The Bounty Teacher's Guide

This land is their land and why it matters

Historical Context

This Land is Their Land and Why It Matters

Understanding the connection between people and land is essential to answering the compelling question of this and the following lessons: What is the relationship between the taking of the land and the taking of the scalps?

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as colonists flooded into North America and coveted more Indigenous homelands, tensions spiked between the original inhabitants of the land and Europeans, who used a variety of means to occupy and gain possession of the land. The issuance by Europeans of scalp bounties that promised significant payment for the bodies and body parts of Indigenous peoples was one tactic among many they used to realize the goal of taking and keeping someone elseʼs land.

Our research focuses primarily on northern Ckuwaponahkik (a Wabanaki word meaning the Dawnland or place where the sun first looks our way) [49], now known as New England, although in Lesson Four, readers will find information about scalp bounties issued in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, Texas, California, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. The genocidal history of Ckuwaponahkik fills many hundreds of volumes, and to contain the length of this lesson, important incidents, stories, and the names of many victims and perpetrators, were left out. An electronic timeline of scalp bounties in Ckuwaponahkik provides additional information and can be accessed at the e-timeline.

To understand the motives and actions of Europeans, we need to acknowledge that the relationship between Europeans and the land is unlike the relationship of Indigenous people to the land. We will use the analytical lenses of the “View from the Shore” and the “View from the Boat” to orient our inquiry into the deep gulf that separates these two perspectives, as we did in the Dawnland Teacherʼs Guide. [for more on this, see the introduction to the Dawnland Teacherʼs Guide]

We begin with a few quotes that represent the View from the Shore of Indigenous leaders from Ckuwaponahkik. Each quote opens a window to better understand the interactions between Indigenous peoples and European settler/colonizers in relation to the land, as in this letter, which is a transcription by Father Maillard, a Catholic missionary, of statements made by the Miʼkmaq representative to the Governor of Halifax, dated October 18, 1749. (see e-timeline).

The place where you are, where you are building dwellings, where you are now building a fort, where you want, as it were, to enthrone yourself, this land of which you wish to make yourself now absolute master, this land belongs to me, I have come from it as certainly as the grass, it is the very place of my birth and of my dwelling, this land belongs to me the Native person, yes I swear, it is God who has given it to me to be my country for ever ... you drive me out; where do you want me to take refuge? You have almost all this land in all its extent. Your residence at Port Royal does not cause me great anger because you see that I have left you there at peace for a long time, but now you force me to speak out by the great theft you have perpetrated against me. [50]

Here is a second View from the Shore, in which Abenaki leader Atiwaneto denounces colonial expansion at a conference in Montreal. He is speaking to Captain Phineas Stevens, a colonial negotiator from the seat of settler power, Boston, just a few years before the 1755 bounty proclamations. (see e-timeline)

Brothers, we tell you that we seek not war, we ask nothing better than to be quiet, and it depends, brothers, only on you English, to have peace with us.

We have not yet sold the land we inhabit, we wish to keep the possession of them.... [W]e will not cede one single inch of the lands we inhabit beyond what has been decided formerly by our fathers.

Brothers, who hath authorized you to have those lands surveyed? We request our brother, the Governor of Boston, to have those surveyors punished, as we cannot imagine that they have acted by his authority.

We acknowledge no other boundaries of yours than your settlement whereon you have built, and we will not, under any pretext whatsoever, that you pass beyond them. The lands we possess have been given to us by the Master of Life. We acknowledge to hold only from him.

-Atiwaneto, Chief Speaker, July 1752
[51]

Readers can glimpse a View from the Boat in a letter written in 1622 by Robert Cushman, member of the Pilgrim Church at Leiden and Chief Agent of the Plymouth Pilgrims from 1617 to 1625:

But some will say, what right have I to go live in the heathens’ country? ... [W]hen I seriously consider of things I cannot but think that God hath purpose to give that land as an inheritance to our nation, and great pity it were that it should long lie in so desolate a state.... [T]heir land is spacious and void, and they are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc. As the ancient patriarchs therefore removed themselves from straighter places into more roomy, where the land lay idle and waste, and none used it, though there dwelt inhabitants by them ... so it is lawful now to take a land which none useth, and make use of it.[emphasis added]. [52]

A few years later in 1629, John Winthrop, English colonial lawyer and first elected governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Francis Higginson, Puritan minister, expressed another View from the Boat.

This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property; for they enclose no ground, neither have they cattle to maintain it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion.... And why may not Christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods...? ... For God hath given to the sons of men a twofould right to the earth; there is a natural right and a civil right. The first right was natural when men held the earth in common, every man sowing and feeding where he pleased: Then, as men and cattle increased, they appropriated some parcels of ground by enclosing and peculiar manurance, and this in time got them a civil right.... God hath consumed the natives with a miraculous plague, whereby the greater part of the country is left voide of inhabitants.... We shall come in with good leave of the natives. [53]

In this view, the land was not simply underutilized but devoid of people. Kristine Malpica explains,

English perspectives on Native legal rights, however, were tied to fixed land use, and mobility was often used by colonial officials and courts to justify dispossession of what were seen as unoccupied lands under the legal edict, vacuum domicilium (vacant spaces). Massachusetts Bay Colony governor, John Winthrop, famously argued that New England Natives’ uncivilized, nomadic lifestyles invalidated their land rights: “That which is common to all is proper to none. This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property...for they enclose no ground, neither have they any cattel to maintayne it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion.” Winthrop expressed the English Common Law view that mobile subsistence meant that Natives did not claim territorial bounds or have a system of land “ownership,” akin to English land tenure and fee simple, sole proprietorship. [54]

