucity of material.
I'd been collecting these
works for years, and finally--
for 15 years-- and finally
got to critical mass
in terms of being able to
design a syllabus that includes
this material in
combination with broader
studies of indigenous
peoples in New England,
including the studies
by O'Brien and Den Ouden
mentioned earlier.
We also read Linda Tuhiwai
Smith's book Decolonizing
Methodologies to examine how
research has historically
served the colonial
project, but alternately,
can have a role in indigenous
struggles for social justice.
And again, please consider
coming to the event
tomorrow on Mauna a Wakea.
Because you see a lot of the
researchers at University
of Hawaii at Manoa,
they've partnered
with the US military and NASA.
And their research is in the
service of colonial violence,
but it doesn't have
to be that way.
Regarding this
course, I should also
note that I was able to arrange
a good number of guest speakers
who visited with the students,
including Vicki Welch, director
of the Seventh Generation
Center for the Study of People
of Color in New
England, Tobias Glaza,
assistant executive editor of
the Yale Indian Papers Project,
and Jesse Cohen, Wesleyan's then
archeology collections manager
and Native American Graves
Protection Act compliance
officer, and then, of
course, Gary O'Neil.
We started the
course by visiting,
in the first week,
Founders Rock,
an historical marker on a
boulder with a plaque located
just outside of the
gates of Riverside
Cemetery, the earliest settler
cemetery for English colonists.
And what's
interesting about this
as this colonial marker
is that it's just
around the corner from
this very famous diner.
You know Divers,
Drive-ins, Dives,
whatever that show is, it's
even been on that show.
And most of the students go
to that diner or know it.
And people come
from out of town,
but have never been
around the corner.
So even that is hidden, OK?
The plaque states, "In
1639, Mattabessec is first
mentioned in the records.
In 1650, the first
English settlement
was made near the spot.
In 1653, the general court
changed the name to Middletown.
In 1672 and 1673, the
title to the lands
was confirmed by
grant from the Indians
in honor of the brave
and God-fearing men who
founded this town.
Their descendants and successors
have flagged this stone
on the 250th anniversary
of the settlement."
So that's the text of the
main plaque on the left.
It also lists, to the right, the
first settlers, 1650 to 1654--
I'll spare you
reading all the names.
But I have them in the footnotes
if anybody's interested--
and so-called, quote, "Indian
grantors," 1672 to 1673,
right-- so classic
move in New England.
The Indians just signed
it all away, you know?
It wasn't stolen.
It's by the stroke
of a pen, right?
This is what Scott Lyons
calls the X-mark, you know?
It's not even about--
we want to talk about
consent politics, right?
If you have a Algonquian
society that doesn't even
have a propertized
notion of land,
what does it mean in terms
of these transactions
and how we have to interrogate
representations of them?
The plaque is a
prime example of what
Jean O'Brien details
in her earlier book
Dispossession by Degrees--
Indian Land and Identity
at Natick, Massachusetts--
1650 to 1790.
In it, she documents how Indian
lands were stolen incrementally
through deeds,
transfers, and sales.
Those who signed deeds
did not necessarily
own the land, even after
the onset of ownership.
And therefore, indigenous
individuals often later
contested these sales.
Later-- and I don't
have a picture of it,
but it's on the other side--
a new plaque was added to
the west side of the rock
to honor the settler women--
colonial feminism, right?
"In honor of the courageous
and unselfish woman who
settled this town, their
descendants and successors
dedicate this monument
on the 350th anniversary
of the settlement."
So took 100 years, but
the women got their due.
Take responsibility.
Claim it, right?
So now I want to
just pause to recount
some of the history
of Wangunk and then
shift back to the course, just
to give you a sense of how deep
the history of
dispossession and erasure.
Sources suggest that
the Wangunk's proximity
to the Connecticut River
made their homeland
desirable for
European fur traders,
leading to conflicts with the
Pequot tribe over the area.
Wangunks allied
with Narragansetts
and reached out to
English settlers
as defensive strategies
against the Pequot.
