I live in a neighbourhood of Scarborough, Maine, called Blue Point. “Neighbourhood” is probably the wrong turn; to me, that inspires thoughts of a high street with shops that you walk to, corner stores and pocket parks and three-decker houses with three families per deck. Blue Point is a village in the old English meaning of the term – a collection of houses, with a few places of business and a church, between other villages, some of which might merit the title of town or borough, or might not. Blue Point is a village, and interestingly, it’s one of the many sites of the genocide of native Americans hundreds of years ago.
Genocide is a loaded term, and it’s overused. But there are a few cases where it’s merited: the Holocaust, which I hope is obvious, and definitely the Rwandan genocide, and probably the Darfur genocide as well. North America is ambiguous, I think: most of the killing of native Americans by European immigrants was inadvertant, although viewed in retrospect as convenient, in that it was accomplished by disease and let’s face it, Europeans in the 17th and 18th century had a limited, at best, understanding of medicine, superior to that of Donald Trump but still not sufficient to blame them for the slaughter of 90% of native North Americans in the century following encounter by smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and the like. Indeed, those diseases regularly felled the immigrants themselves – only on a relatively lesser proportion, owing to inbred immunities and their own superior immune systems that exposed children to such diseases much earlier in their lives. It’s therefore awkward to compare Auschwitz in 1943 to North America in 1650, tempting though the verbiage may be.
But Blue Point is different. This was first settled in the 1650s or so – I could be off a decade or two either way – but it was associated with a settlement in the town I grew up in, Cape Elizabeth. On Richmond Island, a settler established a trading post, buying pelts from the First Nations folks and paying for it in tools and blankets and alcohol. Oh, and the blankets – yes, they were purchased from families whose children had died of smallpox. The traders of Richmond Island were trying to kill the natives, intentionally. They were proper genocidalists, and the people of Blue Point were in the same boat. The native Americans in the area realised this and slaughtered the settlers – with the help of the French from New France, who for all their faults didn’t try to kill the natives, they just tried to convert them to a particularly severe form of Jesuit Catholicism – and in my heart of hearts, I feel like saying “good job, Indian Guy – kill the evil smallpox blanket merchant and his gang of friends.”
Blue Point was thus uninhabited for about eighty years, after the death merchants had been driven away, until in the early 1700s some new folks from Boston came north and resettled the land. It’s good land for cattle, and has a good harbour for fishing boats down stream at Pine Point, and the hill above my house where there is now a Maine Water storage tank commands a view for miles around, perfect for defence. The French tried to take the town during one of the many idiotic wars of the 1700s but failed, and Blue Point settled into a kindly village existence, with many of my neighbours being direct descendants of the families who snipered off the French and Indian attackers, and ultimately sniped off the British redcoats a bit later and founded this particularly flawed and beautiful republic that I currently call home.
But if we’re honest, there have been multiple acts of genocide here. The people who first moved to Blue Point didn’t do anything except carry disease; no fault lies, only ignorance, curiousity, and initiative to settle in a new place. The blanket sellers, though, yes – they were genocidalists. The native Americans who slaughtered everyone here, though, were also intentionally seeking genocide: killing everyone who wasn’t of their tribe or kind. Figure there were a couple of hundred people living in the village of Blue Point in 1689 or whatever; surely not all of them were hideous racists? But they were all killed, or at least, enough were killed that the few survivors got the hell out. And then when the Bostonians came back in the 1700s, and fought off the remaining Indians and their French allies, I’m guessing they did so in a similar spirit of genocide: kill or drive off anyone who isn’t named Moulton or Turner or Taylor or Snow. Either you are one of us – and even we don’t like one another, but we’re of the same tribe – or you are marked to die.
I thought about this today as I walked with the three dogs and one of my neighbour friends, who isn’t from around here (nor am I – my parents are from Chicago, I was just born here), and watched the dogs roam across the paths and the woods. The road we walk on leads down to a boat landing which has clearly been there for centuries; it’s at the obvious point upstream from the ocean where you’d land your boats at the base of the slowly sloping fields and forests where cattle would have roamed and where salt wheat would have been planted. This is where the roughly innocent settlers of the 17th and then later 18th century obviously would have started the village, at this last bend, across the marsh from the clam flats where still today a half dozen locals harvest shellfish every daytime low tide. We take the dogs through the woods behind the houses – one of which is probably 18th century, the rest of which are from the last century if not the last few decades – and here and there you can see some stones which clearly were lain on purpose, not by nature, or you can see trees and openings which bear evidence of being there because nature had to get around something mankind did at some point in the past.
