My wife and I, as relative newcomers to Massachusetts, decided to immerse ourselves more firmly in local history, and an internet search brought us to a website about Moswetuset Hummock. The next day, we drove to the South Boston shore, parked in a small lot, and walked up the hill. Heavily wooded, the hummock faces the Atlantic, backing into a tidal flat at the mouth of the Neponset River. It is not particularly tall, but despite ongoing efforts to drain the surrounding marsh, it dominates the landscape. Beside the trail stands a stone marker stating that this was the “home of the Moswetuset after whom the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is named.”
It is obvious that the state’s name is Native American, but I had never heard of Moswetuset Hummock or of the Moswetuset — now more properly known as the Massachuseuk. 1 Not even my sons, who went to school here, knew of it or them. Yet the official seal of the Commonwealth features a sachem dressed in deerskin. This is an updated version of the first seal of Massachusetts Bay Colony, in use from 1629 to 1691, that showed a nude man with a bush covering his groin and a scroll extending from his mouth bearing the plea “Come over and help us” — adapting a message supposed to have been registered by St. Paul in a dream about the Macedonians, and highlighting, at least theoretically, the Puritans’ evangelizing mission. 2 The figure looks more like a conventional 17th-century portrayal of a Caribbean than a Massachuseuk, indicative of limited knowledge on the part of the colony’s founders-to-be regarding the people they intended to convert. After all, the seal was designed in England, before the Puritans set sail. Though the figure was later “corrected” in terms of clothing, it remained a fiction that has served for centuries to represent the Commonwealth, with the sachem holding an arrow pointing down, indicating his acceptance of colonial morality and authority. 3
All the American colonies have inscribed within their official histories some form of “encounter narrative.” But, in Massachusetts, the strategies of political and territorial dispossession that shaped these encounters are embedded to an unusual degree in the images and nomenclatures by which the state continues to represent itself to its citizens — including its Native American citizens. In regard to the seal itself, Elizabeth James-Perry, an Aquinnah Wampanoag activist, observes that “as an indigenous person and visual artist, the seal is deeply offensive in its imagery and has been for countless generations of tribal members,” to which she adds that the solution is not to remove the image of the sachem, but to reimagine it in consultation with the Native American community:
Yes, the state flag should include Wampanoag imagery — and that can be designed in concert with Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, who can work with our tribal artisans to create concepts and work with the state … the imagery should reflect our dignity, humanity, rights and equality. 4