Episode 36 — I Should Be Glad To Leave The School

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant
Episode 36 - “I Should Be Glad To Leave The School”
Published on January 3, 2023

Note: This transcript was generated by Otter.ai with light human correction

Kathryn Gehred 

Hello, and welcome to Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant. This is Women's History podcast where we feature 18th and early 19th century women's letters that don't get as much attention as we think they should. I'm your host, Katherine Gehred. Now, I've wanted to do an episode with a letter from a Native American woman for quite some time. You might remember, if you've listened to all the episodes of the podcast, when I did my first episode with a letter from Hannah Valentine, who's an enslaved woman, I talked a little bit about how there are structural reasons why letters from non white women are harder to find. However, for this letter, thanks to the work of the Occom Circle Project at Dartmouth College, I was able to find multiple documents from Native American women who attended Moore's Indian charity school in Lebanon, Connecticut. The letter we're going to be talking about today comes from a girl named Mary Secutor, who was part of the Narragansett tribe. My guest this week, Ivy Schweitzer is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, and she launched the Occom Circle Project, and I'm thrilled to have her on the podcast today. So Hello, Dr. Schweitzer.

Ivy Schweitzer

Hi, Kathryn!

Kathryn Gehred 

What inspired you to start this project?

Ivy Schweitzer

That's a really good question. And, I went back to look at my notes. It was spring 2007, and Brown University had just published a very influential report called Slavery and Justice 2006, which was authorized by a new president who had been appointed who was a woman of color, the first woman of color president, I think of an Ivy League institution. And, she wanted to look into Browns background in terms of slavery, and it's pretty astounding. It wasn't just that the college owned slaves, but that the college actually was in the business of slave trading, and it was an extraordinary history. So when this report came out, an editorial in the Daily Dartmouth, which is the college newspaper at Dartmouth, had this to say in relationship to this, the Brown Report, Dartmouth, quote, "Dartmouth should publish something similar with regard to Native Americans in order to symbolically and substantively confront its own history. Just as Dartmouth students should hold each other accountable. The college must hold itself accountable for its own past." That was really interesting. Then in May of 2007, Dartmouth, every May on Mother's Day weekend, has a powwow and invites native people from all over the country to come and dance and celebrate Dartmouth's Native American studies program, and it's also Native American program. And I was asked to, because I work in the 18th century, I was asked to give a presentation about the life of Samson Occom, to a group of Mohegan Indians who are coming up to the powwow. I found out later, I wasn't the first one who was was asked, I was like, two or three down the road, because I'm not native myself. I'm just a scholar of early American literature. And I happen to have a real passion and interest in Native literature and bringing native culture more to our attention. And, I didn't I work with Peter Carini, the archivist who brought out a lot of the documents that we had in the library, written by an about Occom, and we're presenting all this material and one old guy who looked like he came from central casting, raised his hand and said, "Well, if Occom is just so important, where is he at Dartmouth? Why isn't he more celebrated?" And, I was stumped, and the only answer I had was kind of a bad answer that 'oh, well, the colleges ignored him,' right? Because he's native. And it was that moment, and thinking about that moment that I said, 'Well, I have the resources, I have the expertise and Native literature, I'm going to do something, to answer that question, and to give Occom more play and more publicity at the college.' And so what I decided to do was, I first started to teach this course in response to the Brown Report called "Do the Right Thing: Taking Responsibility for the Past," in which we read the Brown Report, we read the literature that was out there by Occom. We looked at the library's holding, we went into special collections and looked at his documents. We learned all about that, and then the students wrote position papers on what they thought the college should do about, for example, all its Indian imagery. There were several murals at the college that were very controversial that were covered up, there were certain sculptures, there was a wind vane, which just this year was taken down off the library, which depicted Eliezer Wheelock, who was the congregational minister who founded Dartmouth College, teaching a kneeling Indian. The Indian is kneeling and an arc and we like his teaching him, right. It's like okay, that was finally taken out this year. So, the students were all these amazing papers, deciding what they should do. Based on this report, and based on what we had read, submitted it to the college president, it went to the circular file and nothing ever happened. But what I did, I was then motivated to apply to decal to one of the Dartmouth, I think it was the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning for a one term kind of little fund to go into the library archives and create a kind of digital website that gather all the all the documents about our Occom in one place. And, I somehow thought was going to take like, three months or something. But what I learned is that you don't do digital projects in three months, this is a much bigger project. And, based on that little grant that I got, that was in 2007, I started to do more research about this, I was very inspired by the Yale Indian Papers Project, which is now called the Northeast Native Portal, and also the work of the Abenaki scholar, Lisa Brooks, who talks about this notion of a common pot, which is a northeast native tradition of communal responsibility. And, so given a lot of, you know, sort of do a lot of reading, and I eventually applied for an NEH grant to do a scholarly edition, and I got it, in 2011. It's amazing. It was a big grant for a quarter of a million dollars. And, I assembled a team with Peter Carini, who's the archivist at Dartmouth College who just knows tons about Occom, and the documents that were in the archives. But what I didn't know, and what I learned is that we have a huge archive of documents by Eleazar Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth College, so we have his whole collection. So there was just mounds of stuff in the literal, you know, shoe boxes that nobody had really ever, I mean, that's actually they had organized them, but nobody's really done anything with them. So, the library was very excited about this project, and so we started to work. And, we worked from 2011 to 2000 and, we have a three year grant, and then we got a one year extension, so till about 2015. We have 550 documents in the archive because we limited ourselves. And we launched the project in 2016, with a conference, and those conference papers are now collected in a volume that I put together that came out last year called "The Afterlives of Indigenous Archives, Essays in Honor of the Occom Circle," which was edited with Gordon Henry, who's Anishinaabe and had been teaching at Dartmouth College. So, that's how I got in it was really the challenge from that Mohegan Elder, and I felt very strongly that that's, you know, I kind of was called to do that in some way.