But alliances may have shifted
with the outbreak of the Pequot
War in 1637, right, the
first all-out genocidal
massacre in North America.
Colonial accounts suggests
that Wangunk sachem Sowheage
assisted the Pequots
in their attack
on Wethersfield, where
he resided at the time.
And in that same period, he
relocated to Mattabesset,
later to become Middletown.
From 1650 on, natives and
settlers living in Middletown
are documented as engaging
in a series of these land
transactions, culminating in
a written reservation deed
in 1673.
Connecticut's
colonial government
reserved approximately
350 acres of land
on the east side of
the Connecticut River
for the descendants
of that Wangunk sachem
and the Wangunk people at large.
As we know from the work of
Timothy Ives, mentioned before,
the reservation remained
undefined until 1673,
when 13 of Sowheage's
heirs signed
a document which
created two parcels,
one of 50 acres at Indian Hill,
which I'll tell you more about,
and another of 250 acres on the
east side of the Connecticut
River.
Reservation land was specified
as belonging to Wangunk heirs
forever, but that
would not last long.
Wangunk land ownership
remained largely communal
into the reservation period
until some individuals
were compelled to sell land to
colonists, often to pay debts.
Predatory lending
goes back a long way.
The English population
of Middletown grew.
And by 1714, this group of
settlers split from Middletown
and formed the Third
Society of Middletown,
which had its own meeting
house and separate leadership.
As documented by Ives,
by 1713, Wangunks
had been forced to
vacate the Mattabesset
portion of the
reservation, which
was in central Middletown.
Settler encroachment
on Indian land
accelerated in 1732
when the Third Society
got a new pastor who built
his home on the reservation.
Some Wangunks began
converting to Christianity
during this period,
resulting in migration
to Christian Indian communities.
In 1746, the Third Society
petitioned the Connecticut
General Assembly for
a new meeting house
and was granted land right
on the Wangunk reservation.
Settlers petitioned twice more
to buy the reservation lands.
And due to colonial debt,
the remaining Wangunks
were pressured to
sell the land--
the rest of their
land as payment.
By 1767, the Third
Society officially
became the town
of Chatham, which
was later renamed Portland.
The last part of the
Wangunk reservation
was sold somewhere
between 1772 and 1784.
But the Wangunk
community remained active
throughout this period,
although their numbers
were severely reduced.
One report estimated
the number of Wangunks
in Portland at just 28 in 1777.
In the 18th century,
many Wangunks
moved away from the reservation,
some folding into other tribes
from the adjacent regions.
As Paul Grant-Costa shows
in some of his work,
Wangunks joined the
Farmington Indians
in Connecticut, a group that
formed when the Tunxis invited
other indigenous individuals
to move to their reservation
as Christian Indians.
They later moved to
Oneida, New York,
and then to
Brothertown, Wisconsin.
In terms of documentation of the
Wangunks into the 19th century,
we know of Bette
Nepash through the work
of Doris Sherrow of the
Portland Historical Society.
Nepash held yearly tribal
gatherings until the 1810s.
And after her death,
Jonathan Palmer
was named the "last"
Indian in Middletown
when he died in 1813.
However, the Palmer family line
has survived into the present.
And many members continue
to live in Middlesex County.
That is Gary O'Neil's
extended family.
Now shifting my discussion
back to the class,
we also visited
Indian Hill Cemetery,
which is right next
to Wesleyan's campus.
The site was once a
thriving Wangunk village
that later became part of
the initial reservation
during the English colonial
reservation period.
In 1850, settler descendants
repurposed the hill
as a rural cemetery
for their own burials,
creating a place for
Middletown's most historically
prominent families to be buried.
As Wesleyan alumna
Sarah Kavanaugh
writes about the site, quote,
"As American citizens realize
that their experiment
in Republican government
had the potential for a
limitless future--" excuse me--
"for a limitless
future, they were
faced with the daunting task
of constructing themselves--
for themselves-- an
immemorial past."
