This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.
In 1755, Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Royal Lieutenant Governor issued a scalp bounty proclamation, offering substantial cash payments to any white colonists who brought in the scalps of indigenous men, women, and children. This was just one of approximately 70 scalp bounty proclamations issued in New England in the century before the American Revolution; U.S. governments issued at least another 50 throughout the new nation in subsequent decades. These planned genocides are a profoundly painful part of American history, but are often little remembered or discussed.
Earlier this month, I was invited by the folks at Revolutionary Spaces, the organization that manages both the Old State House and the Old South Meeting House historic sites on Boston’s Freedom Trail, to view the new short film Bounty. Created by Penobscot Wabanaki Native American filmmakers Dawn Neptune Adams, Maulian Dana, and Adam Mazo, with the support of the Upstander Project, this 8.5-minute film screens on a continuous loop in a second-floor room adjacent to the Old State House’s central attraction, a recreation of the Council Chamber where the Massachusetts Colony’s Royal Governors met with their Councils — and where they signed the scalp bounty proclamations that are the subject of this bracing and powerful film.
Working to recover, remember, and engage such histories is a difficult process, and one in which museums and other historic sites have a vital role to play. Both this film and the Old State House are modeling thoughtful ways to remember these harsh stories from our past.
While these proclamations generally targeted a specific tribe, related to ongoing conflicts for example, there was of course no way of knowing the tribal identity of a particular scalping victim, and so the bounties became a general license for the murder of all indigenous peoples.
The short film Bounty focuses on one particular scalp bounty proclamation, as it targeted the Penobscot Wabanaki people specifically. That proclamation, issued by the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Royal Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips in 1755, was one of five issued in Boston in that year alone, including another signed in the same Old State House Council Chamber by Royal Governor William Shirley. But the Phips Proclamation went even further than most: it not only offered bounties for the scalps of Penobscot men, women, and children, but also offered bounties for the capture of living Penobscot males 12 years and older (who would then be sold into enslavement). The Penobscot were seen as allies of the French, with whom England was at war, and this scalp bounty thus represented not just intended genocide, but also a way to weaken a military adversary and bolster both the slave trade and the colony’s coffers in the process.
Bounty does not shy away from any of those complex and painful details. The film (available for streaming on its website) features both the filmmakers and other Penobscot elders reading the text of the Phips Proclamation in full, as well as discussing its contexts and especially its genocidal effects with their children, grandchildren, and other family members. The accompanying Teachers Guide includes four extensive lessons that delve into not just scalp bounty proclamations, but also a number of other relevant historical and cultural settings. And to its credit, the Old State House has not only partnered with the filmmakers to screen Bounty continually; they have also located that screening room directly adjacent to the Council Chamber, a space that now features multiple laminated copies of the Phips and Shirley Proclamations which, as the museum’s explanatory materials note (including in a revised caption for the Chamber’s portrait of Governor Shirley), were signed in that very room.
The most powerful elements of this compelling short film were the presence and voices of the featured Penobscot children. Because the Phips Proclamation directly targeted Penobscot children, this is a historically relevant and painful connection to be sure, and one to which those kids react directly in the film.
The last spoken line in the film (delivered by filmmaker Dawn Neptune Adams) is “They tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds,” and the film ends with a number of images of its 21st century multi-generational Penobscot families walking through and engaging with the Council Chamber and the copies of the Proclamations. These stories continue affect contemporary indigenous peoples (as they do all Americans); for this reason, we all have an important role to play in how we remember, how we engage and discuss, and how we move forward.
The re-creation of history can too often become mythologized and even idealized, and this film and exhibit challenge those trends, forcing visitors to consider the contradictions and conflicts that are present in the Old State House and all of colonial New England and America.
But important as this step is, it is also, as Revolutionary Spaces President and CEO Nat Sheidley acknowledged in our conversation, just a starting point for that continued work. Sheidley linked the film screening to another recent Revolutionary Spaces event, one intended to become an annual tradition: a live (and recorded) communal reading of Native American preacher and activist William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836). Delivered not far from the Old State House, at Boston’s Odeon theatre, Apess’s stirring speech makes the case for the Wampanoag leader King Philip as not an adversary to colonial Americans, but instead a revolutionary ancestor akin to George Washington, a figure to whom all Americans can look with pride and patriotism.
While indigenous people were without question victims of white supremacist genocides such as the scalp bounties, they likewise were and remain essential American communities, from King Philip to William Apess to the filmmakers and children behind and featured in Bounty. Better remembering our hardest histories helps us engage with America’s foundational diversity, goals modeled in the Old State House’s powerful new film.
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Comments
Just because a previous practice was in place does not mean that it was anymore moral to keep doing it.
Thanks for the comment, Tim. I did have a line in my original draft highlighting the longstanding practice, and I agree that that is part of the overarching story and a reminder that brutality is an endemic feature of humanity, especially during war.
That last point, however, is to my mind a crucial distinction that your comment elides. These English scalp bounties were far from brutal excesses and horrors perpetrated by those fighting a war–they were planned, purposeful, official state policies created with the intent of destroying (literally or by selling into slavery) entire indigenous communities. I would argue that’s a difference of kind as well as degree from scalping as a wartime practice, and, whatever the annals of human history might feature overall, represents a shameful part of our specific communal histories that we have to find ways to better remember and engage.
Ben
It’s remarkable that no mention is made that the practice of scalping long predated white settlers on the shores of North America. Warfare between various Indian tribes had seen this particular tactic used for centuries before Europeans arrived. Once Europeans arrived, they continued the practice when presented the opportunity. You’d never know that from the article.
Yes, European settlers offered scalp bounties – almost always in response to what they considered shocking massacres of their groups by Indians, who considered men, women, and children alike as fair game for murder and scalps. History is very often not pretty.