Minister John Cotton, a leading Christian theologian of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, crystalised the View from the Boat. “In a vacant soil, he that taketh possession of it and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is.” [55] Prior to departure from England, Reverend John Cotton delivered his ʻSermon on Godʼs Promise to His Plantationsʼ to Winthropʼs company, extolling the virtue of taking ʻpossession of vacant countriesʼ as Godʼs preordained plan. [56]

Holding this view, English colonists failed to recognize how Native peoplesʼ deep knowledge of the ecosystems they inhabited guided the ways they tended the soil and planted crops. Instead Cotton focused on the mobility of Indigenous peoples across the physical landscape, which he dismissed as “Indian [ways of] hunting and gathering [and therefore] a justification for expropriating Indian land.” [57]

Increase Mather, a powerful Puritan clergyman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and president of Harvard College for two decades, saw settlers as Godʼs children in the Promised Land. “That the Heathen people amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous Devices against that part of the English Israel....” [58]

In another View from the Boat, Rufus King Sewall, author of Ancient Dominions of Maine (1859), presents a settler perspective on not only taking land but taking people through enslavement, as in the case of a Wampanoag man, Tisquantum (also known as Squanto), who was captured and enslaved and went on to play an important role as a cultural mediator and translator in Plymouth and beyond.

Why should not the red man, as well as the black, be made a subject of gainful speculation? The muscles and sinews of the Indian, as well as the Negro, could be turned into gold. Furs were becoming scarce. The fisheries required diligence and perseverance to give a slow but sure return. The slave mart promised good pay, great profits, and little labor. The shrewd Yankee, with an eye to the benefit of himself and owners, had no scruples in turning kidnapper, and his sloop into a slaver on the coasts of Maine! [59]

What can we learn from these quotations about different peoples and their relationships to the land? Native peoples often refer to themselves as belonging to the land from which they were born and of which they have been stewards in a web of sustained and interdependent relationships since time immemorial. Europeans refer to themselves as possessing and improving upon the land to make it productive, often displaying deeds as proof of what they think of as ownership. According to the Eurocentric view, private ownership of the land (and private property, in general) is foundational to the cultural, social, economic, and political order. These profoundly different views of the land were operating in the background and then the foreground as growing numbers of European colonists occupied more Native land.

In the following section we look more deeply at settler colonialismʼs fixation on the land and its connection to scalping and exterminationism.

Land Dispossession: A Must for Settler Colonialism

Seeing land as something that can be possessed and improved is a hallmark of the system known as settler colonialism. If colonialism entails a foreign power taking control of a region to dominate its people and extract its resources, settler colonialism happens when the outsiders settle on someone elseʼs land and never leave.

Scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) writes that the objective of settler colonialism:

is always the acquisition of indigenous territories and resources, which means the native must be eliminated. This can be accomplished in overt ways, including biological warfare and military domination, but also in more subtle ways; for example, through national policies of assimilation. [60]

It is a system of occupying, then controlling, foreign lands while eliminating and erasing the Indigenous people who belong to that land, and in this way settler colonialism relates directly to genocide. According to Patrick Wolfe,

[t]erritoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element. The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be indeed, often are—contests for life. [61]

And these contests for life took many forms: war, raids, murder, kidnapping, and issuance of
scalp-bounty acts and proclamations.

From the time they first arrived in what is now called the United States, Europeans took over Native space and engaged in trade, kidnapping, enslavement, and then in settler colonialism. Insofar as gaining possession of the land is at the core of settler colonialismʼs project, European occupiers deployed a variety of strategies to obtain Native land: they purchased it, often under coercion and using false pretenses, and in exchange for pledges of protection; they created scenarios to burden Native people with debt they could not pay and then seized the land as payment; they broke agreements over land usage and failed to fulfill their commitments to share space with Native peoples and occupied it anyway; they removed Native people from the land through violence and the threat of violence and killed and scalped them in exchange for payment.

While varying from place to place and across the decades and centuries, the English in their interactions with the Wabanaki used most of these strategies. In general, colonial authorities combined diplomacy and military force, all the while seeking alliances with certain Indigenous nations and targeting others. They did this with one goal in mind: to “cleanse” the land of Native people and as thousands of European newcomers continued to invade Wabanaki homelands, colonial authorities intensified the pressure on the Wabanaki to make room for more settlers. [62]

Colonial leaders encouraged English newcomers to occupy Wabanaki land and some settlers sought to legalize their holdings by securing deeds, when possible. Indigenous people viewed deeds as agreements to share space rather than as agreements to transfer ownership. Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks refers to these colonial-era deeds as documents of diplomacy and dispossession insofar as their dual meaning and significance was to “document relationships [for Native peoples] versus land transfers [for Europeans].” In her groundbreaking book, Our Beloved Kin, Brooks points to key questions to consider when trying to understand these deeds, which were part of a long legal process over land rights:

What happened on the ground, in these places, after the deeds were signed? What do subsequent acts tell us about the agreements behind the deeds? [63]

With those questions in mind, letʼs examine a deed from 1666. In commentary provided by Maine Memory Network, we learn how Wabanaki “female leader Warrabitta, also known as Joane or Jane” and Nanateonett “signed a deed allowing George Munjoy to settle land ʻon the other side of Amancongan River at the great Falls the upper part of them called Sacarabiggʼ (now, Saccarappa Falls in Westbrook) where there was another planting ground, ʻand so down the River Side unto the lowermost planting Ground,ʼ a considerable tract on the Presumpscot River.” [64]

According to archivists of Maine Memory Network,

Early deeds [between Wabanaki people and Europeans] were often the result of longer councils and negotiations, but unlike later treaties, which included long speeches by Wabanaki leaders, here, only the deed survives. It is important to note that deeds like this one do not represent a relinquishment of vital planting grounds and fishing falls, but an agreement to share space, and to allow a settler like Munjoy to also inhabit the space. [65]

The notion of sharing space and sharing use rights may sound obvious to some, but it was an act of considerable generosity on the part of the Original peoples, who could have blocked and expelled the newcomers. In this and other ways, Wabanaki people chose diplomacy over violence as their preferred response. Generations of Wabanaki diplomats and peacemakers tried to reach negotiated solutions to the problem posed by the growing numbers of European trespassers who refused to leave.

