Yes Massachusetts, The State Seal IS Racist: An Open Letter to the Editorial Board of the Sentinel and Enterprise
Dear Editorial Board,
I noted with interest your recent editorial asking readers to place the current debate over the Commonwealth’s Seal in a larger historical context. As a local historian who has researched and taught Massachusetts colonial history for over two decades, I was struck by your silence about events prior to 1775. Pushing your exploration further back in time and including more diverse voices reveals a much more complicated and troubling story.
The original seal for the Massachusetts Bay Colony portrays an indigenous “Algonquin” inviting colonization by the English. Certainly the current seal has been modified to reduce offense. Nevertheless, the underlying belief that local indigenous tribes prayed for “white conquest” is a myth that will not stand close examination. Colonial fantasies of the “needy native” should be placed in the same category as a “woman who asked to be raped,” “slavery as a necessary evil,” or a “child who needed to be beaten” by their parents.
Tribes such as the Nashaway in present day Lancaster and Sterling signed deeds with the English permitting them to establish “trucking houses” and limited settlements. Natives sold beaver and “leased land” in exchange for guns…
