Back in the 1700s, the Massachusetts government offered money or land — or both — to the men who brought them the scalps of Native men, women, and even children. Now, tribes and organizations are working to return sovereign land back to Native people.
One of the people involved in that work is Kimberly Toney, a member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmuc and the coordinating curator of Native American and Indigenous collections at Brown University Libraries. She Joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss the history of scalp bounties and the work being done today to address . What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: I think we all need to start off with a history lesson. So can you tell us some more about the history of Petersham and those bounties?
Kim Toney: I guess I would start off by saying Petersham, Massachusetts, is located in Worcester County and is very squarely on Nipmuc homeland. So Nipmuc people traditionally stewarded and continue to steward land across what is now referred to as Central Massachusetts and parts of northern Connecticut and Rhode Island. So Petersham is sort of west-northwest of Worcester and was settled by English folks in the 1730s. At that time it was actually called Voluntown or Volunteer Town before it was called Petersham. And this was kind of a nod by the proprietors who settled that land to the fact that they had volunteered in various militias to basically perpetrate the sanctioned murder or scalping of Native Abenaki folks in what is now Maine and northern territories. That’s kind of a brief history of, of sort of the settlement of that place. But it had been, as I said, cared for and lived in by Nipmuc people for time in memoriam before then.
Rath: I feel like we need to point out at the top, if it’s not totally clear, because I think a lot of people have this misconception that scalping was a Native American practice. Here we see that this is perpetrated by Europeans, and it was actually — correct me if I’m wrong — was actually introduced by Europeans.
Toney: I know when I was growing up, I learned to equate the practice of scalping with something that only Native people did, but that’s really not true. There are long histories of the practice of scalping employed in warfare coming from Great Britain, coming from Europe. So by the time settlers came here to the Dawn Land, or to what is commonly referred to now as New England, that practice was being imposed upon Indigenous people in order to remove them from the land.
Rath: Scalping is obviously, you know, something that we would currently consider a war crime. It’s an atrocity. How do you and your community deal with a trauma like that?
Toney: Yeah, it’s an especially difficult subject matter. And I think also another thing that I would offer is not only were there practices of scalping happening as one sort of mode of clearing the land, I suppose, and removing Native people from the land. But there were actually proclamations issued at a colonial governmental level saying you will receive 100 pounds for the scalp of a man, and half of that for a woman or a child. And I think because the history of scalping, or that mode of engagement with Native people in the Northeast is something that is invisible or not taught — it really is a shameful history, it’s something that I myself want to turn away from, I don’t love thinking about it — it means that it’s not something that’s maybe part of the consciousness or a lot of people, including Native people, including people in my community. But the fact is that this happened and that there are the sort of results of the killing of Native folks and the taking of land or giving of land as sort of a gift for people’s volunteering in these militias has had a long effect and a deep effect on Indigenous communities since the 1600s. Since the 1700s, when a place like Petersham was gifted to proprietors for their work scalping Abenaki folks in Maine.
Rath: Well, that’s what’s really striking. As an American or someone who thinks that they understand American history, we tend to think in terms of what happened with Native Americans, that that the genocide didn’t really get going until like the 19th century. Right? Til post-Civil War to like the wars that we learned about if we did it in schools. But the proclamations, those documents that you’re talking about that put it right back to the earliest days right here.
Toney: Right? Yeah. Everything I think about the Northeast or even the East Coast, sort of the sights of first engagement with English colonizers and Native folks as being kind of a training ground for all these different and later modes of cultural and physical genocide or dispossession of Native lives and cultures and land. Not only were scalp bounties and sort of proclamations that sanctioned the murder of men, women and children coming out of the colony, but there were also early land transactions that were happening to dispossess people. I think about the origins of Indian boarding schools and the removal of children from home, so that those things were happening in Nipmuc communities in the 18th and 17th centuries, too. Children were being removed from homes to live in Cambridge, live in Boston with settlers in their homes. There were also sort of processes of land allotment being sort of tried out on Indigenous communities in the 1700s here in Massachusetts. And you can think about sort of the Dawes Act or Indian removal that’s happening in the 1830s as sort of I see a dotted line connecting those things that are happening in the 19th century to what was happening here in the Northeast hundreds of years before it.
Rath: And in terms of the but what you’re taking on the rather large project of determining how to how to rectify some of these wrongs. Are you able to trace through these documents, you know, specifically what money went where and which land was taken to to get a detailed sense of, again, connecting the those lines you’re talking about.
Toney: It’s actually really incredible the amount of information that still survives, and I guess the gap between that amount of information that survives in libraries and archives and the lack of a public education or knowing about these things. So because there are really very deep colonial records, especially when it comes to what colonists want to do as far as record keeping about this land in particular. Like, here’s a deed document that’s saying all the rights forever and ever are handed over to different settlers. And they wanted to keep really good track of the land and their desire to have the land, so there are records — court records, colony records, deeds. These proclamations tell a story. So we can do a lot to really look at the record and track where land is being gifted or given to people for their service as part of militia companies or military forces who are tracking murdering Native folks. There are many stories that the archives can tell about these things, and there are scholars and other people working on them. I work in special collections libraries, and I like to connect with people who are doing the work, but also bring people into the archive and show them these things. I think there’s a little work that has to be done when the subject matter is something like this in particular, but the documents kind of reveal themselves. There are different projects going on tracking specifically bounties, and which towns are connected to the sort of reward system for scalp bounties.
Rath: Are you in a state where there’s been any money or lands returned, or the prospect of that? How far off would that be?
Toney: So there are discussions about and there is real land being returned or work being done with members of our community and folks who are allied or really interested in creating solid and reciprocal relationships with our community to return land or facilitate modes of stewardship and access for Native people. So the Hassanamisco Nipmuc in particular, is one of several bands of Nipmuc across the state, or Central Massachusetts and Northern Rhode Island and Connecticut, where the Hassanamisco have a land base at Hassanamesit, which is in present day Grafton, Massachusetts, and that land base referred to as a reservation established in the 18th century, or I guess a little before that, is the only space of land that has never been owned by anyone other than Nipmuc people — sort of in the expansive definition of the word “owned” in terms of how that fits into a Nipmuc culture. But it’s actually less than four acres. The plaque on the side of the road at the reservation says it’s four acres, but it’s about three and a half. So that’s the only land base that the Hassanamisco Band has had in its possession outside of colonial, taking away of what was originally thousands of acres of land. But there are lots of people in my community working on land, back working, as I said, with allies, organizations and other groups who are interested in returning land. So that’s happening.
Rath: We talked about some dark stuff, but that’s pretty exciting, right? I mean, there’s obviously a long history of promises. So to actually get something real, to see the prospect of actual land returning must feel amazing.
Toney: Yeah, it is very promising and it’s exciting to think about just connecting with folks and improving access to land, because it does feel like it’s a path toward healing and acknowledging the harm and the dispossession that has happened over so many centuries, that the land is our relative and is desirous and in need of care. And it’s wonderful to be able to be in spaces where people understand and want to talk about that and and commit to doing better and healing some of the the trauma that we all carry from these sort of horrible things that happened so long ago.
