A Map of New England, Being the First That Ever Was Here Cut
The upper right corner of the self-proclaimed oldest (1677) map of extant New England. Note cardinal west is at the top of this depiction, so the Kwenitekw/Connecticut River is shown flowing north to south from right to left at the top of the map. Re-shared here from Christine DeLucia’s personal website/CV, under the Galleries/Materialities of Memory tab: “This map by John Foster accompanied a narrative of [King Philip’s] war by English minister William Hubbard, and it focused on colonial sites of trauma and loss, constituting an important memory device about the war’s meaningful geographies for English colonists and their descendants.”
Given that purpose and context, we can, at the same time, extract some good insights from this colonial(ist) document that helps us to better understand Indigenous presence and relationship in this place and time, all of which carries through to the present of course!
Along the Kwenitekw, note the last upstream English town - the northernmost “plantation” farthest to the right - labeled as #11 Squaheag. This is a slight misspelling by John Foster, the mapmaker who was working remotely from Hubbard’s narrative - there are several other such mistakes on the woodcut. Usually the British would spell this location as Squakeag or Squakheag; Hubbard’s own text employed the former. All are derived from the Abenaki word Sokwakik - meaning “at the separated land” or “at the land apart.” Canadian ethnographer Gordon Day has amply documented the origin, meaning, significance, and application (and mis-application) of this referrent (and its more modern derivative of Sokoki).
The important understandings that we can derive from this English mapping of Squakheag/Squakeag/Sokwakik are at least several:
This documentation of an Abenaki toponym provides a rare context from a relatively sparse English colonial record (while remaining as an unusually close homophone). It is a telltale sign of a different, shifting set of relationships being encountered here at the fringe of familiarity. The English skewed application of a broad regionalism - Sokwakik - to a more localized site is one of those episodic “lost in translation” moments, where a Native person’s answer to the query “where are we?” was misconstrued and misapplied. In fact, the various settlement/village areas within “Squakheag”, - now Northfield, MA - have their own, more discrete names that are recorded elsewhere. Much the same practice often happened with individual’s names, as well: many specific people cited in the written records are referred to with honorifics, by kinship, or task-descriptives, which may speak more to cultural norms wherein Native linguistic structures address relationality with verbal constructions, in contrast to the tendency of the English language to define materiality or identity using nouns.
It is significant that this geophysical ‘frontier’ location, at the edge of colonial space along Kwenitegok, delineates the functional reality that northward of this point was unknown territory. Unexplored and thus unrecorded, Abenaki presence in their homelands was, in many respects not comprehended and not acknowledged in its fulness. This lapse of incompleteness or ignorance became perpetuated as “common knowledge” - actually, the lack thereof - and morphed into “history”, being passed down all the way into the 20th century, recorded in numerous books, and taught as fact in Vermont schools: “There were no Indians living here.”
This mindset, of course, had (and continues to have) deep and lasting implications, with the landscape strangely becoming seen as terra nullius, nobody’s land, and available for the claiming. This is a good example of the primacy of European conventions of validity, with literacy and its derivative documentation giving it substance and thus value, and hence commodified as potential ‘property’ due to being objectified and bounded. See Jean O’Brien’s “Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England.”
Further, because Squakheag/Squakeag/Sokwakik was at the edge of better-known (by the English colonists) territorialities in all directions except N’dakinna (Abenaki homelands) to the north, the Land and its People were often seen - both historically and by more recent historians - as essentially part of other polities, such as Pocumtuk, Nipmuk, Pennacook, or Mahican. While there were strong kinship, diplomatic, linguistic, and trade connections, the Sokwakiak/Sokoki maintained their own autonomy or sovereignty among these usual allies. Their sense of connection ran more upstream along Kwenitekw, radiating out toward the north, northeast, and northwest, with their fellow Wabanaki bands, of which the Pennacook themselves are one group.
And so, it is good to note that a map represents a subjective, limited reality, and reflects the mapmaker more than the actual lay of the land. There is usually much more than meets the eye, but a judicious application of ‘reading between the lines’ can reveal much more. This may speak more to the inherent cognitive side-effects of reading/literacy - of which we may be unaware due to the assumptions of familiarity - than anything else. While we focus on the messages encoded in the alphabetical lines of type or the graphic marks on the map directly in front of us, we miss what is not shown. To internalize those realities, we need to have our feet on the ground and our senses wide open to the seven directions.