Read Online A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
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purposeful and moving, even though arrival was another trauma. Many others refused to return.
In the midst of winter, in the frontier town of Deer-field, Massachusetts, 1704, Eunice Williams, age seven, was captured by a party of French and Indian raiders, along with all the other members of her family and many of their neighbors, 112 in all. They were given moccasins to wear and marched from northern Massachusetts to near Montreal through New Hampshire, in the snow. Some of the captors were wounded and dying, and some of the captives who could not keep up—notably infants, women who had recently given birth, including Williams’s mother—were killed, their bodies left in the snow along the route. Many children were carried some or all of the way. Some of these child captives were not just prisoners but potential adoptees; Eunice’s older brother Stephen Williams was taken by the Abenaki and then by a Pennacook chief, though he was “redeemed” as the religiously loaded term went, or ransomed, in the spring of 1705. Eunice was kept by the Mohawk Iroquois near Montreal, and she never returned.
The Iroquois practiced a ceremonious form of adoption in which a captive could replace a family member who had died, and sometimes captives were explicit replacements for those killed in battle. The captive was given a new name and treated as a member of the family. Sometimes the given name belonged to someone who had died, and the newly named person inherited something of the affections and identity of the deceased. Ceremoniously, officially, Eunice Williams became someone else. Within a few years, all her surviving family members had returned to their Puritan communities, but the people among whom she lived said they would “as soon part with their hearts” as with her. She remained, soon forgot how to speak English, had a new name, then a Catholic baptismal name (becoming Catholic was almost more shocking to her Puritan preacher father than becoming Indian), eventually a second Iroquois name.
In 1713 in her late teens she married a member of the community named François Xavier Arosen with whom she remained until his death fifty-two years later. Her brother Stephen would write in his diary in 1722 that he had seen a man come from Canada. “He brings bad news thence. My poor sister lives with her Indian husband; has had two children, one is living, the other not.” The Williams family never ceased to mourn her loss and to regard her as spiritually lost as well. But Eunice Williams had ceased to be a captive long ago. She finally met with Stephen and her other brothers in 1740, traveled with them to their home, and even attended “publick worship” with them. “Yet this might be as a pledge yt she may return to the house and ordinances of God from wch she has been so long Sepratd,” though according to tradition she refused to “put off her Indian blankets” and camped out in a meadow with her husband rather than residing in a relative’s home. She was negotiating her emotional and cultural distance carefully, on her terms rather than theirs. On a few further occasions, she revisited her birth family, but she never left the community that had captured her, and in it she died at age ninety-five.
Her family always spoke as though she had crossed over into another world beyond reach, but what is striking is that even in the eighteenth century the boundaries were blurred. The Mohawks among whom she lived had close ties to the Jesuits of Montreal, and there was considerable movement between the various French, English, and Native communities. But it was different enough. She no longer spoke the language of her blood relatives, did not see them for more than three decades, and had settled among a people whose every belief and practice was profoundly different from the Puritans’. John Demos, in his book on Williams, The Unredeemed Captive, suggests that the Iroquois were kinder to children, and perhaps the thing hardest
In the midst of winter, in the frontier town of Deer-field, Massachusetts, 1704, Eunice Williams, age seven, was captured by a party of French and Indian raiders, along with all the other members of her family and many of their neighbors, 112 in all. They were given moccasins to wear and marched from northern Massachusetts to near Montreal through New Hampshire, in the snow. Some of the captors were wounded and dying, and some of the captives who could not keep up—notably infants, women who had recently given birth, including Williams’s mother—were killed, their bodies left in the snow along the route. Many children were carried some or all of the way. Some of these child captives were not just prisoners but potential adoptees; Eunice’s older brother Stephen Williams was taken by the Abenaki and then by a Pennacook chief, though he was “redeemed” as the religiously loaded term went, or ransomed, in the spring of 1705. Eunice was kept by the Mohawk Iroquois near Montreal, and she never returned.
The Iroquois practiced a ceremonious form of adoption in which a captive could replace a family member who had died, and sometimes captives were explicit replacements for those killed in battle. The captive was given a new name and treated as a member of the family. Sometimes the given name belonged to someone who had died, and the newly named person inherited something of the affections and identity of the deceased. Ceremoniously, officially, Eunice Williams became someone else. Within a few years, all her surviving family members had returned to their Puritan communities, but the people among whom she lived said they would “as soon part with their hearts” as with her. She remained, soon forgot how to speak English, had a new name, then a Catholic baptismal name (becoming Catholic was almost more shocking to her Puritan preacher father than becoming Indian), eventually a second Iroquois name.
In 1713 in her late teens she married a member of the community named François Xavier Arosen with whom she remained until his death fifty-two years later. Her brother Stephen would write in his diary in 1722 that he had seen a man come from Canada. “He brings bad news thence. My poor sister lives with her Indian husband; has had two children, one is living, the other not.” The Williams family never ceased to mourn her loss and to regard her as spiritually lost as well. But Eunice Williams had ceased to be a captive long ago. She finally met with Stephen and her other brothers in 1740, traveled with them to their home, and even attended “publick worship” with them. “Yet this might be as a pledge yt she may return to the house and ordinances of God from wch she has been so long Sepratd,” though according to tradition she refused to “put off her Indian blankets” and camped out in a meadow with her husband rather than residing in a relative’s home. She was negotiating her emotional and cultural distance carefully, on her terms rather than theirs. On a few further occasions, she revisited her birth family, but she never left the community that had captured her, and in it she died at age ninety-five.
Her family always spoke as though she had crossed over into another world beyond reach, but what is striking is that even in the eighteenth century the boundaries were blurred. The Mohawks among whom she lived had close ties to the Jesuits of Montreal, and there was considerable movement between the various French, English, and Native communities. But it was different enough. She no longer spoke the language of her blood relatives, did not see them for more than three decades, and had settled among a people whose every belief and practice was profoundly different from the Puritans’. John Demos, in his book on Williams, The Unredeemed Captive, suggests that the Iroquois were kinder to children, and perhaps the thing hardest
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