About me

Teaching ourselves about Native American history on Cape Cod

Welcome. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be part of this wonderful program–the Open University of Wellfleet. We are so lucky, so blessed, to be able to live in this unique, stunningly beautiful, and, dare I say, sacred place. I came to Cape Cod for the first time in March of 1973–before the Air Force left the North Truro Air Force Station, before housing costs reached Hampton-like levels, and before there were lines extending to the meat cases from the checkout register of the WellfleetMarketplace. On that first trip here, a church retreat, I was an apostate just along for the ride; I left the Cape that Spring a disciple of the Cape, eager to consume as much information that I possibly could glean from the local public library.

And I have not stopped asking questions.

Two years later, in July of 1975, the monthly staple of my vicarious world travels showed up at my door. It was a National Geographic magazine with Ben Franklin’s portrait on the cover. The third article in that edition was titled Cape Cod’s Circle of Seasons, a Bible-like parable for a boy with wanderlust. The story-–and pictures-–were voraciously consumed, and have been repeatedly devoured by me, in the ensuing decades. That magazine has been in my various abodes since, like a Gideon’s Bible in a hotel room’s drawer.

Several of my friends here on the Cape told me about WOU, this vital source of lifelong learning. I did not think that I would be teaching a class here so soon, especially since I only retired from teaching June 22. Thanks to Wil Sullivan and Janet Hymanwitz, Barbara Epstein, Med Storey and Sam Cuddeback, Steve Roehm, Maria Burks (and others) for introducing me to Dr. Rhoda Flaxman, the founder of this “school” for Cape Codders and washashores, all of whom share the common denominator of curiosity. When I told my wife Judy about WOU, I thought it would be nice to take a class or two. I thought it would enable us to winnow away the winter grays and fill in the time between our various outdoor activities, like biking, swimming or surfing. WOU would satisfy my insatiable desire to learn.

I grew up in Kearny, NJ, just a 15-minute drive to the Holland Tunnel. Once known to Native Americans as Mighgecticok, the area that became Kearny was sold by Chief Tantaqua of the Lenni Lenape to Captain William Sandford of Barbadoes in 1668. The 9.33-square-mile area was wedged between the Pasawack (now Passaic) and Hackensack Rivers. But my story here in North America, like many of our histories, did not start in New York; it started nearly 400 years ago in New England. I feel it is important to show those cards because they reveal intrinsic biases about how we exist, learn and teach. Each of our stories is unique; those stories are part of the tangible fabric of our existence, like a massive quilt, sewn with innumerable tales. But there are other quilts that are much older, more nuanced, as cultivated, as complicated and rich, yet not completely understood. Hopefully, through this gathering, we can understand that latter quilt.

My grandfather, Joseph J. Savage, was the first child born in the United States to his Lithuanian immigrant parents, in 1888 in Mahanoy City, PA; Mahanoy is the Native American word for salt deposits.  This is not far from where the Molly Maguires were hanged and the birthplace of cable television. He spent his formative years in this anthracite coal region of Northeast Pennsylvania, a place where immigrants got their start as Americans. Some never left. Most in his family were coal miners; some in his family were slate pickers, the lowest of the low in the hierarchy of an industry of slim economic margins, misery, and death. But coal fed the industrial engines of the northeast, and that fossil fuel was the pull migration force of those who came here; the push immigration force was the economic and political instability of living in Eastern Europe. Coal had to get to markets, the industry needed railroads, and the railroads needed workers; my grandfather became one of those workers; he became a painter for the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad, his proverbial train ticket out of Coal Country, his paint brush the virtual vehicle. That railroad had Native American influences, so to speak; It was named for the Erie people and a Lenni Lenape/Algonquin word for stream with two forks.

The Erie, as we in Kearny called it, literally brought him to the rail yards of Jersey City,  which only a few years before had been renamed from Bergen, a name “given” to the region by the Dutch in the mid 17th century. Prior to being called Bergen, Lenni Lenape called the area Comunipaw.  The first foray for European settlement there was said to be in 1613, seven years before Plymouth, six years after Jamestown. Permanent settlement was unsuccessful. Dutch patroons claimed the area, and a few farms sprang up between Staten Island and Hoboken. The area would be called Pavonia, so named because absentee Dutch patroon Michel Pauw’s last name means peacock in Dutch and pavonia is Latin for peacock. The five-or-so farms, and their European occupiers, were short lived as relations strained with the Native Americans there in the 1640s. In other words, they were killed, part of a pattern of violence that began in the Americas after 1492 but interestingly spared Plymouth and the Cape, for the most part, until 1675. It wasn’t until 1660 that a Dutch foothold opposite of Manhattan took place; windmills dotted the waterfront of the Noord River, today’s Hudson, as the scant remnants of the original inhabitants disappeared, save for the occasional place name. The natives were no longer a threat to the Dutch. By 1802, most were forced west. Who are the savages now?

