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Spring 2004

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Setting the Record Straight

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Setting the Record Straight
The truth about the 1704 raid on Deerfield

-Faye Wolfe




	“Deerfield Burning,” Will Sillin, illustrator. Courtesy of Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

THE WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS VILLAGE OF Old Deerfield swarms with people. They scurry along its main street, duck in and out of houses, variously cradling small children, shouldering rifles, or lifting their skirts as they negotiate walkways made nearly impassable in places by spring thaw. On this warm and sunny Leap Year Day, L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer cross paths with linen homespun and buckskin. Merrells and moccasins alike tread carefully through a stew of slush, mud, and puddles. There is a feeling of bounteous goodwill, or bonhomie, as it might be termed by the Quebecois among the crowd, one of whom is overheard animatedly alluding to her deux cafés (two coffees). Eager curiosity charges the air; gathered here are tourists on the hunt for history. Scholars, docents, and reenactors are prepared to offer it up in a variety of ways.

Three hundred years ago, in the dark, early hours of February 29, 1704, that history was in the making. According to Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield:

“A joint French and Indian raiding party attacked this English village where some 275 inhabitants and 20 garrison soldiers slept. In a surprise assault, 250 to 300 Abenakis, Frenchmen, Hurons, Mohawks, Pennacooks, and Iroquois of the Mountain penetrated the village’s stockade and killed 50 and captured 112 of the residents. By evening half of the village’s population was gone, men, women, and children. Many homes lay in ashes. The English killed 11 of the attackers and wounded at least 22, some of whom never made it home. The death toll and the number of captives taken made it one of the most devastating assaults on a colonial village anywhere in New England, New York, or New France.”

Between 1704 and 2004, the story of the Deerfield raid has been told many times and from many perspectives. Kevin Sweeney and Evan Haefeli’s scholarly Captors and Captives is the most recent version, published late last year by the University of Massachusetts Press. One of the earliest accounts appeared in 1706: The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion was written by John Williams, one of the settlers taken hostage. In the Canadian Mohawk community of Kahnawake, the Williams name persisted for several generations. In the Abenaki village of Odanak, the name of another Deerfield captive, Williams’s daughter, Eunice, has been passed on from grandmother to granddaughter for three centuries.

But what is the truth about Deerfield? Was it a brutal attack on innocent villagers? A desperate attempt by Natives to regain land that had wrongfully been taken from them? An unfortunate byproduct of a war between imperial European powers?

Leading up to the raid’s tricentennial, several UMass Amherst alums, faculty, and other members of the campus community have been involved in presenting the story—and the history that has grown up around the original event—with the aim of uncovering and including many points of view as fairly as possible. In an effort to set the record straight, the story is being told in such diverse forms as an opera, an interactive Web site, a radio show, and the anniversary weekend, held back in February, kicking off a year of special events.

Harley Erdman, chair of the UMass Amherst theater department, was suffering from “culture shock,” he says, when he moved to Amherst from Mexico three years ago. Towards acclimating himself he brought home The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. Historian John Putnam Demos’s book focused on Eunice Williams. Adopted at age seven by a Mohawk woman, years later Eunice refused to be “redeemed,” or ransomed, by her father. Instead, she married a Native man, Amrusus, who was apparently also called Arosen, and stayed in Canada, although she did return later for visits to her Deerfield family. Erdman was so moved by Eunice’s story that he broached the idea of dramatizing it to friend, Linda McInerney (MFA’98), an actor and theater teacher. When Paula Kimper signed on to compose the music, the three set about making an opera, “The Captivation of Eunice Williams.” By February, in time for a public reading during the anniversary weekend, Erdman had written at least five drafts of the libretto. (See “More on 1704,” for information on the opera’s world premiere in July.)

Erdman had never worked on an opera before. With eight roles as well a chorus, and a two-hour narrative that spans 40 years, it has been “a big project,” says Erdman, “complex and ambitious.”

Their research took Erdman, McInerney and Kimper to Kahnawake, Canada, the Native settlement where Eunice lived. McInerney, the opera’s director and producer, says that the friendships they made there “informed the project enormously.” She says, “One of the high points in the process was sharing the libretto with the Mohawks,” and their acceptance of it.

Erdman says, as they wrote the opera, “It almost felt like there was a special power guiding us.” Striving “to see both sides,” the English and the Native, they structured the opera as a shifting back and forth. Act I, for instance, juxtaposes the English settlers’ religious views and the Iroquois creation story of Sky Woman. The ambitious project’s weighty subject and operatic form notwithstanding, “Captivation” has humor and romance; Erdman notes, “Like all stories, ultimately it’s about love. We were not trying to do a political play,” he says, “but I feel it is relevant for today—the world needs people like Eunice, to go between worlds, between nations, and act as a bridge, and remind us transformation is possible.”

Abenaki Marge Bruchac often speaks about such transformations as she travels between worlds in the present day. As a storyteller, she offers Native history and ancient myths to new audiences. As a consultant and advisor to museums all over New England, she works to ensure that Native histories are presented accurately and fully. In that role she assisted in the creation of a Web site and an exhibit, integral parts of the 1704 anniversary weekend in Deerfield.