What I was thinking about was this instinct in humanity to kill en masse. It isn’t far below the surface, and it’s different from the instinct or desire to kill en pointe. Killing an individual, I think, is a different impulse. I can inspire the concept of wanting to kill someone fairly easily: by thinking of anyone harming my son, or any one whom I love for that matter (even people who no longer love me, or even care for me for that matter). But killing other people as a class, as a clade, is completely foreign to me. And it does seem to be very commonplace, or else we wouldn’t see it crop up over and over again in history, in every continent, in every culture.
Again, I don’t understand that impulse, so I’m the wrong person to be analysing it, but living on the ground that I do, it’s important to be aware of it. How can you inhabit a space without respecting those who came before you? If you respect your neighbours in space – the uber-eco family next door to the left, the pesticide salesman who lives to the right – shouldn’t you respect your neighbours in time? The native Americans who were displaced by dimwitted Englishman with potted faces, whose presence was followed by most of your friends and family dying a horrific feverish poxy death, for example, or the inbred Englishman living in fear of a Calvinist God and of the now-herd immune native Americans who would kill them without distinction – all of those spirits are living in the trees and the sandy soil beneath my home. My dog and her friends range through forests which once had settlers crouching in duck blinds with muskets against the Indians, with the Indians, probably far more stealthily, moving swiftly around the aspen and the birch, French weapons in hand, to kill without mercy.
Then again, words matter.
I watched a terrific program on Maine public television tonight about the Maine Wabanaki State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Maine, along with many other states and in line with Canadian practice as well, took children by force from First Nations families and placed them in foster care, group boarding homes, and into adoption, in an effort to – as it was called – “eliminate the Indian to save the man”. It went on for about a hundred years throughout North America, and the trauma it produced is enduring. Many children – unfortunately one can say “most” children – were physically or sexually abused, and even those in the best of circumstances had to endure the pain of being removed from their own parents, and their own culture, and dropped into an intellectual chaos. One woman on the program remembered trying to pour bleach over herself and her sister to remove the dark skin that marked them as being different from the other children in her adoptive family – even as she admitted that her adoptive parents treated them equally as their siblings – and that was probably the kindest memory recorded by the commission.
The commission declared, after three years of open public hearings, that the Wabanaki people were still subject to a “cultural genocide” and my first reaction was wait, genocide means something. Genocide is a destruction of people, much as the Englishmen who sold blankets to the Wabanaki back in the day were intentionally trying to kill off a people. The schools and foster and adoption parents weren’t trying to kill people – but I see what they were talking about. They were trying to kill a culture, trying to kill a shared understanding of being a part of something unique. It was an attempted murder, just not of people – it was an attempted murder of a people..
There has to be a different word for that though, because we also share the experience of creating a new people which by necessity involves shedding the skin of our former selves. I am no longer really an American, except for the fact that I hold an American passport and can only work without restriction in the states and territories of the United States: I’ve shed that long ago and become something different. It’s not that I abhor America or Americans, it’s just that I’m not part of that any more. And it’s not dead to me – but it isn’t part of me and therefore it is a dead part of my identity. No one made that happen – it was by choice. And I think that means I must be guilty of cultural homicide. If that’s the case, then if there are enough of us who choose to change ourselves – say, the way most Irish and Italian immigrants to America chose to assimilate, or the way that most Canadian immigrants merge into the multicultural melange of Canadia – then collectively we must be committing cultural genocide as well. We are choosing to sever the connections to a past tribal identity, and in so doing, we are killing that tribe in and of itself.
Now, that’s by choice. What happened to the Wabanaki children was not by choice, and I think it’s fair to apply a kind of accusatory word to another group when they force others to leave the collective into which they were born. But isn’t it interesting that we don’t see any disconnect when those who make the choice to sever held up as being liberal, or open, or even forward thinking? When they erode and dissolve the links of history and culture that they were born into, we usually celebrate it – but it is no less powerful in its erosive effect. In fact it might be even more corrosive: those who are forced out of a culture hold on that much more desperately, out of trauma and out of remembrance, to their past, while those who voluntarily reject what they came from are far more susceptible to discarding the memory.
I’m haunted by this because while I’ve left Maine – while I’ve left the experience of being American in a very real way – I’m now back here, and because of pandemic and a litany of other factors, I’m here to stay, an exile now in my own homeland. Do I owe a duty to where I was born, to the culture from which I came? Or is my duty that of simply remembering the deaths of those killed simply because they were different, the ones whose graves I walk over each day with the dogs, as they chase one another down to the water, the waters which keep running in and out, with every tide, without regard to who walks there?