But do those anecdotes and dates really matter? Does discussing some esoteric settlement matter? Does reflecting on some seemingly irrelevant event really mean anything beyond good conversation fodder at a cocktail party? I argue yes. Emphatically. Because when you stitch our past together into the proverbial tapestry, we are moving forward simultaneously. When my 16-year-old students would proudly tell me that they received their driving permits, I would tell them that driving is like doing  history: those rear view mirrors enable you to go forward with the knowledge and implications of things that are behind you. And things that are to come.

The original inhabitants came here thousands of years before the Dutch, English, French, Swedish (yeah, you heard that right), Vikings or Spanish. It was to the New York area–the mouth of the Hudson–that the Pilgrims were supposed to settle had nature not intervened during the fall of 1620, thus forcing the Mayflower’s captain to seek safe harbor at Provincetown–Meeshaun to the Nausets. When we taught ourselves about this history during my public school teaching career, my students and I often pondered what the legacy of the Pilgrims–and the Native Americans–would have been like if they landed at Bayonne, Hoboken, Sandy Hook or Staten Island, all places then claimed by the joint stock group called the Virginia Company. Endless what ifs.

It was in Jersey City that my grandfather met my grandmother, Grace Freeman, the daughter of Henry Lewis Freeman, who was descended from early New England settlement. The Freeman’s roots extend to Massachusetts and Plymouth (which were then two separate provinces) in the 1630s, to Connecticut in 1642, and to New Jersey in 1666, the year of the Great London Fire. They were followers of Robert Treat, who settled Milford, Ct. in 1639. Treat wanted to name the New Jersey settlement Milford, New Jersey. But New Ark was chosen due to its representation as saving the Connecticut exiles. Treat would ultimately return to Connecticut: In the mid 1670s, as a militia leader, he would be part of King Philip's War, a conflict we will discover later in this course, and would lead his militia against the Narragansetts, and against Indians at Deerfield.

Today there is an ample supply of Freemans here on the Cape still, hence street names and surnames peppered around the peninsula. A few years ago, I was at a dinner party in Wellfleet, and my friend Bob Wallace, a local shellfisherman, pulled out the crisp copy of his family history, and there it was; a common Freeman ancestor that we shared. The Freemans got around. Many chose to stay here, some went west, some south. My line of Freemans chose to settle in Newark, where I was born, three centuries after they arrived. Thousands of years after the Lenni Lenapes made it their home. 

But a reservoir of genealogical history of Native Americans is exceedingly hard to find, unlike the Freemans, as millions died after contact, and thousands were displaced from their homelands, their oral histories and memories silenced by disease, plague, segregation, subjugation and war.

Here is my take on my pedigree, or lack thereof: Yeah, it’s really cool to say your ancestry in North America goes back nearly four centuries; but a discussion of those ancestors must be taken in the complicated context of immigration to a land that wasn’t theirs in the first place. I am mindful of that, considering the four colonial provinces that my ancestors “settled”--Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Haven, and New Jersey–were all populated long before my English ancestors migrated here. I have rationalized this and I argue that it is vital to examine, digest, and synthesize what happened to the Native Americans and why. I want to examine the incongruity of how people who came here seeking freedom would marginalize, exile, enslave and kill those who were here first.  In many cases, those affected were the children of the very First Peoples who enabled the settlers to survive here in the first place. It is not my intent to argue that all settlers were bad or hegemonic but, in the words of historian David McCullouch, history has “warts and dark spots” and they need to be discussed, too. I want to know more about the 70 million or so who lived in the Americas before 106 people stepped off a ship at Provincetown in the fall of 1620.

Hopefully, we will discover things about our past that can help us move forward, too. The proverbial rear view mirror.

~Paul Savage, Wellfleet, MA, 2021