Springfield-Agawam Indigenous Land Acknowledgement
Agawam Territory, Springfield, Massachusetts
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Springfield-Agawam Indigenous Land Acknowledgement:
We [or I] acknowledge that here, we stand on Indigenous land, known to the original Algonkian Indian (Native American/Indigenous) inhabitants as “Agawam,” or “Akawaham.” The Indigenous name for this place is a locative term that roughly translates to “low-lying marshy lands,” describing a large region along both sides of the Kwinitekw (now called the Connecticut River) from present-day Enfield, Connecticut to the Holyoke Range. For at least 10,000 years, since the last era of glaciation, the Agawam people engaged in trade, diplomacy, and kinship with other regional Indigenous people, most notably: the Quaboag to the East; the Podunk to the South; the Woronoco to the West; and the Nonotuck, Pocumtuck, and Sokoki to the North.
During the 1630s, when Agawam leaders invited English colonial settlers to build a small settlement here, they attempted to preserve, in written deeds, Indigenous cartographies and rights to hunt, fish, plant, and live on tribal lands. When diplomatic relations failed, the Agawam people were decimated and dispersed as a direct result of colonial deceit, disease, and warfare. Although the survivors sought refuge with other Native communities across the northeast, very few direct descendants of the Agawam people live in Springfield today.
We [or I] acknowledge, however, that many Indigenous nations, from the territory we now call "southern New England," still survive and still exercise sovereignty. We [or I] acknowledge, in particular, these contemporary Indigenous nations: the Nipmuc to the East; the Wampanoag and Narragansett to the Southeast; the Mohegan, Pequot, and Schaghticoke to the South; the Mohican to the West; and the Abenaki to the North, among many others. Recognizing that the entirety of the North American continent constitutes territory considered to be original Indigenous homelands, we [or I] respect the sovereignty of these and hundreds of other Native American Indigenous nations that survive today and we [or I] pledge to support the rights of these nations and the interests of Indigenous peoples.
Pronunciation Guide:
Abenaki [a-ben-a-kee]
Agawam [aa-gah-wahm]
Akawaham [ah-kah-wa-hahm]
Algonkian [al-gone-kee-uhn]
Kwinitekw [kwin-eh-tek-wuh]
Mohegan [moh-he-gahn]
Mohican [moh-hee-kuhn]
Narragansett [nare-uh-gann-sett]
Nipmuc & Nipmuck [nip-muck]
Nonotuck [non-oh-tuck]
Pequot [pee-kwaht]
Pocumtuck [poe-come-tuck]
Podunk [poe-dunk]
Schaghticoke [scat-ti-coke]
Sokoki [soh-koh-kee]
Quaboag [qua-bog]
Wampanoag [wamp-ah-nawg]
Woronoco [wore-oh-no-co]
Authors: This land acknowledgement was written by Margaret M. Bruchac (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania) & Laurel Davis-Delano (Professor of Sociology, Springfield College).
“Reconsidering the English Settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts: Agawam Generosity and Colonial Violence”
by Margaret M. Bruchac [See Footnote 1]
The founding of the English town of Springfield, in the traditional homelands of the Agawam people, in the midst of the Kwinitekw/Connecticut River Valley, is not a simple story of colonial settlement in an apparent “wilderness.” Nor is it a story of violence at the outset. New England in general, and the Connecticut River Valley in particular, witnessed a gradual system of colonization where first contact – in the form of inter-cultural trading off the coast – led to the accidental introduction of infectious diseases that decimated the Indigenous population. In the aftermath of those devastating losses, some Native nations – including the Wampanoag on the coast, and the Agawam on the Connecticut River – welcomed small vulnerable groups of English colonists to trade, to settle colonial towns, and to negotiate peaceful terms for co-habitation. Such were their hopes.
The Native people of Agawam, Nonotuck, Pocumtuck, and other places in this valley had long utilized seasonal hunting and trading networks and abundant local resources (such as corn, furs, wampum, land) to build and rebuild inter-tribal kin relations and alliances (Brooks 2008; Thomas 1990). By the 1630s, they expanded local economies by inviting, to a limited degree, English neighbors, trading partners (and potential military allies) into the valley (Bridenbaugh 1982; Thomas 1990).
