Dispossession: Indigenous Land Loss in Plymouth Colony, presented by Dr. Jeremy Bangs, was fourth in our 2022 fall series, The Power of Place.
The laboriously inscribed, ink-stained title deeds tell the story the colonists wanted them to tell: the legal acquisition of thousands of acres of land, defensible in British law and their own ideas of legality. Deed expert Dr. Jeremy Bangs, author of numerous works on land sales, offers us his unparalleled knowledge of early New England, the land sales and title deeds that ended in almost complete Indigenous disposession.
How did these land sales, begun in the colony’s first days and based on the presumption that the British monarch owned all, take place? How freely or fairly was the land sold, and what were the understandings of land use and ownership that shaped the cumulative outcome of these transactions? Dr. Bangs explores the forces that led, regardless of the ethics of individual legal transfers, to what was ultimately an almost complete loss of Native land in Plymouth colony, Massachusetts. Controversially, and based on his reading of hundreds of Plymouth deeds, he argues against what he calls the “modern myth” that Native people held land communally, but also points to the reasons compelling Native people to sell land and to increasingly illegal colonial practices.
His presentations also revealed maps of Plymouth showing the steady and devastating transfer of land from Native people to colonists.
Jeremy Bangs, University of Leiden, PhD., 1976, was curator of the Leiden Pilgrim Documents Center, chief curator of Plimoth Plantation, visiting curator of manuscripts at Pilgrim Hall Museum, and visiting distinguished professor of art history at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, before becoming director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum in 1997. He has published 25 books on historical and art historical topics, 15 of them related to the Pilgrims and Plymouth colony. Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners - Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (2009) studies the Pilgrim congregation and colony from its origins in England and development in The Netherlands to its early years in New England. His book, Indian Deeds - Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691 (2002, revised 2008), presents 400 transcribed deeds documenting the transfer of land from sachems to the colony and then to individual colonists, preceded by an analytical introduction of 225 pages discussing the historical circumstances of native land loss. The topic is explored again in a chapter in his 2020 book, New Light on the Old Colony - Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration(chapter 2, "Tribes and Land Reserves in Plymouth Colony"). A particular point of contention is the focus of the book (from 2021), Josias Wompatuck and the Titicut Reserve of the Mattakeeset Massachusetts Tribe. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the 5th Annual International Indigenous Peoples Cultural Conference in 2021. In 2017 by royal decree he was named a knight in the Order of Oranje-Nassau.
Image: The Tribes of Plymouth county. Courtesy of Dr. Jeremy Bangs