This process whereby colonists purchased Wabanaki land was made more complicated when Wabanaki people sold their land directly to individual newcomers, given that land was communally held by Wabanaki communities and the notion of private property was a foreign one.

In addition to individual purchases from Wabanaki, several companies of land speculators in Boston tried to buy up as much land as they could, often from settlers on the verge of giving up the struggle to survive the many hardships they faced. This process of purchase [66] and sale, agreements and diplomacy, happened despite the fact that the Crown in England disputed all land titles in Ckuwaponahkik because it deemed itself the sole proprietor of land in New England, according to the dictates of the Doctrine of Discovery.

The Doctrine of Discovery established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians.[67]

Kennebeck Proprietors, one of the primary land speculation enterprises based in Boston, sought to dismiss the legality of early Native deeds, basing their claims solely on the earlier land grant from the crown. This represented a new era of legal dispossession of the Wabanaki after the mid-eighteenth century. Companies such as this tried to out-maneuver the Crown, competed fiercely with one another, made sure those loyal to them were appointed to powerful government positions, arranged for their children to marry one another, surveyed vast acreage where they planned English townships, and sought to placate and divide Wabanaki tribes from one another as they continued their encroachment.

In 1629, when the Pilgrims obtained their patent from the Council for New England for land along the Kennebec River, their goal was immediate and simple: the development of a profitable fur trade. Their legal descendants, the Kennebeck proprietors, who revived the almost defunct claim over one hundred years later, were men of a different breed. Wealthy Boston merchants for the most part, they formed a speculative land company to develop the wilderness areas of central Maine. They possessed the means to expand their holdings methodically, defend their controversial title in the courts, and await the enormous riches that would eventually accrue from their investment. [68]

In some cases, access to and/or possession of Native land was secured through treaties. As Colin Calloway points out, “the English ... repeatedly entitled their treaties, “Acts of Submission,” and demanded that the Indians submit to the crown and acknowledge their own wrongdoings. Abenakis resorted to council just as often to reassert that they were free and independent and subject to no foreign power. Abenaki diplomats consistently strived to preserve their land and independence, even as they recognized their increasing weakness and vulnerability.” [69]

Frequently, colonists did not abide by the terms of treaties signed by their leaders. For example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, settlers often refused to pay the annual acknowledgment of a peck of corn that was supposed to have been provided by each English family living on Wabanaki land, as stipulated in treaties signed by colonial authorities and Wabanaki tribal leaders. The newcomers violated the agreements by allowing their cattle to trample Wabanaki cornfields, hanging their fishing nets across rivers and thereby blocking the passage of mi grating fish, and letting their pigs roam free to destroy shellfish beds, all of which deprived Wabanaki families of essential sustenance. Lisa Brooks frames the unceasing arrival of English in northern New England as a colonial conflict that “was rooted in the English failure to participate in the [resource and land-based] distributive system, combined with encroachment on subsistence grounds.” [70] Once Wabanaki people saw how the colonists impacted the land, many refused to sell.

As colonial settlers pressed for and occupied more land, to justify their occupation they demonized and attacked the landʼs original inhabitants. Colonial leaders stoked settler fear of Wabanaki people and unified colonists behind a mounting anti-Native discourse, from which it was a small step to extermination.

During the centuries-long struggle over the land, wars of extermination were waged by legions of colonial settlers against millions of Indigenous people. John Grenier, retired U.S. Air Force officer and Associate Professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy, contends that by engaging in this violence:

... Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders.... [71]

That brutalization took the form of scalping, torture and bodily dismemberment.

Trigger Warning

Trigger Warning In the remainder of this lesson and the following lessons, we examine warfare, scalping, and physical mutilation in North America spanning three centuries. We include decapitations ordered by the English around London Tower, brutalization of Irish, beheadings of Native people ordered by the Dutch in New York and New Jersey in the 1630s, and scalping and enslavement during the Pequot War of 1637.

It is essential that teachers take into account the lived experiences of students and their families and communities, including trauma they and their ancestors experienced historically as well as trauma they experience currently, which could be triggered by the information that lies ahead. We urge teachers to provide all students with an alternative set of readings and activities, if they choose not to participate.

European and Native Traditions of Beheading and Scalping: An Old Story

Native peoples and Europeans practiced scalping long before they met one another on the North American continent, and while it is not our goal to argue who scalped whom first, it is worthwhile to explore briefly how scalping fit into the cultural norms of the Original peoples of the Eastern Woodlands and the European newcomers. This is especially vital to understanding the dramatically different ways in which the two groups engaged in conflict and warfare.

With regard to dismemberment of bodies and the taking of scalps by some Native peoples, in certain Native societies, it was practiced symbolically and as a form of restitution for fallen warriors.