Some of the earliest documents reveal the intricacies of recording both Native and English names for the local landscape. Agawam, meaning “low land” (Huden 1962:19), identified marshy, low-lying meadows, near a spot where waves wash against the shore (akawaham); another translation is “ground overflowed by water” (Wright 1905:13). Agawam also came to refer to the place “where ye English did first build a house, wch we now commonly call ye house meadow.” Another nearby place, Masacksick, was called by the English “Long medow,” and “Usquaiok is the mil River wth the Land adjoyning” (Holyoke July 8, 1679 in Wright 1905:13). Another locale came to be called Pauhunganuck (from pawahagan, meaning “to pound” or “thrash”). This name employed Algonkian logic, in that it literally translates to “land of the mill,” referring to the sawmill that was built on present-day “Miller’s Brook” in 1666 (Wright 1905:64).
The English colonial settlers included references to these Native names and places when transacting “deeds” that, to Native people, were intended to function as treaties and as written records of Indigenous rights to permanent occupation. These documents often included references to goods given (such as wampum, clothing, weapons), notations on kinship relations among signatories, and language that explicitly preserved Native rights (hunting, fishing, setting up wigwams, harvesting nuts, planting corn, etc.) (Bruchac 2007:17-20).
For example, a July 15, 1636 deed transacted by William Pynchon, Henry Smith, and Jehu Burr identified thirteen Native signatories, including Commucke and Matanchan, “ancient Indians of Agaam,” and Cuttonas, the “right owner of Agaam & Quana, & in the Name of his mother Kewenusk the Tamasham or wife of Wenawis, & Niarum the wife of Coa” (Wright 1905:11-12). Pynchon supplied eighteen fathoms of wampum, eighteen coats, eighteen hatchets, eighteen hoes, and eighteen knives, plus an additional two coats paid to Wrutherna (Wright 1905:12). This exchange was witnessed and signed by “Ahaughton an Indian of the Massachusett” (Nipmuc) who likely served as a translator. This document specifically reserved traditional hunting, harvesting, and planting rights, and also indicated that damages would be due if English hogs or cattle disturbed Native crops:
...the Sd Indians...shal have & enjoy all that cottinackeesh, or ground that is now planted; And have liberty to take Fish & Deer, ground nuts, walnuts akornes & sasachiminesh or a kind of pease, And also if any of our cattle spoile their corne, to pay as it is worth; & that hogs shall not goe on the side of Agam but in akorne time (Hampden County Records Liber A-B; Folio 19, in Wright 1905:12).
The first generation of Native signatories to these documents may well have believed they were negotiating treaties with rights to share usage of certain areas (Thomas 1990). Most of these deeds indicate boundaries that extend no further than a few miles on either side of the Connecticut river. Important shared fishing places, such as the Great Falls at Montague/Gill, where abundant shad and salmon were communally harvested by multiple tribal nations every spring, were not circumscribed in these deeds (Thomas 1990). Native leaders likely assumed that their English trading partners would limit their new plantations to small locations beside the rivers, thus avoiding interference with on-going Native activities in the broader homelands (Brooks 2008; Bruchac 2007; Thomas 1990).
English written promises were, however, hollow, and the objects that Native leaders saw as “tribute” were construed by the English as mere “payment.” English power brokers, despite promises of peaceful interaction, clearly intended to use these deeds as an expedient means of undermining Indigenous sovereignty by enforcing English laws and manipulating deeds into “quit-claims,” where Native people would lose all use of the land. Native people attempted, without success, to seek redress from colonial courts; in one such complaint, the General Court at Boston heard:
...a Petition to consider of the complaynts of the Indians of Springfeild agt Samll Marshfeild who hath gotten the lands of the Indians into his hands by virtue of a deed of mortgage from ye Indians whereby they are impovished haveing little or nothing left to plant but are constrained to hire of ye English...This Court advised Samuel Marshfield & the Indians to accord amongst themselves... (Green 1888:153).
