As she dug for clues about her ancestors in the pages of Petersham, Massachusetts’
local history
, Jennifer Albertine struck the underbelly of the town her family has called home for 11 generations.
The present-day boundaries of Petersham are nearly identical to those
outlined in a 1733 grant
, in which colonial Massachusetts carved out a chunk of Nipmuc
land, divvied it up into roughly 50 to 100-acre parcels, and doled it
out to 72 volunteer bounty hunters as a bonus for scalping 10 Abenaki
nearly a decade before.
“A Nipmuc person lost that connection — that connection that I have to the land,” Albertine said. “That’s heavy to think about.”
In 1724, at the request of Captain John Lovewell, the Massachusetts government
offered 100 pounds
— about the annual salary of a schoolteacher at the time — for
each male Native American scalp brought to its council in Boston.
Months later, Lovewell’s men massacred 10 Abenaki next to a lake that now bears his name: Lake Lovell in New Hampshire.
Lovewell
trudged to Boston, assured the council the victims were over the age of
12, and paraded their scalps around town before weaving a wig out of
their hair and departing for another bloody expedition in Maine.
In
the decade that followed, soldiers, bounty hunters and their children
demanded land previously promised for over half a century of capturing
and killing Natives across New England.
In 1733, the government
fulfilled that promise for Lovewell’s men, handing out parcels in an
area northwest of Worcester. These lots comprised “Volunteer Town” — a
nod to the bounty hunters’ murderous initiative — and in 1754, the town
was incorporated as Petersham.
Scalping and genocide
Kimberly
Toney grew up a few miles away, in Barre. She is the coordinating
curator of Native American and Indigenous Collections at Brown
University Libraries and member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmuc. Last
April, she spoke on Petersham’s formation at its historical society’s
annual meeting.
“I got emotional myself, talking about the scalp bounties,” she said.
It’s
one thing to push back against the “cultural predisposition in America
to think of Indigenous people as being of the past,” she added. “It’s
kind of another thing to talk about the very real sanctioned murder of
men, women, and children.”
Massachusetts was not the only colony that issued bounties for Native
scalps; the practice was pervasive. And since the borders of
Massachusetts were much larger at the turn of the 18th century,
some of the bounty land
is now in Maine and New Hampshire.
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