Kathryn Gehred 

That's incredible. That's really cool. It really is a treasure trove of documents, just making that available for free online, so anybody can get to them. It's fantastic.

Ivy Schweitzer

Yeah, that was the idea. That was the idea. Public, public humanities, it's really important.

Kathryn Gehred 

We've been dropping a few names Samson Occom, Eleazar Wheelock, and Moor's Indian Charity School, would you mind giving sort of a brief introduction and background?

Ivy Schweitzer

Well, Samson Occom, who's dates are 1723 to 1792, was born a member of the Mohegan tribe. They lived in South-East Connecticut on the water, and the great awakening comes to Mohegan territory in 1739. This is this big wave of religious revivals that kind of proceeds, and some people say also influences the American Revolution. A lot of these ministers like George Whitefield come over from England, and they're preaching in open air tents. The preaching is much more accessible. They invite everybody, men, women, you know, working class people, it's very much Evangelical, it's very much about emotions, and an emotion of reaction to kind of religious desire. It just takes off like wildfire, and it kind of spreads across the colonies, and Occom gets caught up in it when he's about 17, and he's converted by a man named James Davenport, who ends up marrying Eliezer Wheelock’s daughter is kind of interesting little, everybody's related. And, he learns to read he learns to be becomes literate learns from, from a white neighbor how to read. And then when he's about 18, he gets selected as a counselor for the Mohegan tribe. So, he very early on is pushed up into a position of authority with the tribe. But, this is really the important part, in 1743, he attends hearings of the on the Mason Mohegan land case in Norwich, Connecticut. Now this is a case that started in the 1630s, in which the, the Mohegan tribe appointed a man named John Mason to steward some of their ancestral and traditional lands because Native Americans tended to move around and they didn't stay in one place and in the summertime, they go to the seaside and they would fish there and then sometimes they go up, you know, went to the mountains. So, they were kind of a little nomadic. Well, this colony of Connecticut had been eyeing these lands for decades and centuries even. And, so they started to encroach on these lands and claim that the lands were theirs and John Mason and his family, his children, and were very much on the side of the Mohegans. And this case, eventually ends up in the British courts in the 1770s. And, that's when it's decided, and it's decided against the Mohegan tribe, so they lose their ancestral lands. But, in 1743 Occom, who's 17 or 18, or 19 years old, goes to hear this the argument, the legal arguments, and I think what happens is that he realizes that unless somebody really understands reading and writing, and Western notions of argument and rhetoric, his tribe is really going to suffer. And, it's at that point that he then asks his mother to go to Eliezer Wheelock, who is a local congregational minister, to say ‘Will you take my son into your school and educate him.’ So, that's kind of very important, and I'll talk a little bit more about we like in a second, he stays with Wheelock for about four years, he's tutored, he is an extraordinary student, he becomes fluent in Latin, he learns Greek, he learns French, he learns Hebrew, but because of eyestrain, and he's preparing actually to go to Yale, which is where we went, but because of severe eyestrain, he has to stop his studies. And, in 1749, he becomes a teacher and a missionary to the Montaukits, it's on Long Island. And that's where he stays from the next 12 years, and he does some extraordinary work with them. His teaching methods are very innovative, actually. He marries a Montaukit woman from a leading family whose name is Mary Fowler in 1751. In 1759, he's ordained as a Presbyterian minister, I think the first native to be ordained as a Presbyterian minister. And in the 60s, he works as a missionary to the Oneida Indians in upstate New York, and then finally, he stops working with the Oneidas and decides that he wants to come back to Mohegan and he starts to build a house there. And then in 1765 to 1769, Wheelock deputes Occom to fundraise in England and Scotland for the Indian Charity School. Now, some people argue that Wheelock sends him there, because Occom is becoming too active in the Mason land case, and they want to get him out of the country that that's one line of argument. And, they sent him with a guy named Whitaker, who was a minister but it was also kind of like a really kind of, crafty kind of guy. And they end up being a terrific success. Occom ends up preaching to huge crowds of people, in London, he preaches the George Whitefield's tabernacle to 3000 people and he's a raging success, he meets the king, he meets Selena, Countess of Huntington, he meets the Earl of Dartmouth, he hangs out with the elites, who are all impressed with his humility. And, he just had a lovely character, apparently, and he comes back, and he has raised 12,000 pounds, which is the equivalent of about $2 million. So, it is what Wheelock calls bushels of money, and he comes back in 1768, late 1768/69, only to find that Wheelock has up stakes, picked the school up and moved it to a royal charter in New Hampshire, in the wilds of New Hampshire, far away from the Mohegans, far away from all the tribes that he had been working with and supporting an Occom is sitting there saying, 'Well, what happened' and feels really betrayed by this and there's a he writes, we like a what I call the breakup letter, which is an incredibly angry letter. 'Why did you do this, I went and put everything at risk to raise all this money for the school and you go and you move it up to New Hampshire.' And, at that point, we look becomes very disillusioned with his what he calls the grand design of educating Indians as missionaries, because in fact, it hasn't really worked. Well. We'll get to that when we get to Wheelock. Occom then breaks with Wheelock, and he turns his attention to organizing Christian Indians into a pan Indian Christian separatist community called Brothertown, which eventually moves up in 1870 and 1784, after the Revolution, many of the Christian Indians in New England who have been dispossessed by all the land being taken over by the colonies move up to Brotherton on land that the Uintahs have donated to them and start this pan Indian kind of separatist community. They start two towns Brothertown in New Stockbridge, and that's where Occom eventually goes, he becomes their kind of minister and their spiritual leader, and he dies there in 1792. But, the story doesn't end there because the Oneidas eventually are Svengalied lead into giving up this land that they've promised to the Brotherton community. The Brothertons have to leave and they actually move finally to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they are today. And the Brotherton tribe is an ongoing, vibrant concern. It's a native tribe and they claim Occom as one of their ancestors and guiding spirits. What's interesting is that, you know, they just kept on getting pushed further and further west.

