350 years ago, in May of 1676, the surviving Praying Indians imprisoned on Deer Island during King Philip’s War were released.
During the brutally cold winter of 1675–1676, hundreds of “Christian Indians” — including many Nipmucs who had converted to settler Christianity and pledged allegiance to the English — were forcibly confined on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. Historians estimate that hundreds perhaps even 1,000 people were imprisoned there. More than half of those men, women and children perished from starvation, disease, and exposure in just a few months’ time.
Natives were left on a deforested island with little shelter, inadequate clothing, no fresh drinking water and no food. Some survived by digging frozen clams from the shoreline, leading to food borne sicknesses. Colonial authorities also declared that any Native person attempting escape from the island could legally be shot on sight.
Among those imprisoned were Waban and his family.
This post features Waban’s pictographic mark from a land deed for almost 2,000 acres at “Sherborn, Massachusetts,” signed well after the end of the war, on June 20, 1682. For me, this document serves as a reminder that these are not anonymous victims of history, but Native people with names, families, political relationships, homelands, and enduring nations, and that the dispossession of native lives and lands did not stop in 1676.
When the survivors were released in May 1676, many were so weak, malnourished, and ill that it took days for them to return home. In the immediate aftermath, survivors were subsequently enslaved, indentured, coerced into military service, or further displaced from their homelands.
This history is not distant.
Deer Island remains a site of memory, mourning, survival, and colonial violence in the Northeast.
Deed from 1686, seen at the Mass State Archives.