Though severed [body] parts occasionally represented executive power, more often they were symbols of war. Coastal natives rarely waged war to accumulate territories; they fought to avenge murders and to accumulate people and things of symbolic and practical value. The most prized plunder of war was a live captive. Women and children were usually assimilated into their captors’ lineage. Captured warriors often had to face an excruciating and slow death; they would be methodically dismembered in front of an entire village and expected to remain brave and stoic under the duress of torture. These ceremonies usually included the amputation of hands and feet and culminated in either the beheading or scalping of the captive. The methodic and public slaughter of a male captive was a cathartic theatrical performance where Indians could vent their anger for a wrongful death and revel in their victory over a bitter enemy. It also gave the enemy warrior a chance to redeem the honor he lost in being captured by demonstrating his fearlessness towards death. Colonial observers were often aghast at the torture of captives but, at the same time, they had to admit that Indian conflicts were far more restrained and concentrated than European wars, where victories were often measured by the total number of enemies slain. To Indians, killing on a large scale was wasteful and dangerous; it only served to perpetuate violence. They much preferred butchering a few foes in a deliberate fashion to gain emotional rewards....
Deliveries of severed parts from a warrior to a sachem [community leader] or from one sachem to another showed a firm alliance, like that of kin. [72]

The majority of scalping of Indigenous peoples was done by European settlers, but in some cases Indigenous peoples from other tribal nations participated in and were compensated for joining and helping the English hunt and scalp Native peoples.

Europeans had their own repertoire of barbarous practices, but colonial governments institutionalized scalping by paying scalp bounties as a mercenary incentive to their citizens and their Indian allies. Scalping became commonplace in backwoods warfare, and frontiersmen expected—and we expected—to lift trophies from Indian enemies.... [73]

For the most part, scalping implies murder because the act of cutting off a personʼs scalp usually results in death. Human scalps were also removed from corpses.

Europeans brought a history of beheading and scalping with them when they occupied North America. The English were inclined to dismember and behead their foes. The English practice of decapitation was used in the late fifteenth century when severed heads were placed on spikes around London Tower.

Drawing and quartering was their most elaborate ritual: a criminal would be hanged, disemboweled, emasculated, and decapitated, and the remainder of his corpse would be divided into quarters. English officials also sentenced criminals to have their hands, ears, and tongues cut off and condemned others to be beheaded. Of all the body parts that the English severed in sickening numbers, the object that they valued the most (and thus the object that expressed the most of their values) was the head. Heads supplied an obvious metaphor for hierarchy, indicated by the use of the word “crown” as a metonym for the monarch. The words “capital,” “capitulate,” and “captain,” like “decapitate,” all derive from the Latin caput, meaning head. Appropriately, the English often reserved beheading for high treason, the most capital offense. The beheaded tended to be the most powerful members of society: subversive preachers, scheming nobles, and pretenders to the throne....
English royals frequently placed severed heads in prominent locations ... and sheriffs repeated the practice in larger towns throughout the realm. Executioners often parboiled the heads of traitors; that is, they quickly cooked them in hot water, which temporarily arrested decay.... [74]

This brutalization of the human body was further shaped by the ideology of colonization tested and honed by the English during the conquest of Ireland, “which was contemporaneous and parallel to the first effective contacts of Englishmen with North America ... and to the earliest encounters with its Indian inhabitants.” [75]  In the following quote, note how the word “natives” refers to both Irish and “American natives.”

In the Elizabethan campaigns against the Irish ... where natives [Irish] were portrayed in terms that mirror the descriptions of American natives a few years later, the English took only heads in an attempt to terrorize their “savage” opponents. Not without reason, the grim pallid features of human faces lining the path to a commander’s tent were chosen as a deterrent rather than impersonal shocks of hair and skin waving from tent poles and pikes. Similarly, when Captain Miles Standish wished to daunt the Massachusetts Indians who threatened the nascent Plymouth Colony, he killed Wituwamat, “the chiefest of them,” took his head to Plymouth, and set it on the top of the fort with a blood-soaked flag. [76]

Beheadings and the placement of an enemy’s head on top of spikes at the entrance to forts, sometimes for decades, became a habit of the British, as readers will learn further on.

The Dutch and Beheadings

As early as the 1630s, Europeans used scalping and beheading when attacking Native communities. The Dutch in New Amsterdam (present-day lower Manhattan) were responsible for the first recorded monetary rewards for beheading Native people. In 1637, Willem Kieft became the fifth director of the capital city of New Netherlands. Known for a tyrannical style of governance and belligerence toward the original inhabitants of the land, Kieftʼs response to resistance by Raritan bands of Lenape near what is now called Staten Island, New York, and northeastern New Jersey, was to “offer fathoms of wampum for each Raritanʼs head delivered to the fort and twice as much for heads of those known to have murdered the settlers on Staten Island.” [77]

Governor Kieft further aggravated tensions with Hackensacks, Tappan, Narragansett, Wappinger, and Munsee Delawares after an armed group of Dutch men were sent to the Hackensack and Tappan villages of what is now called Jersey City. Silently crossing the river, the Dutch invaded the encampment and turned the snow red with the blood of children, women, and men. The troops brought back to Kieft 30 prisoners and a number of heads of Native people on pikes. Kieft greeted the Dutch militia enthusiastically and rewarded them. It was reported that the men played kickball with severed heads.

Scalping in the Kwinitekw River Valley and the Pequot War

At around the same time the Dutch attacked Native peoples in what is now New York and New Jersey, the Connecticut colony (under English rule) declared war on the Pequot Tribe on May 1, 1637. In the early 1630s, the fur and wampum trade in the Kwinitekw (Connecticut) River Valley had been dominated by the Dutch and Pequot. Mohegans and Narragansetts and some Wabanaki were allied with the English against the Pequot. Control over the fur and wampum trade is the historical context for this war.