Kathryn Gehred

All the way to Wisconsin.

Ivy Schweitzer

All the way to Wisconsin. Yep. So, Wheelock, his dates are 1711 to 1799. He is a New Life Congregational minister, studied at Yale, he achieved fame during the Great Awakening as a as an itinerant Minister, but the colony started to punish the New Lights and he lost his salary. So, in order to support his family, he started up Grammar School in his home for boys. And that's the school that Occom mother asks if Occom can attend, and Occom attends, joins him in December of 1743. Occom is so successful that it inspires Wheelock to expand his school into what he calls an Indian Charity School, which is then a man, named Jonathan Moore, donates land and buildings for the school in Lebanon, Connecticut. And, that's why it's called Morris Indian charity school. It's after this the donor. What's interesting about this school it opens in 1754 is that he educated native boys and also English boys. So, it was one of the few interracial schools in the Northeast. And then in 1761, he started what he calls the Female School. But this was all part of something he called the "Great Design." He really regarded his schooling and his working with Native Americans as a sacred calling of some personal and national urgency. And he says in a letter, quote, "to clear myself and family, of partaking in the public guilt of our land and nation, in such neglect of them," (that is the Indians), he talks about how as a boy, quote, "I've had you upon my heart," pitying what he saw as the Indians, worldly poverty, and most of all, quote, "The perishing case of your precious souls are in without the knowledge of the only true God and Savior of sinners." So, he really was convicted about this evening, this is something that really was part of his own religious calling. But, he participated in the racism and the kind of ethnocentric ideas of his time, and we'll we'll see that, you know, play out in the profile of the school that he starts. So, in the school, he's training Native students from nearby tribes to become missionaries. And in 1761, he starts to, as I say, starts to train women. But by the late 1760s, he becomes disillusioned with this and in the last decade, Occom breaks with him, some of his other protegees break with him, and he really this great, great design that he has, this is a failure, essentially, that took a little bit more about the school.

Kathryn Gehred

Yeah.

Ivy Schweitzer

We talked about it was founded in 1754. I'm sorry, there's a lot of history going on here. One of his most famous students was Joseph Brant, who was a Mohawk who fought on the side of the British, actually, in the American Revolution. But, the school was shaped by Wheelock's self conceptualization as the father what he called the father of his tawny family. So, this is what scholars call "Missionary Paternalism," and it involved internal and external shaping of students, according to white English and Christian values. That is they believed that in order for these Indians to be saved religiously, they had to adopt a Western English lifestyle, which meant not being nomadic, and not being peripatetic, and not being communal and collective, but living in separate households marrying and adopting Western English values. And it also involved this notion of rooting out the savage or the obstinate, proud, evil Indian, so there was this notion of "you kill the Indian save the man." So, there's a lot of violence involved in these conceptions in this conception of what Wheelock was doing. Right? And the male Native students responded to this violence, sometimes with other violence, and there's some psychological violence Occom uses a lot of Latin puns to get back at Wheelock, and that's kind of interesting. So, it's kind of like using the very tools that you're taught to get back to speak back to the colonizer, but the female students had a little bit more autonomy, and I'll talk about that they could negotiate this paternalism to benefit them without completely breaking with Wheelock. So, that's kind of interesting. But, just a little bit about the female school, so he starts this in 1761. And, he describes it as part of his plan, that a number of girls should be instructed in whatever should be necessary to render them fit to perform the female part as housewives, schoolmistress, tailoresses, et cetera. But what happens in this gendered education, and this is really important from reading Mary's letter, the girls are boarded with local families who helped instruct them in domestic skills. They got instruction once a week in reading and writing, they attended church on Sunday. Now what this did was it separated the girls a little bit from Wheelock's direct influence, right, and maneuverings. But, it also allowed the female school to be self supporting because the girls got paid for their work, so that their payment helped support the school. So this is kind of very interesting, right? Whereas the boys were learning, supposedly, and studying the girls studying was very minimal, and they were actually working as domestic kind of servants and local households who are paying them. So that's kind of interesting, right?

