Showing posts with label Abenaki. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abenaki. Show all posts
Friday, January 8, 2016
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
SCALP Hunting
Pakwatikosewin
On July of 1689, at the start of King William’s War, the state of Massachusetts declared that each soldier would receive eight pounds out of the public treasury for each Indian scalp and that “whatever Indian plunders falls into their hands shall be their own.”
Less than a decade later, in 1697, a woman named Hannah Dustin became a Colonial heroine when she slayed her Abenaki captors while they slept "10 aboriginal women and children" then redeemed their scalps for money. A bronze monument honoring Dustin stands in Haverhill, Massachusetts, her home state. Clutched in her right hand is a hatchet. Dustin was held in New Hampshire, where a granite monument stands and one in Massachusetts.
This Hannah Dustin statue is in Haverhill, Massachusetts, her home state. This one shows her with a hatchet and the scalps of the native women and children.
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| statue of Hannah Dustin |
By 1702, Massachusetts offered 10 pounds for every scalp from a male Indian age 10 and older. That price increased to 20 pounds then 100, Scalps taken from women fetched 10 pounds each, while children under the age of 10 were sold into slavery with proceeds going to the scalp hunters.
“Scalp hunting provided both an effective and a financially rewarding means to kill, conquer and subjugate the Indian peoples of the Eastern Seaboard,”.
Scalping, according to James Axtell, a former history professor at the College of William & Mary, was performed after a person was unconscious or dead. The executor, from a position behind the victim, pulled the hair back and used an obsidian blade to slice off a section of skin, in some cases the skin was torn off.
In other cases, scalps were displayed as badges of honor. Other times they were gifts or decorations. When there were bounties to be collected, scalps served as a way to count the dead.
One of the problems of scalping, however, was that taking a scalp did not guarantee death, they would sometimes suffer and bleed out for days. “There are medical journals that include articles about the care and management of a scalped head.”
Despite the evidence of colonists scalping Natives, the word “scalp” is culturally loaded, and most people assume the practice is rooted in Native tradition. It was invented by the Europeans, French, and Spaniards.
In 1969 Vine Deloria Jr. said Europeans likened Natives to wild animals. “Scalping, introduced prior to the French and Indian War by the English, confirmed the suspicion that Indians were wild animals to be hunted and skinned,” he wrote. “Bounties were set and an Indian scalp became more valuable than beaver, otter, marten and other animal pelts.”
The practice of scalping was losing popularity by the early 1800s. Although there were some reports of scalping during the Revolutionary War and bounties were being offered as recently as the Civil War.
Scalping was practiced by the ancient Scythians of Eurasia. Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote of the Scythians in 440 BC.
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Friday, November 19, 2010
DISRESPECT: Sterilization program targeted the Abenaki nation
Campaign 2004: Vermont’s dark secret Sterilization program targeted Abenaki, Governor Dean wouldn’t apologize Posted: January 30, 2004 - 12:50pm EST by: Jim Adams / Associate Editor / Indian Country Today
http://WWW.INDIANCOUNTRY.COM/?1075485169
MONTPELIER, Vt. - Howard Dean’s Vermont is hiding a nasty secret.
For more than 30 years, it was a stronghold of the now discredited eugenics movement and state institutions performed hundreds of sterilizations. Abenaki Indian families say they were disproportionately targeted.
Official records show a cumulative total of 259 sterilizations under Vermont law from 1933 to 1968, when the eugenics statute was in effect. Some scholars believe the real total could be double that, since the records probably only cover operations in state institutions. They say that up to one-third of the victims might have been Abenaki, the indigenous people of northern Vermont and New Hampshire and adjacent areas of Quebec and Maine.
"Every family has stories of people who were sterilized," said Frederick Matthew Wiseman, a professor at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vt., and a historian and advocate of the Abenaki people.
This program might be considered a historical curiosity, an artifact of an appallingly widespread movement of the 1920s and ’30s. Some 31 states adopted eugenics and sterilization statutes before the rise of Nazi ideology and the Jewish Holocaust made evident to even the meanest capacity their inherent evil.
But it re-emerged as a significant issue in Vermont because of the stubborn opposition of state officials, including Gov. Dean, to the Abenaki quest for federal recognition. The St. Francis/Sokoki Band of the Abenaki Nation of Vermont filed recognition petition number 68 with the BIA in April 1980. It is now close to the top of the list for "active consideration."