... Throughout the war, Mohegans, Narragansetts, and other Native peoples gave parts of slain Pequots to their English partners. At one point, deliveries of trophies were so frequent that colonists stopped keeping track of individual parts, referring instead to the “still many Pequods’ heads and hands” that “came almost daily.” [78]


After the English torched the Mystic Fort in Connecticut, which killed hundreds of Pequot children, women, and men, the English tried to force nearby Native peoples to abandon their support of Pequot survivors and refugees and threatened to cut off trade with any Native community that refused to bring them the heads of Pequots.

When Long Island sachem Waiandance came to Saybrook (English fort in Connecticut] “to know if [the English] were angry with all Indians,” fort commander Gardener replied, “No, but only with such as had killed Englishmen.” Waiandance then asked if his people could resume trade. Yes, Gardener said, but with the following conditions: “If you will kill all the Pequots that come to you, and send me their heads,” then “you shall have trade with us.” Gardener also insinuated that Indians who refused to bring heads and wampum would be assumed to be harboring Pequots and could be held responsible for any belligerent actions. The Indians who had avoided the war now had only two choices: they were either with the English or against them....

The triumphant [English Captain] Mason explained the effect of the demand for body parts: “The Pequots now became a Prey to all Indians. Happy were they that could bring in their Heads to the English. Of which there came almost daily to Winsor, or Hartford.” News of this head exchange spread quickly, and groups that only had loose ties to the Pequots joined in....
[79]


As for the Pequot survivors, many were sold into slavery and the rest were divided up among the English and their Mohegan and Narragansett allies, although the colonists eventually required their Native allies to purchase from the English the Pequot captives that they had already taken.

The English demanded a fathom of wampum beads for every adult Pequot and half as much for each child. The English also confiscated several dozen Pequots for themselves. Some of the Pequots were “branded on the shoulder” and became slaves within colonial households; others found themselves sent to Providence Island to work on plantations. An additional clause in the treaty stipulated that the Indians “shall as soon as they can possibly take off [the] heads” of any remaining Pequot fugitives. The Treaty of Hartford codified head exchange and slavery and intimately linked the two as the colonists took possession of the living bodies and the lifeless parts of their enemies. [80]



Governor Winthrop and his family acquired enslaved Pequots after the war. “Winthrop Jr. was appointed governor of the Connecticut colony and became a speculator in the Atherton Company, acquiring Native lands beyond Massachusetts.” [81] Winthrop has thousands of descendants today, among them John Kerry. The towns of Winthrop, Massachusetts [82] and Winthrop, Maine, were named in his honor.

In spite of the catastrophic impact of the war and the Treatyʼs attempt to erase the Pequot Nation, survivors told their stories, and their descendants continue to do so today. The largest Indigenous-led museum in the U.S. is the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, located on sacred tribal land in Connecticut.

Beheading and scalping of Native people for money was now part of the treacherous landscape of North America as Native societies opposed mounting encroachment of settlers and warring European powers, and were scarred by violence, shifting alliances, promises of monetary rewards, and unreliable pledges of loyalty.

Additional information and learning activities about the Pequot War and Treaty of Hartford of 1638 can be found in Lesson 8 of the Dawnland Teacherʼs Guide.
In the following section we focus on official English colonial government acts and proclamations that encouraged the scalping of targeted groups of Indigenous peoples.

Overview of Scalp Acts and Bounty Rewards: Organization of Terror

Insofar as settler colonialism relies on the logic of removal and elimination of the original stewards of the land, the mutilation of captives and issuance of scalp-bounty acts helped unify settlers and focus their frustrations and hatred on the loathed and dehumanized other whom many vowed to cleanse from the land. White claims of superiority and the branding of Native peoples as savages fed this process of othering. Official scalp-bounty acts and proclamations and less formal mechanisms (e.g., pooling of funds by wealthy settlers to incentivize their less affluent neighbors to hunt and scalp Native people) were essential tools of settler colonialismʼs project of land dispossession.

Currently, we know of 79 official scalp-bounty acts and proclamations that were issued across two centuries in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia.


Currently, we know of 79 official scalp-bounty acts and proclamations [83] that were issued across two centuries in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia when it was under the control of New England after 1710. These and scores of scalp-bounty acts in many other regions served the larger settler colonial project of subjugation and attempted extermination of Indigenous peoples in their homelands. The scalp-bounty proclamations issued by English colonial authorities in New England were triggered by governors and lieutenant governors who promulgated acts, which were then published and printed in newspapers and as broadsides to be distributed throughout the regions where those targeted by the acts lived. Scalpers had to register their intent with the colonial authorities and were instructed to keep journals of their actions. After hunting Wabanaki people, some colonists brought captives and the scalps of their victims to Boston and other colonial outposts for payment. These transactions were recorded, although some of those records have proven difficult to find.  In some places, most notably Nova Scotia, payment for scalps was listed as a miscellaneous expense, making it unlikely we will ever know how much money was paid to scalpers. [84]

Indiscriminate and widespread anti-Native loathing encouraged posses of settlers to terrorize Native peoples with the threat of scalping across the current United States. The gruesome scalping of human beings was rewarded in New England, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California and Colorado, where it spread to towns and villages with unimpaired intensity as wealthy landowners and land speculators funded local campaigns whereby settlers were hired to hunt, kill, and scalp Native people for money. Untold numbers of Indigenous civilians perished. We will learn more about that in Lesson Four.

