America’s Guardian Myths
By SUSAN FALUDI
New York Times
AT length they came and beset our own house, and quickly it was the dolefulest day that ever mine eyes saw.” Thus did a minister’s wife, Mary Rowlandson, describe the Indian attack and immolation of her Massachusetts village, 35 miles west of Boston. “On the 10th of February 1675 came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster,” she wrote. “Their first coming was about sun-rising. Hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven.”
Rowlandson was one of the fortunate that morning: she and her three children were spared and taken captive. Her youngest, a 6-year-old daughter, died in her arms on the forced march north. After 11 harrowing weeks, Rowlandson was released and a few years later wrote “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” which would run through four printings in its first year and become America’s original best seller, the model of the captivity narrative, the foremost indigenous genre of American literature.
Huddled inside the garrison, with “the smoke ascending to heaven,” Mary Rowlandson and the other villagers faced a choice that echoes grimly through the commemorations of our own “dolefulest day”: whether to stay inside and burn, or plunge into certain death. The parallels between the Lancaster ordeal and the catastrophe we faced on 9/11 are not incidental. Rowlandson’s story holds a key to our own experience, shedding light on not only the trauma of the day itself but our response. On a deep cultural and psychological level, our reactions as a nation to 9/11 had as much to do with Mary Rowlandson as with Mohamed Atta.
In the weeks and months after 9/11, many commentators described the “dream-like” mindset that the disaster had induced. They attributed our fugue state to the “unimaginable” unreality of the event. Nothing like this had ever happened before. But essential to our understanding of what that attack means to our national psyche is a recognition that it did happen before, over and over. And its happening was instrumental to the formation of the American character. The nation that recently imagined itself so impervious to attack at home was gestated in a time when such attacks were the prevailing reality of American life.
The assault on Lancaster came several months into King Philip’s War (or Metacom’s Rebellion, for those who prefer the actual name of the Wampanoag chief). That fearsome and formative confrontation between white settlers and the New England tribes remains, per capita, America’s deadliest war. In one year, one of every 10 white men of military age in Massachusetts Bay was killed, and one of every 16 in the Northeastern colonies. Two-thirds of New England towns were attacked and more than half the settlements were left in ruins. Settlers were forced to retreat nearly to the coast, and the Colonial economy was devastated.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
AT length they came and beset our own house, and quickly it was the dolefulest day that ever mine eyes saw.” Thus did a minister’s wife, Mary Rowlandson, describe the Indian attack and immolation of her Massachusetts village, 35 miles west of Boston. “On the 10th of February 1675 came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster,” she wrote. “Their first coming was about sun-rising. Hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven.”
Rowlandson was one of the fortunate that morning: she and her three children were spared and taken captive. Her youngest, a 6-year-old daughter, died in her arms on the forced march north. After 11 harrowing weeks, Rowlandson was released and a few years later wrote “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” which would run through four printings in its first year and become America’s original best seller, the model of the captivity narrative, the foremost indigenous genre of American literature.
Huddled inside the garrison, with “the smoke ascending to heaven,” Mary Rowlandson and the other villagers faced a choice that echoes grimly through the commemorations of our own “dolefulest day”: whether to stay inside and burn, or plunge into certain death. The parallels between the Lancaster ordeal and the catastrophe we faced on 9/11 are not incidental. Rowlandson’s story holds a key to our own experience, shedding light on not only the trauma of the day itself but our response. On a deep cultural and psychological level, our reactions as a nation to 9/11 had as much to do with Mary Rowlandson as with Mohamed Atta.
In the weeks and months after 9/11, many commentators described the “dream-like” mindset that the disaster had induced. They attributed our fugue state to the “unimaginable” unreality of the event. Nothing like this had ever happened before. But essential to our understanding of what that attack means to our national psyche is a recognition that it did happen before, over and over. And its happening was instrumental to the formation of the American character. The nation that recently imagined itself so impervious to attack at home was gestated in a time when such attacks were the prevailing reality of American life.
The assault on Lancaster came several months into King Philip’s War (or Metacom’s Rebellion, for those who prefer the actual name of the Wampanoag chief). That fearsome and formative confrontation between white settlers and the New England tribes remains, per capita, America’s deadliest war. In one year, one of every 10 white men of military age in Massachusetts Bay was killed, and one of every 16 in the Northeastern colonies. Two-thirds of New England towns were attacked and more than half the settlements were left in ruins. Settlers were forced to retreat nearly to the coast, and the Colonial economy was devastated.
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
This is a great story, but if one is looking for an up-to-date account from the Native perspective, I recommend checking out A Cultural History of the Native Peoples of Southern New England by Moondancer and Strong Woman. The book if full of first hand accounts from the first settlers.
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