If the colonizer didn’t write it, it didn’t happen, right?

Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Chairman Skip Hayward (back row left) and his family in an early photo in Mashantucket (My photo)

By Trace Hentz (blog editor) (also posting this on American Indian Adoptees)

In 1999, when I took the Pequot Times editor job in Connecticut, I’d tried to read as much as I could find about New England “Indians” and especially the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.  I’d found a book “The Spirit of New England Tribes” in a bookstore on the Cape, and fortunately I read it cover to cover before I took the job.  But it wasn’t enough and I knew that.  Books for the general public were hard to find, and I think that was on purpose. “We are not supposed to know,” and I have written that headline often.  And it’s true.

If the colonizer didn’t write it (in books), it didn’t happen. Got it?

As part of our introduction to the tribe, when we are hired, we watch the film, THE WITNESS, at the Pequot Museum.  It gives a glimpse of the history that lead to a massacre at Fort Mystick in the 1600s.  It’s so hard to put into words but it was brutal and traumatic to watch, and then to comprehend.  Killing women, children, and elders, shooting them as they tried to escape the burning fort, that was a wake-up call for me. What kind of monsters would do that?  (Well, if you look up massacres, there are over 1000 documented in this place we call America.)  It’s something we are not supposed to know.

Later I was asked to give a history talk for Foxwoods employees and most employees seemed (to me) to be clueless (but interested) in early history in this part of Connecticut.  A lack of history causes suspicion and that was the case with many people I met.  They felt or said out loud, the Pequot were not real “Indians.”  Well, that was not true and it took a lot of writing and research in the Pequot Times every month to counter that falsehood. (I worked there 5 years.)  The only way to counter ignorance is with TRUTH.  So I searched and published “Genocide and Enslavement of the Pequot” by Dr. Kevin McBride, who was the director of the Pequot Museum’s Research Center.  I heard him give a talk at Yale and asked if I could publish it.

Just being here in New England, I could tell right away they hide history, lots of it.  It might upset people, I guess?   In 2000, I wrote a paper on Native slavery called “First Contact” and gave a short talk at the Native American Journalist’s conference in Florida.  Many of the best Native journalists I knew were surprised about the slavery part, but knew something about massacres.

Yes, in some tribes they do teach about colonization and contact with non-Indians, slavery, massacres, but not all tribes. 

Did you enjoy your history class in school?  I remember they focused on the Nazis and Jews and world wars.  Why didn’t we learn about American atrocity, starting in the 1600s right here in New England? What about Slavery?

I asked the research center to give me as much as they could so I could publish it. As an editor, it’s our job to educate, offer news, and sneak in some real history when possible.

I call myself a citizen journalist now, and part-historian. I am still very interested in Native Slavery.  My prayer was answered when I saw that Brown University (in Rhode Island) had a presentation on this topic in June.  Challenge yourself to keep learning, please.

Please click:  www.stolenrelations.org (scroll down to see the June talk)

(To be continued)