Change is good…for historians
Curious about the past? It’s not always comfortable, but it certainly is exciting.
Many years ago I saw an interview with an animal trainer who talked about teaching a large bird to land on a mat, not on his shoulder. The bird preferred to land on the higher perch of the trainer’s shoulder, but its talons were dangerously sharp.
The interviewer asked, “How do you teach him not to land on your shoulder?”
The trainer’s answer changed my life. He said: “You don’t teach the bird not to land on your shoulder. You teach him to land on the mat.”
In other words, approaching a project from the negative is harder and less successful than approaching it from the positive. You don't teach someone not to do something, you teach them how to do something.
This important lesson is true in all teaching situations, from parenting to medical school. It’s also a way to accept and embrace what can seem like a negative for those of us who love history: a fundamental challenge to your understanding of historical people, places, and events.
“I was completely happy as a historian of Puritan New England. And then I read Our Beloved Kin.”
I’ve been a historian of Puritan New England for 20 years, and I considered myself pretty expert. I’ve given many talks, I have a long-running blog, I work with New England’s Hidden Histories, I’m a board member of the Partnership of Historic Bostons. In fall 2020, I published a book on Puritan women’s spiritual seeking in Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s-1640s.[i] In short, I was completely happy as a historian specializing in New England Puritans.
Everything changes
And then I read Our Beloved Kin, by the Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks, and everything changed.
The book taught me about the ways in which Indigenous people governed themselves, lived daily life, and existed in reciprocal relationship with the land and each other in the Eastern Woodlands and the Dawnland (what are now generally called southern and northern New England). Our Beloved Kin is a powerful blending of canonical scholarship and Indigenous historical knowledge, and its voice is unlike any other historical work I’ve ever read.
My initial reaction was one of excitement, but also of discomfort. I was immediately energized by its introduction to Indigenous civilization, and immediately uncomfortably aware of how much my own work had shut that out. I had been calling myself a New England historian when I was really just a Puritan historian, and I had been contributing to the erasure of Indigenous civilization past and present by writing and talking about New England in the 1600s as if life began there only after 1620.
In short, when I read Our Beloved Kin, I lost a lot: my inherited understanding of “Puritan New England,” my comfort zone of not studying Indigenous people because I thought it was only a terrible story of a people who “disappeared,” my inherited belief that “we know so little about how Indigenous people lived before contact,” and my satisfaction with my own narrow scholarly work. My whole perception of the history of this region and my own part in studying it changed, permanently and completely.
TikTok and church records
But those losses paved the way for tremendous gains. One of the gifts of Lisa Brooks’ work is that she offers it as an invitation to participate, and I eagerly accepted that invitation. It led me to her other book, The Common Pot, and then to her anthropological work with her sister Cassandra. It led me to many other Indigenous anthropologists, archaeologists, and scholars, which began to lead me to a wider range of non-professional experiences like “Natives React,” a YouTube channel run by two young Navajo men who invite people from different nations to have fun responding to funny TikTok videos made by Indigenous people, and then talk about the aspects of Indigenous life that the videos address. I’ve learned more about what it’s like to be a young Indigenous person from that channel than from any book.
“My whole perception of New England and my part in studying it changed.”
In sum, it’s all been overwhelmingly positive. And eventually, after about a year, I began to understand how I could take what I know, my non-Indigenous scholarly knowledge and expertise, and use it to both support Indigenous people and help move traditional scholarship of New England in a new direction. I’m working on a new book project of my own now: Indigenous Measures of Puritan Churches in Woodland New England. The Congregational church records I know so well tell many stories about the Indigenous people who chose to belong to those churches. Unlike Puritan court records, church records aren’t focused on land sales and criminal charges; they do not dehumanize Indigenous people. With their testament to Native religious life, they fill in the blanks created by civil records.
Adding not subtracting
That’s the great outcome of this change for me: my loss has turned into gain, and I have not had to “abandon” my knowledge base but have actually deepened it. I don’t have to stop doing what I do, studying Puritan Congregationalism—I get to expand it.
If you are facing a challenge to your own historical expertise, or just your comfort zone, my advice is to embrace it. New information won’t erase what you love about history—it will expand that love. Of course, we always need to fully vet and authenticate new claims about history, because there are mistakes, and there are people who distort the historical record in order to validate their own ideas. But if a new idea backed by solid research comes along in your area of interest, whether that’s genealogy, town history, or any other field, and that new thinking opens the door to positive progress in your understanding of the past and the present, and offers hope for the future, I think the only way it could represent a loss is if you don’t embrace the fundamental change it inspires. It’s not about learning how not to do your history—it’s about learning a new way to do it.
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[i] New England’s Hidden Histories (NEHH) is a digital history project sponsored by the Congregational Library and Archives that is making tens of thousands of pages of colonial Congregational church records available to the public. My book is Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-1649: Heroic Souls.