Seasons of Misery by Kathleen Donegan

Author:Kathleen Donegan [Donegan, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Newfound Golgotha

Ultimately histories such as Bradford's had to succeed in making colonial death meaningful by assigning a vastly different significance to the remains of English bodies scattered in a foreign land. In part, this meaning was established by elaborating a set of desired contrasts between Indian and colonial deaths. The outlines of the contrast promised stability. On the one hand, Indian deaths would depopulate the land and leave it void, littered with the bones of the unremembered dead. They would mark a termination and an absence. Colonial deaths, on the other hand, would populate the “wilderness” with marks and memories of English sacrifice. They would leave the land sacred, hallowed. The memory of the English dead would mark an origin and a presence. Indian deaths would make discrete and local places look like empty space, but colonial deaths properly remembered would turn that empty space into a series of places of English memory and fidelity. The Indian dead would signify the devolution of native communities into anomie: a chaos of civil dissensions and bloody war; great mortality; and abandoned remains. The colonial dead would perform an opposite function. Out of the anomie that everywhere threatened the goals of settlement, they would create nomos: a deeply bound community of faithful and grateful survivors. The Indian corpse had to devolve into pure materiality—carrion—so that the colonial corpse could reach the status of pure figure—seed.

In his Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative, Cristobal Silva treats this providential interpretation of Indian death in detail, explaining how “a colonial ideology that framed the settlement of New England as a divinely ordained mission, and that understood the epidemics to play a crucial role in that mission,” resulted in “the centrality of epidemiological discourse to justification narratives.”36 The providential narrative dovetailed with one of the major civil justifications for the English seizure of Indian lands, which was later articulated by John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government (1690). There, Locke elaborates the ancient Roman theory of vacuum domicillium as a powerful rationale for English colonialism. Locke's theory of property puts forward two arguments: first, that original inhabitants have no sovereign claim on the land because they live in a state of nature, not as fully developed societies; and second, that property rights require not only habitation but also the addition of human labor, of discernible “improvement” of the land resulting in the development of agricultural, commercial, civil, and political societies. Only this kind of society could maintain rights, hold property, and assert sovereignty. These legal and civil claims made land claims easier to justify for the colonial English, who did not want to be seen as following the Spanish conquest style of colonialism. In New England the debilitation of strong, economically and politically sound Indian cultures due to the devastating spread of disease made it easier still.37

The movement from shared, Anglo-Indian specters of death to divergent symbologies—one apocalyptic, one generative—can be traced in the seventeenth-century sources. For example, compare an eyewitness report published in 1622 and a subsequent history published in 1669.

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