As Governor, Dean, now candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, rejected appeals for Vermont to issue an official apology for the sterilizations, spurning the example of states like Virginia and North Carolina, which have not only apologized but offered compensation to the victims. According to Nancy Gallagher, the scholar who uncovered the history of the Vermont eugenics program, "Gov. Dean was caught in a power struggle with the Abenakis over recognition."
"He was against it," Gallagher said. "He worked with state Attorney General William Sorrell, who actively tried to repress the petition."
Abenaki leaders, said Gallagher, cite the eugenics program as a reason for gaps in tribal self-identification. "They had to hide their identity because of the fear of sterilization."
Even worse, said Wiseman, Attorney General Sorrell has "mined" the eugenics records for evidence to use against the Abenakis’ recognition petition. In December 2002, Sorrell and his Special Assistant Attorney General Eve Jacobs-Carnahan issued a 250-page response to the St. Francis/Sokoki Band petition. As part of their argument, they cited extensive entries from the Vermont Eugenics Survey, observing, "Not a single one identifies an Indian as an Abenaki."
The Attorney General’s report has been dismissed with varying expressions of contempt by professional scholars and historians. "It’s not history," said Gallagher. "It’s a legal brief. I don’t understand how lawyers think." But the most vehement criticisms center on what scholars consider an extreme breach of ethics in handling the Eugenics Survey records. Eugenics record historians at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state have adopted guidelines forbidding identification of individuals and even their locales in scholarly works.
Yet Sorrell and Jacobs-Carnahan include personal names and physical descriptions, such as the following quotation from the Survey: "[blank] was part Indian, part French, and part Negro. On his death certificate he is recorded as colored. He was very decidedly Negroid in appearance." Furthermore, the Attorney General’s office has made this report widely available. It went through a second printing in January 2003 and is now posted in its entirety on the Attorney General’s official Web site.
Chief Assistant Attorney General William Griffin, who supervised preparation of the report, defended the use of the names. "We did not release any identifications that were not in the public record," he told Indian Country Today. He also denied a connection between the Eugenics Survey and the recognition issue.
"It had nothing to do with Native Americans," he said of the Survey. "We went back and looked at it," he said. "It seemed to be targeting French-Canadians, if any particular group."
(Gallagher observed that very little research had been done about the fate of Indian peoples in the state eugenics programs. She said, however, that a primary target seemed to be mixed-race families, including tri-racial populations of black, white and Indian descent.)
Griffin also defended the content of the report. "What surprised me was the lack of a substantive response," he said of its critics. "There is some sniping around the edges, like the question you raised."
Although Sorrell is independently elected, he has long been a friend and political ally of Gov. Dean. (His mother, a Democratic Party activist, is often said to be the person who recruited Dean to run for the state legislature.) He figures prominently in a separate but possibly related, controversy, Dean’s refusal to release official papers from his 10 years as governor. The Attorney General’s office vetted the Memorandum of Understanding that withholds Dean’s papers from public view for ten years and is now defending the agreement in Vermont’s Washington County Superior Court against a suit from the Washington, D.C. group Judicial Watch. Dean’s discussions about sealing the 146 boxes and 450,000 pages of correspondence and official business, said Judicial Watch, focused on their impact on his presidential campaign.
Some of the more damaging material, to judge from letters which have already leaked and been turned against Dean, very likely involves his decisions on Indian issues, including the call for an apology on the Eugenics Survey.
Dean’s papers are now in the hands of the State Archivist, who is also in charge of the Eugenics Survey documents. Some critics of the state use of the eugenics papers also express concern that those documents are less accessible and in more disarray than they were 10 years ago.
"The file on sterilization," said Gallagher, "has gone missing."
©2003 Indian Country Today
http://WWW.INDIANCOUNTRY.COM/?1075485169
MONTPELIER, Vt. - Howard Dean’s Vermont is hiding a nasty secret.
For more than 30 years, it was a stronghold of the now discredited eugenics movement and state institutions performed hundreds of sterilizations. Abenaki Indian families say they were disproportionately targeted.
Official records show a cumulative total of 259 sterilizations under Vermont law from 1933 to 1968, when the eugenics statute was in effect. Some scholars believe the real total could be double that, since the records probably only cover operations in state institutions. They say that up to one-third of the victims might have been Abenaki, the indigenous people of northern Vermont and New Hampshire and adjacent areas of Quebec and Maine.