As we dig more deeply into how scalping was used, primarily by Europeans, to exterminate Native peoples from their homelands, we will focus on colonial Massachusetts, which produced dozens of bounty acts. With that, we will consider the interplay between historical setting, institutional practices, and the actions of those who scalped. It is essential to keep in mind that it was individuals, usually white men, who chose to hunt Native children, women, and men, and redeem their bodies or body parts for considerable sums of money and land. In some cases, English who scalped were known to skin victims from their hips on down for boot legs, [85] suggesting that Native people were seen by some settlers as prey much like deer, whose hides and skins were used as protective clothing.

The dozens of bounty acts in Massachusetts promised distinct reward amounts for the scalps of Native peoples depending on the age and gender of the intended victim. The value of womenʼs scalps was usually equated with that of boys under twelve, often at half the value of adult males. Sometimes bounty claimants received higher awards for captives than for scalps because they could be sold as slaves, but they had to be fed and kept alive until they could be sold. This was not always profitable. The highest amount paid for scalps was for those of adult Native men capable of bearing arms.

“Adult,” “capable,” and “child,” of course, were discretionary terms dependent on the judgment of the scalp hunter. Although graduated by age and sex, the bounties certainly erased the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Indeed, many a scalp hunter must have faced a financial, though probably not a moral, dilemma. Should he kill and scalp an Indian child under 10 and then claim that the child was capable of bearing arms and collect a guaranteed £20 or £100? Alternatively, should he transport the child to Boston, where he would receive the profits from selling the child into slavery? Of course, not every scalp procured was taken by a hunter in a commissioned body. Thus it is probable, though impossible to prove, that a black market in scalps may have arisen. [86]

Across decades and centuries, the bounty amounts tended to increase, while most wages for colonial settlers remained stagnant. At the time, the reward for the scalp of an Indigenous person far exceeded the wages of a private soldier and was roughly equivalent to an officerʼs remuneration for a single military campaign. The amount was also close to the annual income of a farm family, schoolmaster, or town clerk. [87]

In Ckuwaponahkik, colonial leaders authorized the hunting of Wabanaki people and used revenue to reward settlers for scalps and other body parts, and for captured Wabanaki. These rewards were paid in English pounds and land grants. In this way they mitigated settler economic anxiety and acquired more land for newcomers.

As military conflicts proliferated in Ckuwaponahkik, Native peoples were caught between defending themselves and dealing with insistent pressure to take sides in the centuries-long struggles in which Europeans pitted themselves against one another. The strategy of divide and conquer, a favorite among imperial and colonial powers keen to subjugate those whose land they occupy, was a key ingredient in the regionʼs toxic brew. When French-English skirmishes developed into wars, the marketplace for scalps was used to terrorize and attempt to exterminate the original peoples in the Northeast.

It is worth noting that in 1633, authorities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony forbade Indigenous people from purchasing and bearing arms, which undermined their ability to protect themselves from Englishmen intent on hunting, scalping, and capturing them and their loved ones. [88] As Wabanaki people were prevented from bearing arms to protect their families, the force of Englishmen willing to hunt and scalp Indigenous people grew. One of their motivations can be tied to a deep-seated notion of entitlement.

In the summer of 1671, the leaders of Plymouth Colony formed a Council of War. They aimed to press a key adversary into submission and to secure the fertile lands they had promised to their first-born sons. [89] [emphasis added]


The promise of fertile lands to an emergent generation is a significant driver of the conflicts over land that ignited Native resistance to and war with the newcomers. The English deployment of militia helped unite settlers and channel their fear and growing anti-Native prejudice and hatred.

It is unlikely that possession of overt anti-Native hatred was a prerequisite for all Europeans who signed up to hunt and scalp Wabanaki people in exchange for monetary rewards. Some may have been more motivated by fear of losing their grip on the patch of Native homelands they occupied and the precarious nature of their own economic circumstances and limited means at the margins of colonial society, as well as social pressure and norms. But what can be argued with certainty is that scalp-bounty acts and proclamations channeled and amplified anti-Native violence by Europeans, which was convenient given their growing numbers and unbridled thirst for land.

For the most part, we do not know the names or social roles of those who were scalped. Canwe explain it due to the fires and wars that destroyed historical records? Or is it a reminder of settler colonialismʼs penchant for erasure? Either way, these omissions make it harder for us to remember and memorialize individual victims of scalping.

Scalp bounties were just one of the catastrophic pressures on the Original peoples, some of whom were already weakened by disease, famine caused by wartime destruction of crops and disruptions of harvests, stoppages of trade due to English prohibitions, and the unceasing arrival of newcomers bent on displacing them.

Guidance for Teaching

Teachers: Ask students to read this article about settler colonialism and write a short essay on what they have learned about the key features of settler colonialism and its relationship to exterminationism and genocide. Upper middle and high school students can also reflect on to what degree and in what ways settler colonialism tries to remove and erase Indigenous peoples from their homelands. You can also ask them to get into small groups to discuss the significance of the monetization of scalping and whether they knew this history and if not, why not.

We now look at Wabanaki attempts at diplomacy in the 1640s. 

Wabanaki Attempts at Diplomacy, 1640s

Following the Pequot War, there were repeated and renewed attempts at diplomacy on the part of Wabanaki leaders. For example, the Pennacook Bashaba Sagamore Papisseconnewa (known by English as Passaconaway) was renowned for his power and diplomacy in the wake of the first waves of colonization. The Pennacook Confederacy or “sphere of influence” centered on Molôdemak [Merrimack], “the deep river,” and extended through inland waterways to the Atlantic.

Papisseconnewa, who formerly paid tribute to the Massachusett Sagamore Nanepashemet, leader of the Pawtucket Confederation, tried to unify the heterogeneous Pawtucket-Pennacook political alliance and multi-cultural kinship networks in lower and upper Molodemak territories. This intertribal Pennacook Confederacy maintained greater autonomy in northern homelands, which became increasingly important as a buffer against coastal plagues, English land encroachment, and speculation.