So this is an alumna who
wrote this paper in a class
that a colleague of mine
taught in 2004 that she
later developed after graduation
and is now in an edited volume.
It's one of the few
things on Wangunk.
And that was just written
not that long ago.
It's an excellent article.
And she does some incredible
work theorizing it.
And it's also really
interesting to teach it.
Because all of the key
prominent families--
you know, all of our
buildings at Wesleyan
are named after them.
So it really makes things
pop for the students, right?
It brings this colonial
history really forcefully
into the present.
On the gates of the
cemetery is also
a stereotypical image
of a "noble savage,"
one of the only markers, today,
of the land's English colonial
history and enduring
colonial present.
One of the most memorial
aspects of the course
was when O'Neil and
Cohen, who I mentioned
earlier, who used to be our
NAGPRA compliance officer
and head of the
archeology collection,
did a joint presentation.
I don't have too
many photos, but I
do want to show you, that's
Gary O'Neill with Jesse
Cohen and some pottery shards.
Cohen presented pottery shards
from the Wesleyan University
Archeology and Anthropology
collections that
are from the immediate location
and are presumed to be Wangunk.
Now she was brand-new.
And this was a 12-year battle
to get a NAGPRA compliance
officer hired at Wesleyan,
which is another whole story.
But when I met Gary--
and I'd been looking
for Wangunk for years--
I found out that he is
a ceramicist and works
at Wesleyan Potters, literally
around the corner from my home.
And it's called
Wesleyan Potters,
but it's not affiliated
with the campus.
And I also found out
he's a Wesleyan alumnus.
So he's literally
around the corner.
And so when she got wind that
he's a ceramicist, she says,
I have these boxes
of pottery shards.
And they're from right here.
So the two came together
in the classroom.
And some of these
pieces included
markings and impressions
on pottery that
dated 400 to 1,000 years ago.
Meanwhile, O'Neil
insisted that the students
had to make "Indian" pinch
pots, which some of you
might remember doing in
elementary school, right?
He wanted the students
to have a tactile memory
while he narrated his
family's oral history.
And he wanted their listening
to be manifest in that material
object that they would
eventually take with them.
He said, they will
not forget my history.
They will have that.
Each of them will
have their own design.
He spoke about his
great grandmother,
and his grandmother, and
how they both influenced him
through their storytelling,
and their strength
as matriarchal figures in
a large, extended kinship
network.
He also spoke about how their
stories and histories that they
told him were starting points
in his own archival research.
He recalled names
and places, and used
those as guiding points in
tracing his family's line
back to Jonathan Palmer.
And Jonathan Palmer, who
I've mentioned earlier,
is featured in a
1930s text that's
PDFed online if
anybody's curious.
It's called Yankee Township.
And Jonathan Palmer is referred
to as "Jonathan Indian."
And basically, it's
basically narrating
this sort of
romanticized account
of the last full-blood Wangunk.
And we see, again, this is an
ongoing, pervasive tactic used
to discount Native
American presence
in the contemporary period
and throughout history.
As that semester was wrapping
up, in December 2015,
I organized a public forum
linked to the course.
The event was held on
Wesleyan's at Russell House.
And we called the event
"Indigenous Middletown--
Settler Colonial and
Wangunk Tribal History."
I noted in my
introduction that day,
one of the goals of the course
was to collectively produce
a Wikipedia entry on Wangunk.
I also remarked that
While Russell House
itself had a wiki entry,
the Wangunk did not.
What did it mean that we
could readily learn more
about the building we
were sitting in because
of the prominence of the Russell
family that day than we could
about the people of the
land we were occupying?
The event included Lucianne
Lavin, director of research
and collections at the Institute
for American Indian Studies,
a museum, and research,
and educational center
in Washington, Connecticut.
She is a founding member of
the state's Native American
Heritage Advisory Council.
There's just some
more of the shards.
This is at the Center for
the Americas at Wesleyan.
There's Gary with some of the
pinch pots the students made.
And that's the flyer
for this first event.
She is founding member of
the state's Native American
Heritage Advisory
Council and editor
of the Journal of
the Archaeological
Society of Connecticut.