A doctoral candidate in anthropology at UMass Amherst, Bruchac continues her decades-long research on colonial and contemorary encounters between Native and non-Native ways of life. “Academia is where theories are developed and promulgated—it’s the back-and-forth between popular assumptions and academic theories that form ideas. That social dialogue affects everyone, it decides whose history is valued and whose is not.”

In particular, Bruchac is concerned with developing “a methodology to bring more of history out in the open.” She notes that available, valuable resources—documents, artifacts, and oral histories—have often been ignored, “marginalized” by researchers. Things are changing, however, Bruchac believes. Case in point: during the 1704 anniversary weekend, Native American Indian dancers, reenactors and guests were a very visible presence everywhere in Deerfield.

Bruchac, in period Abenaki costume, led tours around town on the anniversary weekend. She told hundreds of people the Native names for the slate-blue hills—the Pemawatchuwatunck—looming over Deerfield and the rivers running through it. She vividly conveyed how the Native presence has persevered—and been ignored—over the last three centuries. Perhaps the most shocking example of the latter came when she pointed out that Native bones, uncovered when the Albany road was first laid out, were ground into the roadway by the early settlers. “The beauty of where Deerfield is right now,” says Bruchac, “is that the museum, the historians, the academy, the folks in the town, the Native consultants—all can be heard. No one is seen as threatening. ‘Multicultural’…that’s what the world really is. A multiplicity of beliefs and understandings so enriches life.”

In producing the WFCR series on 1704, “Captive Lands, Captive Hearts,” Suzannah Lee ’79 (MFA ’83) strove for a multiplicity of perspectives—and a rich melange of sounds. Aired the week leading up to the anniversary, five six-minute broadcasts used “the raid as a bridge to what came before and after,” says Lee. What came before were thousands of years of Native life in the Deerfield region; what came after were a series of interpretations of the event. Lee enjoys working in radio because it offers “a window into a part of the world, a situation, or event.” Creating this particular window was “hugely challenging,” she says, because with its focus on a Colonial-era event, there was no original sound.

“The land, its fertile nature, is so central, I wanted to begin there,” she explains. “We opened the series with the sound of a tractor, a farmer in Deerfield harrowing his field.” She brought in Marge Bruchac to provide a Native perspective, as well as Kevin Sweeney, John Demos, and the words of John Williams as spoken by executive producer Bob Paquette ’77. Providing additional depth and texture were the sounds of rushing water, a Wabanaki paddling song, narration from a Deerfield Academy film made in 1949, and a 1911 recording of the first Wendat Indian to be ordained as a Catholic priest.

Lee came to radio after working at Ploughshares magazine, teaching, screenwriting, and living in Portugal on a Fulbright. She says, “This project was an eye-opener for me, [learning about] the vastness of the Native history, and how much it was displaced, obliterated.” The 1704 raid is, she points out, “a rarefied history, a specific moment, but it resonates through a much larger span of time.” Remarkable, she says, is “the rawness of it to this day—we’re still trying to reconcile what went on then.” She pays tribute to the sources she drew upon, the work of “the scholars and educators who have worked hard to keep the story alive and who are continuing to look within the seams of our given history and pull them apart.”

Such scholarship is evident in the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) Web site, “The Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704.” Angela Goebel-Bain ’95G,’03G is one of the scholars who contributed to it. She also co-curated the “Remembering 1704” exhibit at Historic Deerfield’s Flynt Center for Early American Life, on display through April 2005. Goebel-Bain, the Web site’s primary humanities consultant, was involved as project manager in the planning stages, and later, as its subject matter editor.

Her involvement with the Deerfield story began even earlier, when she was studying indigenous education at the School of Education. During an internship at Kahnawake in Canada, she became aware of the Mohawk perspective on the 1704 attack. After graduation, she joined the staff of the PVMA’s Memorial Hall Museum. A critical moment in the Web site’s planning came in July 2001, Goebel-Bain says, when “representatives of Quebec and Native communities of Canada sat around a table,” the first time the museum had ever hosted such a gathering, to hammer out what should be on the site. She says, “I’m most proud of our collaboration with our Native and French advisors, people outside the normal circle of advisors.”

Visitors to the “Many Stories” Web site will find background on the five cultures involved in the Deerfield raid including photographs of a stone ax, circa 5000 BCE and John Williams’s Bible, among other artifacts; a timeline, song recordings, and essays that give still greater historical breadth to the story. What Goebel-Bain says of the Flynt Center exhibit, “Remembering 1704,” also rings true of the Web site: “Whereas many exhibits focus on artifacts, this one is focused on the story … we’re pushing the envelope, saying things about the raid that may ruffle some feathers. But it starts a conversation, I hope.”

The 300th anniversary of the raid has brought about the most detailed account of events to date, one that embraces Native and French perspectives. Goebel-Bain echoes the prevailing attitude when she says, “I feel a responsibility to invite people to look at the attack in its historical context.” By way of explanation, she cites a 19th-century marble plaque hanging in the Memorial Hall Museum that describes the 1704 raid as perpetrated on a “sleeping village.” But its inhabitants, Goebel-Bain points out, “knew that they were living on contested land.” The story of that contest, of the many historical forces that came to bear on a small English town in long-inhabited Pocumtuck Indian territory—the sleeping history of Deerfield, in other words—has, it seems, finally been awakened.

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