Brown University history professor Mack Scott grew up Indigenous in Rhode Island. He moved to the Narragansett reservation in Charlestown in middle school, where he was steeped in his culture. But prior to that he lived in Providence, where he said this identity was less present in his own life.
“I was considered a city Indian, which means that we would go to the pow wow, but a lot of the storytelling and cultural practices, we weren’t involved in,” he said.
He said that in the city, as a person who is both indigenous and Black, people mistook him for Cape Verdean or Dominican because his Indigenous culture and identity were less visible. He attributes this, in part, to the history of the enslavement of Native people in Rhode Island and Southern New England, which he said was a purposeful erasure of both Indigenous and Black identity.
“The intent is to erase my ancestry. People did not keep the records. People did not record the names,” said Scott. “People change things back and forth… on purpose to kind of create a situation where people like me don’t have a significant history and have not been a significant part of the American saga.”
Scott hopes this erasure can begin to be undone by a new website he has served as an academic advisor for called Stolen Relations. It’s a database with thousands of records that people like Scott can use to piece together family history and the larger history of Native enslavement in the country. He said it helps “to find or recover stories that are erased on purpose,” like that of his own enslaved ancestors.
The team behind Stolen Relations plans to launch the website during a symposium on Saturday that will feature academic and Indigenous speakers.
New insights into family history
Scott says that growing up on the reservation, he learned a good amount about his family history, but he had to fill in unknown parts with educated guesses. For instance: His Narragansett grandmother’s last name was Babcock. It’s a common name in the Westerly area, both for people descended primarily from settlers and from Indigenous peoples.
“I know that our Babcock name comes from those people who came from England whose name was Babcock, and they must have enslaved one of my ancestors and gave them that name,” said Scott.
When Scott typed the Babcock last name into the website, a record popped up for his ancestor named Jo: a contract showing the exact moment that Jo was sold into indentured servitude to a Westerly widow named Content Babcock by his parents when he was “14 months old & 20 days.”
Although the contract stipulated that Jo should be freed at the age of 21 years old, that appeared not to happen, Scott said, because Jo’s daughter was also born into slavery and given the last name Babcock.
Scott said learning all this information gave him insight into how desperate his ancestors must have been to sell their son into indentured servitude. It also made him grateful for their perseverance.
“Everything that they had to endure and go through and, if they didn’t, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “So that’s what the records mean for me, is being able to understand the people that I come from and the endurance and the survivance and I, myself and my children, are the fortuity of that experience.”
Sandi Brewster-Walker, a member of the Montaukett Indian Nation of New York, was also involved in the creation of Stolen Relations as an advisor. Her Tribe was previously recognized by the U.S. government, but that was overturned in 1908. She said she believes the website could help her Tribe’s case for federal recognition.
“We’ve been fighting that for 113 years, and I’ve had to go in and identify thousands of Montauketts from first contact up into the present. So this helps to help track them,” said Brewster-Walker, who is also a genealogist.
Expanding understanding of Indigenous enslavement
The broader goal of the site is to provide insight into how the history of Indigenous enslavement in New England shaped the region. Linford Fisher is the historian at Brown University who started the Stolen Relations project. He says many Indigenous people were enslaved as a result of the War for New England in the 1670s, and enslavement was used as a tool by colonists to break up communities and settle the area. The team is using the term “War for New England” rather than “King Philip’s War” in part because of the historical significance the war had for reshaping the political identity of New England.
“There’s a direct connection between hunting down people, enslaving them, carting them off to Boston as slaves, and then founding towns on the very same spot they used to live,” said Fisher.
The website shows how widespread Native enslavement was across the land that is currently known as the United States and beyond through a global map component with individual dots representing slave owners and Indigenous people. Fisher pointed out how the map shows a group of Indigenous enslaved people from New England that were shipped to Tangier, Morocco, in the 1670s, and forced to build a breakwater there.
At one point, Fisher says, they actually wrote a letter back to a missionary in the colonies.
“They say, ‘Look, we’ve been sent over here wrongfully. We’re being forced to labor. We miss our community, we miss our family. We want to get back and can you help us?’” he said.
Fisher said he never could figure out what happened to the people sent to Tangier.
“Archivally, they kind of disappear, but each one of them retain, for the rest of their lives, a sense of who they were and a sense of where they came from,” he said, explaining that records such as these help to “really humanize that sense of shipping people out.”
Fisher plans to publish a book next year based on some of this research. He says beyond these records helping to illustrate the breadth of Indigenous enslavement and the human experience of it, he believes this project helps to push the history forward in two other key ways.
First, he says, the project expands people’s understanding of what it means to have been a slave. Slavery, Fisher says, is sometimes hidden through terms that may appear slightly more innocuous, such as indentured servitude, or apprenticeship, when all of those things still added up to an unfree and unpaid life.
“If I say American slavery, you probably imagine a southern plantation with like 100 African and African descended people working on it, but instead the history of Indigenous enslavement and forced labor and servitude is a much wider array of coerced labor contexts,” said Fisher.
The second way he believes Stolen Relations will help to push the field forward is through the popular understanding of the timeline. Slavery in the area known today as the United States, he says, does not begin with the Triangular Slave Trade, but with earlier European settlement. The timeline on the website shows the first enslaved people in New England were Abenaki people from the territory now called Maine, by Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real.
A path to healing
Besides the website and the book, there will also be two museum exhibits opening next spring. One will be at Brown, and the other will be at the Tomaquag Museum. The museum’s director, Lóren Spears, is Narragansett and also worked on the project as an advisor. She says the project is an important part of the reconciliation process for Indigenous people in the United States.
“I believe that the project is part of healing. If you don’t understand and don’t dive deeply into the history that has befallen our people, you cannot understand where all the layers of trauma are from, and it doesn’t give you the opportunity to start that healing,” she said.
Fisher also said that people using the website are welcome to contact the Stolen Relations team to submit additional records they can vet and potentially add to the website.