And one of her books had just
come out two years prior,
called Connecticut's
Indigenous Peoples--
What Archeology, History,
and Oral Tradition Teach
Us About Their
Communities and Cultures.
So she was one of the panelists.
The second panelist was Timothy
Ives, who, I've mentioned,
is the principal archaeologist
for the Rhode Island Historical
Preservation and
Heritage Commission.
His doctoral thesis,
produced at the College
of William and Mary, focused
on Wangunk ethnohistory.
It's the bulk of the
work that's out there.
And from that study, he has
publications on the Wangunk
reservation land
system as well as
Wangunk community formations
in 17th century central
Connecticut.
I will say that he had met
Gary once before, or maybe
a couple of times before.
But it was after this panel.
Because he said, on
this panel, that he
had traced his own
genealogy to colonial
settlers and had to reckon
with his own genealogy
of being in that area.
And I've talked to them not that
long ago-- like, last year--
and they're basically--
he's going to revisit his
doctoral thesis in conjunction
with Gary and do some
sort of co-publication.
Because he hasn't advanced
more than the two articles.
So that's one of
the developments
in terms of thinking together,
being together, and trying
to figure out what
accountability looks
like in this kind of
21st century context
where you have a very
invisible demographic
of the indigenous people
of the place that we're at.
The third panelist was someone
the students specifically
requested, because they
wanted to hear a "settler"
perspective.
And I said, well, none of us are
Wangunk, so we're all sort of--
right?
We can identify as indigenous.
We can identif-- could
be a war refugee,
could be a descendant
of a slave, right?
But we're not here.
We're not Wangunk here.
And so part of it is they
wanted somebody representative
from that era.
And so we found him,
Reginald W. Bacon,
who serves on the board
of several history
and preservation
organizations, including
the Society of Middletown
First Settlers Descendants.
For the last decade,
he has been editor
of that organization's
newsletter, called
"The Middler"--
yeah, not Mitler, Middler--
which circulates to members
in selected libraries
across the United States.
And that book-- the book
that materialized from his
editorship is titled Early
Families in Middletown,
Connecticut Volume 1--
1650 to 1654.
And last, but
definitely not least,
was Gary O'Neil, who
shared his family genealogy
and compelling stories of
family survival tactics
tracing from his great
grandmother, Kate Eldora Bates
Palmer, who is a Nipmuc
Indian born in 1879,
and who married a Wangunk man.
The following semester, even
though our class had ended,
I organized a public
event at the town library,
Russell Library--
off campus, but named
for the same Russells.
There, students willing to
present their research findings
would share with the
broader community.
We called the event "Looking
for Indigenous Middletown
in Colonial Archives."
Because when we got to
the end of the course,
the students said, we
can't even talk about it
as decolonizing indigenous
Middletown, because we're still
trying to understand indigenous
Middletown, so hence,
"Looking for Indigenous
Middletown in Colonial
Archives--
Settler Erasure and Wangunk
Indian Tribal History."
This was held in March 2016.
In the end, just four
out of the 11 students
who had been in the class
presented their work--
Iryelis Lopez, on
behalf of a paper
she co-wrote with Taina
Quinones, Maia Reumann-Moore,
Abigail Cunniff,
and Yael Horowitz.
The event, just like
the earlier panel,
was co-sponsored by the
Center for the Americas
and the American
Studies department.
One of the most exciting
productions of the students,
besides the Wikipedia
entry on Wangunk,
were that their papers
have now been included
in a special issue of the
Bulletin of the Archeological
Society of Connecticut.
The Bulletin's
editor, Lavin, who
was in attendance--
on the first panel
and in attendance
at the second, said
that she was so inspired and
impressed by the students'
research that she thought that
there was enough critical mass
to do a special issue.
And the published papers include
titles such as "Town Bills
of Middletown--
Material Histories of
Settler Colonialism
and Indigenous
Erasure" by Horowitz,
"Decolonizing Indigenous
Middletown" by Lopez
and Quinones, and one
titled "Militia, Security,
and Smallpox in Middletown
Settler Society as Related
to the Wangunk--
1754 to 1785" by Cunniff.
