The Last of the Paugussetts
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union THE LAST OF THE PAUGUSSETTS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS "We ask this. Chief, to keep sacred the memory of our people" —From a 1927 statement to the mayor of chicago concerning...
...Because school-book historians have to justify our possession of the land, they either denigrate or ignore the original owners...
...His name is Edward Sherman and he lives with his white wife on the smallest Indian reservation in North America, a seven-room house on a half-acre lot in Trumbull, Connecticut...
...He makes a lot of money in California, but he's not an Indian...
...I asked him if he considered himself a chief, and he laughed...
...OK," he said, pointing to his cane...
...When the students learned that Crazy Horse had been murdered, many of them wept...
...It contained local newspaper clippings about "the last of the Pequots," and photographs of "Chief Sherman" wearing a fussy headdress of eagle feathers...
...We stole it when we stole the land...
...murders and massacres are best remembered, not hidden away...
...They did not use the plow and the wheel...
...they had no history...
...they tend to be noisy, inaccurate and self-glorifying...
...The reason is implied in the title of the text: This Is Our Land...
...Sherman, who is 84 years old, claims to be the last of the Pequots, a tribe depicted by the 19th-century historian John W. De Forest as "the most numerous, the most warlike, the fiercest and the bravest of all the aboriginal clans of Connecticut...
...Francis Mission School in South Dakota, a Jesuit seminarian named Tom Dooley was astonished to find that most of his teenage students, all of them Sioux, knew nothing of the Wounded Knee massacre or Crazy Horse's exploits...
...They focused on Crazy Horse, last of the tribe's great warriors, and on his hopeless struggle to regain freedom for the Oglala Sioux...
...Our Country's History, Ginn & Co...
...Certainly a people without memory is a people without a future...
...Sherman to take us to the cemetery...
...Whether a Pequot or a Paugussett, Mr...
...In 1730 the Paugussetts of Golden Hill became wards of the Connecticut colony and Golden Hill became a reservation...
...Sherman is part of the American melting pot...
...The Spanish found the California Indians very much like the Pueblo Indians but slower to learn" (Your People and Mine...
...This is where my father and his father are buried," Mr...
...Ginn & Co...
...It is not to be doubted that among last month's demonstrators at Wounded Knee were some of Dooley's former students...
...A few years ago at St...
...Did your grandfather give it to you...
...It's got a big stone with 'Sherman' on it...
...They had no written language" (The Life History of the United States, Time Inc...
...The First Americans Had No Flags" is the title of an early chapter in an elementary history book published in 1963 and still much in use...
...They enjoyed their reservation peaceably until about 1760," notes De Forest, "when they were ejected by some of the neighboring white proprietors who laid claim to all the land but six acres, and enforced their claims by pulling down the Indian wigwams...
...It came as a terrible blow," Dooley recalls...
...They knew nothing of the white man's idea of private ownership of property...
...He decided to teach a special course in Sioux history...
...Here are some current examples, taken from Textbooks and the American Indian, a superb analysis by Rupert Costo and Jeanette Henry: "Except for the Indians already here and the Negroes brought here from Africa, practically all the colonists were of European origin" (Our Nation from Its Creation, Prentice-Hall...
...A light rain began to fall as we drove through the gate...
...I spent 27 years at sea but they didn't give me no pension...
...People just took it...
...If they lost their land, these volumes seem to be saying, they had only themselves to blame: They were "slow to learn...
...That's the town cemetery...
...Diane asked Mr...
...The rest of the Pequots you can find down the road behind the fire-house...
...Now the Indians are asking white America to give them back their history...
...Finally, in 1842, the state set aside 20 acres for them in Trumbull, and Edward Sherman's grandfather built a house there...
...He veered suddenly and limped off toward another section...
...Yet Dooley was right...
...Gone," he said with a shrug...
...A few weeks ago my wife Diane and I met an Indian bereft of sacred memories...
...Diane asked...
...What happened to the rest of the tribe's land...
...But as nearly as I can make out, he is not a Pequot but a Paugussett...
...We walked gingerly between the gravestones...
...I watched as he hobbled over the coffins of the town notables—the Salisbury's, the Nichols, the Bloods—searching for the graves of his fathers...
...Just hand me my horse...
...For months he and his students delved into books about the Sioux...
...It's somewhere around here," he said...
...Sherman was walking faster now, not bothering to circumvent the graves...
...Sacred memories have their drawbacks...
...The reservation is one of four in Connecticut administered by the state welfare department...
...Chief, to keep sacred the memory of our people" —From a 1927 statement to the mayor of chicago concerning the treatment of indians in school texts...
...Have you ever heard of a tribe called the Paugussetts...
...I had to give it back...
...That and the small lot on which it stands are all that remain now of the 1842 legacy...
...I walked to the back of the room...
...As an afterthought he added, "When you're an Indian you're not a bigshot...
...he possesses no Indian mementos...
...I think maybe it's over there...
...Maybe they live in New York, I don't know...
...I didn't think they'd want me to see them crying...
...Park here...
...Can we blame the young Sioux for clinging to their ancestral history...
...Sherman...
...The Pequots ain't nobody anymore," he said...
...These early Americans left no architectural monuments like the Egyptian pyramids...
...We were sitting in Mr...
...Sherman another question: "Do you have any family...
...The Paugussetts made up a smaller, weaker tribe that held forth for a time in a place called Golden Hill, now a part of Bridgeport...
...No, somebody made it...
...that is the leak in the Melting Pot...
...To acquire a history, alas, is to acquire a taste for vengeance...
...Of course American Indians did have their tribal flags, but if you are writing a white history you must take care to expunge red symbols...
...I asked Mr...
...My grandfather, he's the one who built the house...
...I have a son from another marriage...
...Some fellow at the Chamber of Commerce gave it to me to wear when the town had an anniversary...
...There's only me, and I ain't nothing...
...When he stood, he looked surprisingly large amid the bric-a-brac...
...His "Indianness" has been conferred upon him by the white community — by a Chamber of Commerce that loans him a headdress and calls him "Chief...
...Once in a while he would crouch low to read a stone, using his "horse" as a pointer...
...He was a sailor like me...
...Diane went looking in a new direction, and I just stood in the rain...
...We asked Mr...
...For the next 80 years, it seems, the Paugussett remnants—by then they were down to less than a dozen —wandered from reservation to reservation, the periodic victims of white land-grabbers...
...Sherman is a man without a tribe...
...That is the message of Massada, Valley Forge and Wounded Knee...
...Where did you get the headdress...
...For all practical purposes Mr...
...his government sends him and his wife a monthly Social Security check...
...They just beached me...
...But the alternative to sacred memories is ethnic amnesia, a fate worse than chauvinism...
...It sounds familiar...
...Indian schoolchildren are regularly exposed to such nonhistories, which generally create the impression that Indians brought on their own miseries...
...He remembers no Indian words...
...Sherman's small cluttered parlor, looking through his scrapbook...
...they did not grasp ideas of "private ownership...
...Hunting grounds were claimed in common by a tribe...
...The upshot of all this has been ethnic amnesia—the enforced forgetting of one's tribal past...
...I think maybe I have," he said...
...Sherman said...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 9