"Every family has stories of people who were sterilized," said Frederick Matthew Wiseman, a professor at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vt., and a historian and advocate of the Abenaki people.
This program might be considered a historical curiosity, an artifact of an appallingly widespread movement of the 1920s and ’30s. Some 31 states adopted eugenics and sterilization statutes before the rise of Nazi ideology and the Jewish Holocaust made evident to even the meanest capacity their inherent evil.
But it re-emerged as a significant issue in Vermont because of the stubborn opposition of state officials, including Gov. Dean, to the Abenaki quest for federal recognition. The St. Francis/Sokoki Band of the Abenaki Nation of Vermont filed recognition petition number 68 with the BIA in April 1980. It is now close to the top of the list for "active consideration."
As Governor, Dean, now candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, rejected appeals for Vermont to issue an official apology for the sterilizations, spurning the example of states like Virginia and North Carolina, which have not only apologized but offered compensation to the victims. According to Nancy Gallagher, the scholar who uncovered the history of the Vermont eugenics program, "Gov. Dean was caught in a power struggle with the Abenakis over recognition."
"He was against it," Gallagher said. "He worked with state Attorney General William Sorrell, who actively tried to repress the petition."
Abenaki leaders, said Gallagher, cite the eugenics program as a reason for gaps in tribal self-identification. "They had to hide their identity because of the fear of sterilization."
Even worse, said Wiseman, Attorney General Sorrell has "mined" the eugenics records for evidence to use against the Abenakis’ recognition petition. In December 2002, Sorrell and his Special Assistant Attorney General Eve Jacobs-Carnahan issued a 250-page response to the St. Francis/Sokoki Band petition. As part of their argument, they cited extensive entries from the Vermont Eugenics Survey, observing, "Not a single one identifies an Indian as an Abenaki."
The Attorney General’s report has been dismissed with varying expressions of contempt by professional scholars and historians. "It’s not history," said Gallagher. "It’s a legal brief. I don’t understand how lawyers think." But the most vehement criticisms center on what scholars consider an extreme breach of ethics in handling the Eugenics Survey records. Eugenics record historians at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state have adopted guidelines forbidding identification of individuals and even their locales in scholarly works.
Yet Sorrell and Jacobs-Carnahan include personal names and physical descriptions, such as the following quotation from the Survey: "[blank] was part Indian, part French, and part Negro. On his death certificate he is recorded as colored. He was very decidedly Negroid in appearance." Furthermore, the Attorney General’s office has made this report widely available. It went through a second printing in January 2003 and is now posted in its entirety on the Attorney General’s official Web site.
Chief Assistant Attorney General William Griffin, who supervised preparation of the report, defended the use of the names. "We did not release any identifications that were not in the public record," he told Indian Country Today. He also denied a connection between the Eugenics Survey and the recognition issue.
"It had nothing to do with Native Americans," he said of the Survey. "We went back and looked at it," he said. "It seemed to be targeting French-Canadians, if any particular group."
(Gallagher observed that very little research had been done about the fate of Indian peoples in the state eugenics programs. She said, however, that a primary target seemed to be mixed-race families, including tri-racial populations of black, white and Indian descent.)
Griffin also defended the content of the report. "What surprised me was the lack of a substantive response," he said of its critics. "There is some sniping around the edges, like the question you raised."
Although Sorrell is independently elected, he has long been a friend and political ally of Gov. Dean. (His mother, a Democratic Party activist, is often said to be the person who recruited Dean to run for the state legislature.) He figures prominently in a separate but possibly related, controversy, Dean’s refusal to release official papers from his 10 years as governor. The Attorney General’s office vetted the Memorandum of Understanding that withholds Dean’s papers from public view for ten years and is now defending the agreement in Vermont’s Washington County Superior Court against a suit from the Washington, D.C. group Judicial Watch. Dean’s discussions about sealing the 146 boxes and 450,000 pages of correspondence and official business, said Judicial Watch, focused on their impact on his presidential campaign.
Some of the more damaging material, to judge from letters which have already leaked and been turned against Dean, very likely involves his decisions on Indian issues, including the call for an apology on the Eugenics Survey.
Dean’s papers are now in the hands of the State Archivist, who is also in charge of the Eugenics Survey documents. Some critics of the state use of the eugenics papers also express concern that those documents are less accessible and in more disarray than they were 10 years ago.
"The file on sterilization," said Gallagher, "has gone missing."
©2003 Indian Country Today
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