Papisseconnewa allied with other tribal leaders, including Nanepashemetʼs widow, “Squaw Sachem,” Saunkskwa [female leader] of the Massachusett/Pawtucket, to gather families together after devastating epidemics ravaged Indigenous communities, especially along the coast, as colonial captivities, fur trade, and intertribal conflict fostered further ruptures. Papisseconnewaʼs daughters intermarried with Squaw Sachemʼs sons, Monowampate (James) and Wenepaweekin (George), and those of other leadership families, thus repairing bonds within the network of kinship relations and creating a stronger safety net for survivors and future generations. [90]

These saunskwa and sagamore land stewards initially allowed colonists to settle in their fur-rich regions, negotiating some of the earliest cross-cultural trade and land exchanges, forging alliances and middle ground relations with the English, in which they did not entirely surrender autonomy, occupation or resource-use rights.

Papisseconnewa and his allies were among the Indigenous leaders who signed agreements with officials of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, thereby attempting to forge mutually beneficial alliances with English newcomers. This 1644 covenant, made by Papisseconnewa and his eldest son, Nahanancommock, is among the most significant documents held by the Massachusetts State Archives today. [91]

–––– At a general Court held in Boston the 12th day of the fourth month (June) 1644. Passaconaway, Nahanancommock did voluntarille submit themselves to us as appareth by their covenant subscribed by their own hands heire following & other articles to wch they con sented. We have & doe by theise presents voluntarily & without any constraint or persuasion but of our own free motion put our selves our subjects Lands and estates under the Goverment and protected by them according to their just laws and order so far as we shall be made capable of understanding them . And we doe promise for ourselves & and all our subjects to all our pos teritie to be true and faithful to the said Govrmt. & ayding to the maintenance thereof to our best abilitie and from tyme to tyme to give speedy notice of any conspiracie attempt or evil intention of any which we shall know or heare of against the same and we doe promise to be willing from tyme to tyme to be instructed in the knowledge and worship of God. In witness whereof wee have heeren to put our hands the day and year above written. [92]


Following their oath of allegiance to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, these sagamores presented wampum to court magistrates, amounting to tribute payment for protection. In exchange, they received English clothing and goods. Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks suggests this exchange of wampum and long red coats was symbolic of Native people acknowledging “a bond of alliance among equals,” which “solidified in wampum a significant relationship of mutual exchange and protection with their new neighbors in Massachusetts, the settlers pledging to protect them from both outside attacks and encroachments on their lands.” [93]

While the sagamores who took oaths and Christian vows faced fewer choices in the wake of colonizationʼs occupation of their land, their covenant with the English should not be seen as a capitulation of political, territorial, or cultural autonomy for they viewed their agreements differently than colonial authorities did. The 1644 agreement may be viewed as one of the earliest treaties, affirming an alliance between the sagamores and English authorities, based on mutual accommodation and tolerance of differences according to their own interpretations. While these sagamores undoubtedly expected a depth of reciprocity that colonial authorities were unwilling to deliver, court records indicate that the sagamores gained some benefits, which other Original peoples did not have, including the right to maintain arms, land grants, and protection. [94]

The English, however, undoubtedly understood the covenant as a legal agreement of Native political and territorial submission to Massachusetts Bay authorities, to which they swore allegiance as subordinate subjects. Therefore, this early attempt at diplomacy and the signing of agreements did not usher in a reliable or prolonged period of peaceful coexistence between Indigenous peoples and English newcomers, and just one generation later a catastrophic regional conflict erupted, which we refer to as Pometacometʼs Resistance/King Philipʼs War, although most just call it King Philipʼs War. While the forward slash between these two descriptors may appear clunky, we prefer it to using one to the exclusion of the other.

Conclusion to Lesson Two

Between the late 17th and early 19th century, Great Britain, France, and other European powers engaged in near constant warfare. Their battles for economic and political power engulfed the Dawnland, dispossessing the Wabanaki of their homeland. Pometacometʼs Resistance/King Philipʼs War is also referred to as the First Anglo Abenaki War, which began in 1675. The Sixth Anglo-Abenaki War ended in 1760, nearly a century later. The six Anglo-Abenaki wars provide a framework for studying the issuance of scalp-bounty acts and proclamations, and subsequent bounty claims presented by those who hunted Wabanaki people for their scalps. By the time a lasting peace was reached between France and Britain, Europeans were entrenched in North America and the Wabanaki had experienced significant losses. These wars and their respective scalp-bounty acts and proclamations are the focus of Lesson Three.