Additionally, transcripts
of the presentations
from the other
event were included.
And there are also several--
two, actually-- a
couple-- new articles
by some of the local historians
who had heard about the project
and returned to projects that
they had abandoned long ago.
And so they jump-started or
revived those earlier works.
In reflecting on
this project, I have
to say there were
numerous challenges
and obstacles, practical,
conceptual, and ethical.
And I can speak more
to those in the Q&A
if there's time and interest.
My point is that
decolonial research
must be part of decolonization
in the settler colonial
context.
Now I want to shift
gears to talk more
about theories of decolonization
and decoloniality.
In the darker side
of Western modernity,
Walter Mignolo defines,
quote, "the underlying
logic of the foundation
and unfolding
of Western civilization from
the Renaissance to today,"
what he terms "the
colonial matrix of power."
As he argues, "Coloniality
is foundationally
interconnected to
historical colonialisms."
Vast differences exist in the
histories, socioeconomics,
and geographies of colonization
in its various global
manifestations.
For example, in
the Americas, this
took a different shape
than English colonization
in North America.
Spanish colonization
in the Americas
took a different shape
than English colonization
in North America.
However, as Mignolo
argues, "Coloniality--
the establishment of racialized
and gendered socioeconomic
and political hierarchies--
according to an invented
Eurocentric standard,
is all part of colonization."
Hence, we must reckon with
the dominance of coloniality.
This entails an understanding
of decolonization
beyond its limited
scope within the law
or the easily available
historical and political case
studies of former colonies.
And Hawaiians in the room,
this might resonate for you.
Because we have people in
our own nationalist movement
who deny that we
were ever colonized.
Because they have a very
narrow, fixed definition
of colonization.
And they're reading
juridically, saying,
you know, we couldn't
have been colonized,
because we had an
independent state.
That's a non-sequitur--
but also,
to think about decolonization
beyond the bounds of the law,
and think about this as the
logic of Western civilization.
Even if we buy that logic,
right, we have to look deeper.
Moreover, Mignolo argues
that coloniality manifested
throughout the world in terms
of the epistemological value
systems of contemporary society,
commonly called modern society.
This is precisely why
coloniality does not just
disappear with political and
historical decolonization,
the end of the period of
territorial domination of lands
when countries gain
independence, right--
the post-colonial third
world model, right?
This is where the concept of
decoloniality is critical.
As Mignolo explains,
"Decoloniality
is a term used principally
by emerging Latin American
movements" and refers to,
quote, "analytic approaches
and socioeconomic and
political practices
opposed to pillars of
Western civilization,
coloniality, and
modernity," end quote.
This makes it both a political
and epistemic-- that is,
relating to knowledge
and its validation--
an epistemic project.
It is the refusal
of the assumption
that Western European modes
of thinking are, in fact,
universal ones, or that the
Western ways are the best.
To be clear, this is not about
suggesting the possibility
of restoring a people to
an original condition,
as if one could.
Instead, this is about
enduring indigeneity.
And I want to acknowledge, also,
the work of Sylvia Rivera, who
has been in conversation,
critical conversation,
with Mignolo, and writing about
that from the indigenous point,
and pushing on that and
what it means in reality.
And she takes on a lot of
Latin Americanist academics
who are not actually
working in concert
with indigenous decolonization.
What can decolonization mean
in a settler colonial context?
Drawing on Frantz
Fanon, Lisa Lowe
offers a short working
definition of decolonization
as, quote, "the
social formation that
encompasses a multi-level
and multi-centered assault
on those specific forms of
colonial rule," end quote.
But part of the problem in
contemporary settler colonial
context is that non-native
people have a hard time
understanding, or
even believing,
that indigenous peoples are
still subject to colonial rule.
This is an issue of both
willful ignorance and denial.