English leaders and English courts refused to intervene, and the evidence suggests that some land brokers intoxicated, indebted, or otherwise duped Native people into signing deeds (Bruchac 2007). One Native couple, Spanesa and Poxonock, were convinced to sign a mortgage for Woronoco land that, in effect, offered their daughter to be enslaved if they defaulted:
...wee the Grannters doe hereby Morgage or fully engage that if wee make not the title of the land good to these two Grantees, then Samuell Marshall is to have our little Daughter now about ffoure yeeres old to enjoy her & dispose of her as his own estate. . . (Green 1888:153)
In essence, the generosity of Agawam people in welcoming English colonists enabled what was, at first, a bloodless act of dispossession. Springfield’s colonial settlers efficiently moved to superimpose European boundaries and laws on Native homelands and protocols.
Within the next few decades, there were increasing conflicts over land, law, and resources, and the pressures of European colonists included the chaos of enlisting Native nations to war against one another. By 1675, these conflicts resulted in the outbreak of Metacom’s Rebellion/King Philip’s War, starting in southern New England and engulfing Native nations and English colonists across Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts (DeLucia 2018; Temple 1887). While this and other conflicts continued, amid the so-called “French and Indian wars,” hundreds of Native refugees from Agawam, Pocumtuck, Nonotuck, Woronoco, and Sokoki communities relocated, moving westward to Mohican and Mohawk territory or northward to Abenaki territory (Calloway 1990). These conflicts, when combined with scalp bounties imposed by the Province of Massachusetts Bay – which suggested that any Native person found within five miles of the Connecticut River could be considered hostile – made co-habitation impossible (Bruchac 2011:48).
Thus, like so many other towns founded in the 17th century, Springfield stands as a painful example of failed diplomacy. The generosity of Agawam people was followed by English duplicity, dispossession, violence, war, and Indigenous diaspora. The resulting prevalence and widespread acceptance of colonial narratives, and the erasure of Indigenous perspectives and realities in written histories, has been so extreme that many present-day residents of the region have little to no awareness of, or respect for, living Indigenous peoples and their histories (O’Brien 2010). Native nations – including Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Abenaki, and many others – are still present in New England today, but they are not well-known to the general public. This is, in part, a function of how history is remembered. Colonial monuments tend to celebrate the success of the colonial settler population and Native monuments tend to lament the disappearance of the Native population; neither represents the full truth (Blee and O’Brien 2019; DeLucia 2018). Hence, the need for a careful reconsideration of the colonial era, especially when speaking a land acknowledgement, as a very small first step towards truth and reconciliation.
Sources Cited:
Blee, Lisa and Jean M. O’Brien. 2019. Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Bridenbaugh, Carl. 1982. The Pynchon Papers. Volume I, Letters of John Pynchon, 1654-1700. Boston, MA: Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
Brooks, Lisa. 2008. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Bruchac, Margaret M. 2011. “Revisiting Pocumtuck History in Deerfield: George Sheldon’s Vanishing Indian Act.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 39 (1/2): 30-77.
Bruchac, Margaret M. 2007. Historical Erasure and Cultural Recovery: Indigenous People in the Connecticut River Valley, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Calloway, Colin G. 1990. The Western Abenaki of Vermont, 1600-1800 - War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press.
DeLucia, Christine. 2018. Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
Green, Mason A. 1888. Springfield 1636-1886 History of Town and City. Springfield, MA: C. A. Nichols and Company.
Huden, John c. 1962. Indian Place Names of New England. Heye Foundation, New York: Museum of the American Indian.
O’Brien, Jean. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Temple, Josiah H. 1887. History of North Brookfield, Massachusetts. Boston, MA: Town of North Brookfield.
Thomas, Peter A. 1990. In the Maelstrom of Change: The Indian Trade and Cultural Process in the Middle Connecticut River Valley, 1635-1665. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Wright, Harry Andrew. 1905. Indian Deeds of Hampden County. Springfield, Massachusetts: Harry A. Wright.
[1] Dr. Margaret M. Bruchac is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Associate Faculty in the Penn Center for Cultural Heritage, and Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.