Work Cited

⁴⁹ George Neptune, “Naming the Dawnland: Wabanaki Place Names on Mount Desert Island,” https://abbemuseum.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/4b8da-namingthedawnlandgeorgeneptune_web.pdf
⁵⁰ A. J. B. Johnson, Endgame 1758: The Promise, The Glory, and Despair of Louisburg’s Last Decade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 38.
⁵¹ Colin G. Calloway, Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), 121-122.
⁵² https://www.plimoth.org/what-see-do/mayflower-ii/mayflower-ii-faqs
⁵³ John Winthrop and Francis Higginson, “Reasons to Be Considered, and Objections with Answers,” in Winthrop Family Papers, 2 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1629).
⁵⁴ Kristine Malpica, “Uncommon Ground: Pawtucket-Pennacook Strategic Land Exchange in Native Spaces and Colonized Places of Essex County and Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century,” MA thesis, (University of Massachusetts Boston, 2021), 39; Ian Saxine highlights Winthrop’s contradictory claims and practices in recognizing and purchasing Native lands himself in Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 29-32; Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 19, 33; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003), 56, 60.
⁵⁵ Minister John Cotton, “Gods Promise to His Plantations,” Old South Leaflets (nd), no. 53, 6.
⁵⁶ Kristine Malpica, “Uncommon Ground,” 49.
⁵⁷ Cronon, Changes in the Land, 56.
⁵⁸ Increase Mather, “A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (1676),” edited by Paul Royser. Faculty Publications, UNL Libraries, 9. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=libraryscience
⁵⁹ Rufus King Sewall, Ancient Dominions of Maine (Bath: Elisha Clark and Company, 1859), 158.
⁶⁰ Dina Gilio-Whitaker, “American Settler Colonialism 101,” Thoughtco, March 18, 2017, https://www.thoughtco.com/american-settler-colonialism-4082454
⁶¹ Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240
⁶² Lisa Brooks, private correspondence, September 14, 2019; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 42.
⁶³ Lisa Brooks, private correspondence, September 14, 2019; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 42.
⁶⁴ Deed from Warrabitta and Nanateonett to George Munjoy, June 4, 1666, Samuel Waldo Papers, Maine Historical Society, Portland, ME, https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/7348
⁶⁵ Ibid.
⁶⁶ Kristine Malpica, “Uncommon Ground,” 42. “The 1629 Massachusetts Bay Charter and colonial laws passed by the General Court defined legal title to Indigenous lands, distinguishing between property and political sovereignty or jurisdiction. Because English sovereignty was based on the authority of a monarch, it had negative consequences for Native land tenure systems and legal rights.”
⁶⁷ See https://upstanderproject.org/firstlight/doctrine
⁶⁸ Gordon E. Kershaw, The Kennebeck Proprietors 1749-1775 (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1975), xi.
⁶⁹ Calloway, Dawnland Encounters, 93-94.
⁷⁰ Lisa Brooks, private correspondence, September 14, 2019.
⁷¹ John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5.
⁷² Andrew Lipman, “‘A Meanes to Knitt them Togeather’: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 65, no. 1 (January 2008): 6-7, 11, 13.
⁷³ Calloway, Dawnland Encounters, 167.
⁷⁴ Lipman, “‘A Meanes to Knitt them Togeather,’” 6-7.
⁷⁵ Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 4 (October 1973): 575.
⁷⁶ James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut or Who Invented Scalping,” The William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 3 (July 1980): 463-464.
⁷⁷ Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York: Knopf, 2012), 219.
⁷⁸ Lipman, “‘A Meanes to Knitt them Togeather,’” 3.
⁷⁹ Ibid, 20.
⁸⁰ Ibid, 26.
⁸¹ Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 60.
⁸² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop,_Massachusetts ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop,_Maine
⁸³ Of the 79 known official scalp-bounty acts, 55 were issued by Massachusetts, seven by Connecticut, three by New Hampshire before 1741 when it became an independent colony, nine by New Hampshire after 1741, and five by Nova Scotia after 1710, when it came under British control.
84  email correspondence with Mi’kmaq teacher-scholar, Daniel N. Paul, December 12, 2021.
85 Margaret Haig Roosevelt Sewall Ball, “Grim Commerce: Scalps, Bounties, and the Transformation of Trophy-Taking in the Early American Northeast, 1450-1770,” PhD diss., (University of Colorado, 2013), 168-69, https://scholar.colorado.edu/hist_gradetds
86 Grenier, The First Way of War, 42.
87 Gloria L. Main, “Gender, Work, and Wages in Colonial New England,” The William and Mary Quarterly 51 no. 1 (1994): 48.
88 Rebecca Cardinal Sockbeson, “Maine Indigenous Education Left Behind: A Call for Anti-Racist Conviction as Political Will Toward Decolonization,” Journal of American Indian Education 58, no. 3 (2019): 105-29; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1(Boston: William White, 1853-1854), 76, https://archive.org/details/recordsofgoverno01mass/page/76/mode/2up?q=indian
89 Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 118.
90 The present day Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag claim Squaw Sachem as Massachusett Saunkskwa. See “The History of the Neponset Band of the Indigenous Massachusett Tribe,” http://massachusetttribe.org/the-history-of-the-neponset (accessed April, 2021). This is supported by Lisa Brooks in, Our Beloved Kin, 73; Unlike the Pennacook, the Massachusett constituted several subordinate chieftaincies, but no ethnically recognized subdivisions, according to Sherburne Cook in, The Indian Population of New England, 13-15; See also Robert S. Grumet, Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today’s Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 111; David Stewart-Smith, “The Pennacook Indians and the New England Frontier circa 1604-1733,” Ph.D. diss. Union Institute, 1998, 24, 29, 81-82; Kathleen Joan Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 158–59; William Wood, Wood’s New England’s Prospect (Boston: Printed for the Society, 1865), 97-99; Malpica, “Uncommon Ground,” 26-28.
91 Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: Remapping a New History of King Philip’s War, Wannalancet and the Kwinitekw Headwaters https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/wannalancet
92 For covenant transcription, see Silas Roger Coburn, History of Dracut, Massachusetts: Called by the Indians Augumtoocooke and Before Incorporation, the Wildernesse North of the Merrimac. First Permanent Settlement in 1669 and Incorporated as a Town in 1701 (United States: Press of the Courier-Citizen Company, 1922), 33-34.
93 Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 109.
94 Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol.2, 162-3; https://archive.org/details/cu31924091024582/page/n55/mode/2up ; Christine DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 46; Malpica, “Uncommon Ground,” 98-99.

Continue to the Next Lesson:

Lesson Three: Introduction