In Black Skin,
White Masks, Fanon
examined the relationship
between race and colonialism
to explore the traumatic impact
of the sense of inferiority
on colonized people
and how it often
leads them to identify
with the colonizer.
Looking at how colonial
domination perpetuates
the psychology of the
racism and dehumanization,
taking up psychoanalytic
theory, Fanon
explains the feelings of
dependency and inadequacy
of black colonized subjects'
experiences in relation
to white domination.
One of the key elements of this
work that rarely gets addressed
though, is that he theorized
the divided self perception
of the black subject
as one who has lost
their native cultural origin.
This is key tohis
theorization, since,
as Fanon contends, it produces
an inferiority complex
in the mind of the black subject
who, he argues, then tries
to appropriate and imitate
the culture of the colonizer,
hence, their white masks.
This work is based on the
master-slave dialectic of black
and white racial polarities,
a formulation that, I suggest,
cannot be mapped onto the
settler colonial-indigenous
dynamic without accounting for
the differences in the type
of colonialism that Fanon
was theorizing in Black Skin,
White Masks.
In other words, it cannot
be simply appropriated
in a settler colonial
context vis-a-vis indigeneity
for several reasons.
For one, the question
of indigenous subjects
in relation to native
cultural origins
differs from dislocated
black subjects
who descend from the enslaved,
taken from their homelands,
and cut off from their
neonatal origins.
This would have
gross ramifications
for not having access to
indigenous cultural traditions
and knowledge of the land that
many indigenous peoples, say,
here in North America, have,
even as settler colonialism has
tried to deracinate
indigenous individuals
and peoples to uproot them
and sever that relationship.
Racialization also does
not work in the same way.
There is arguably
no racial binary
between the red-white
or white-red
that functions in ways
comparable to white-black.
Fanon's theory is
premised on the binary
of the white-black that
emerges from slavery,
not land expropriation
of indigenous peoples
and the settler
colonial violence
of structural genocide.
That includes, as
mentioned before,
forms of biocultural
assimilation.
But also, Fanon does not account
for either Carib or Arawak
indigeneity in the French
Antilles in his theorization
of colonial domination and
the psychic violence produced
by black subordination.
That is an absence that creates
an epistemological problem
that we need to account
for when drawing
on this particular work of his.
We must productively
formulate indigenous critiques
of Black Skin, White
Masks to account
for the erasure of
indigeneity, or at least
draw on that remarkable text
in more critical ways given
that its application to
settler colonial contexts
is structurally limited.
Now concluding, what I
want to leave you with
is that within the
rubric of decolonization,
I suggest a critical assessment
of pre-colonial epistems
and cultural practices.
You have the specter of
the pre-colonialists, who
often view it as an assertion
of an essential or primordial
world evoked in
a problematic bid
to claim purity in the service
of a retrograde and exclusive
form of "ethnic nationalism."
That's often the charge.
In US settler colonial
society though, the undeniably
of indigenous societies
demands an engagement
with the question
of the pre-colonial.
And we must also acknowledge the
ways in which indigenous people
and peoples adapted new forms
into their own cultural logics
and practices in ways that
mark strong continuities that
often go unappreciated.
There are rich examples
of decolonial indigenous
resurgence efforts in this
region and other indigenous
worlds beyond.
These are grounded in
non-statist, or anti-statist,
in many cases, forms
of indigenous--
what we might call-- sovereignty
that tend to the power
and life forces of
interconnectedness
between deities,
ancestral forces, humans
and other animals, and all
elements of the natural world.
These forms of
governance are distinctly
different from the Western
concept of sovereignty,
right, hence my "scare
quotes" around the S word.
We know that indigenous
peoples need not
rely on the US state
or its subsidiaries,
nor for federal recognition.
Decolonization is
imperative for everyone
striving to live
in a world without
nonconsensual domination.
But the practice looks
different for indigenous people
and peoples than for
those living on lands
they are not indigenous to.
Decolonization is
a practice that
must entail an understanding
of the settler colonial project
as a structure and
countering the logic
of elimination of the native.
Mahalo.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
