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NARRATOR: CRYSTAL HAYNES COPITHORNE
INTERVIEW: FARIES GRAY, SAGAMORE, MASSACHUSETT TRIBE AT PONKAPOAG
Welcome to the Cultivate & Corn banner. It illustrates two men in colonial garb picking corn in a fenced field.
In April, 1775 Boston was under military occupation and no longer safe for rebel political meetings. Nearby Menotomy offered an ideal alternative. Major roads connected it with other towns. Its residents were supportive and its minister preached fiery opposition to royal tyranny. Fifty militia members mustered for battle under command of Captain Benjamin Locke. Notably, this militia included two Black patriots, Cuff Whittemore and Cato Wood, who continued to fight after the first battles in Lexington, Concord, and Menotomy.
On April 18, a group of key rebel leaders convened at Menotomy’s Black Horse Tavern and three remained overnight. Marching in darkness towards Concord, something prompted a group of passing British soldiers to stop and search the Black Horse Tavern. Roused from their beds by the tavern keeper, the three leaders fled out the back door. There was nowhere to hide in the moonlight except a field of corn-stubble from the previous fall. They threw themselves flat on the ground, and, remaining still overnight, escaped uncomfortable questions or worse.
And so, we get a glimpse of Menotomy’s colonial agricultural landscape. The inn, also a home and farm, sat surrounded by harvested corn fields. Massachusett people taught English Puritans how to grow this nutritious grain, which could flourish in the poorest soils, saving them from starvation. Corn immediately became a staple. Some historians believe that the colonization of North America would have failed without this transfer of knowledge.
In the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, planting a field was understood by Puritan founders as the virtuous way to establish ownership of land. In 1630, farming was not only a European settler’s means for survival, it was also the cultural and legal justification for displacing native people and denying their land rights. Colonists believed unplanted land – forests, meadows, and foraging areas – was wasted land, and even a Christian sin. This worldview kept leaders like Governor John Winthrop from seeing the beauty, intelligence, sustainability, and spiritual stewardship of native land use even as he praised the splendid abundance of the New World. For tens of thousands of European settlers, farming was a way of escaping poverty through hard work and knowledge. At the same time, genocide and forced displacement of native people were the foundation for the settlers’ secure way of life.
And so we return to the image of three revolutionary leaders taking shelter in a corn field that was planted using Indigenous knowledge passed down from early settlers. We can simultaneously acknowledge their courage in the face of a tyrannical colonial superpower, and that they were fighting for and claiming land that was not theirs to begin with.
To honor that Indigenous knowledge, we will now hear from Faries Gray, who is the Sagamore, or war chief, of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag.