Joseph Nevins - A Peoples Guide to Greater Boston

Greater Boston

Boston, like any particular place, is many things. Among those who have celebrated it, or do so now, it is that City on the Hilla biblical phrase used by the Massachusetts Bay Colonys first governor to highlight the dangers of failurebut now (mis)understood to suggest the promise of great things to come. In addition, as the physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes once baptized the city, it is the Hub (of the universe), the center of the world. Moreover, its the Athens of America due to Bostons preeminent place in the intellectual and cultural life of the United States, and its leading role in the establishment of educational institutionsfrom public schools to elite universities. And it is the Cradle of Liberty (a title claimed by others, not least Philadelphia) for helping to birth and nurture the American Revolution and subsequent freedom struggles.

But Boston is also a colonial enterpriseand has been since its very foundingone with two faces. First, it is a colony in the most literal sense of the word: a place where people from elsewhere have settled. Indeed, its very name comes from a town in England from where a number of the original Puritan settlers came in the early 1600s. When one speaks of colonial Boston, it is this first face that is typically intended. It is one, particularly in its earliest manifestations, that embodies a colonys most unjust form: one involving a relationship of domination (by a mother country) and subjugation (of the colonized land and people). Its second face reflects the fact that Boston has also long been a place involved in the colonization of places and peoples. One manifestation is the areas dispossession of the non-European, indigenous inhabitants and the absorption of the Native lands upon which the city and its environs now sit.

Prior to European contact, many Native groupsfrom the Massachusett and Nipmuc to the Pennacook and the Wampanoagpopulated the area. Moreover, there were points during the first several decades of European settlement when relations between settlers and Indians were constructive and respectfuleven if often only superficially soor when dissenting colonists challenged war-making against Indian groups. The potential of these relations was significantly limited, however, by a larger context: the questat best, paternalisticto civilize the indigenous population. Such efforts were thus part of a project to kill the Indian, and save the man, as Richard Henry Pratt, a US Army officer credited with establishing the first Indian boarding school, phrased it in an 1892 speech. These civilizing endeavors are inseparable from the many episodes and various forms of overt violence against Native peoples.

These speak to another project, one that saw Indians and their claims to the land as obstacles to the colonial enterprise, and that thus focused not on saving Indians, but instead on removing them. It was a project facilitated not only by direct violenceviolence intensified by rivalries involving competing European projects in North America and shifting alliances among Native groupsbut also by a combination of economic, ecological, and epidemiological forces that led to drastic reductions in Native numbers and far-reaching changes in how they lived. Even before English colonists settled what is today eastern Massachusetts, pathogens introduced by European traders had wreaked havoc on many Indian groups. Between 1616 and 1618, for example, an epidemic or a series of them killed upward of 75 percent of southern New Englands coastal Algonquian population, according to one estimate.