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, it's, it's sort of an education.

Ivy Schweitzer

Right, right.

Kathryn Gehred

Sort of free labor a little bit.

Ivy Schweitzer

Exactly, exactly. He calls the boys, his sons, will Occom his black son, but he never uses the word daughter in relationship to the girls in the school, which is kind of interesting. And, I think I'm wondering if it has to do with gendered expectations at the time, because for the English women were subordinate to men, they were meant to be docile to men, they, they were subjected, actually, and subjugated to fathers and husbands who expected them to be docile and obedient. And that was actually not the expectations in native tribes. So, in native tribes, women had much more flexibility, they had much more political clout, they had much more economic cloud, the men did the hunting, the women did the agriculture and grew the three, the three sisters, right, corn, beans, and squash. So they had much more freedom, they had much more flexibility, they could be independent, right. And native conceptions of the female role really came into conflict, with Wheelock and his English conceptions of the female role.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, so it seems like his school which was sort of forcing Western cultural values onto its students was definitely gendered and forcing Western gendered expectations onto the students as well.

Ivy Schweitzer

That's exactly right. And it turns out that, well, we'll see, it's kind of a failure, only one female student, Hannah Garrett actually marries a native missionary. And, fulfills this helped meet visions that Wheelock had, none of them become school mistresses, although we know that there's evidence that native women did serve as school mistresses and other tribes and other areas. But, in fact, none of Wheelock's female students fulfill his goals for them. So, it really is kind of from his perspective a failure. But, what people say and this is really interesting, the school itself became a hub for natives across New England to meet each other, and work together, and learn about each other. So, that in some interesting, ironic way, it became a kind of cradle for intertribal connectivity and networking.

Kathryn Gehred

Huh!

Ivy Schweitzer

And actually, Morris Indian charity school produce some of the major figures in native politics during this period Samson Occom, his brother in law, David Fowler, his son in law, Joseph Johnson. So, these are all people come out of the school and start to do this inter tribal networking, which eventually produces the Brothertown project, which is to get them up and away from New England and the influences of the negative influences of the colonies in New England.

Kathryn Gehred 

So, sort of culturally, would you say, more is Indian School has kind of a mixed legacy?

Ivy Schweitzer

Well, what it shows is how there are certain aspects of colonialism that allow the colonized to use it, and maneuver around it, if they're living in this fallen world as Occom would say it says in his sermon on the execution of Moses, Paul, if we're living in this fallen world, we need to use every tool we have, right and Western literacy is a major tool. It's a major tool of colonization and conquest. But it's also a major tool of resistance.

Kathryn Gehred 

That the students were human beings with agency, that were able to take this education and do things that we like, certainly wasn't expecting with that education.

Ivy Schweitzer

Precisely. That's right. I think he really thought Occom was such a brilliant student, and I think in some ways, he felt that Occom had absorbed and accepted full assimilation, but what Wheelock never realized is that Occom never gave up his identity as an Indian as a Mohegan. Never, never. And there's debates, big scholarly debates about, you know, hybridization. Is he a hybrid figure, part Indian part Western, I would argue, kind of No, I'm more on the side and Occom gives voice to this. You know, he says, 'there's no reason why I can't be an Indian and a Christian at the same time. They don't cancel each other out.' For Wheelock they did cancel each other out, and if you're going to be a Christian, you can't be an Indian, for Wheelock. And Occom was saying, 'but that's not the case. I can be a Christian and I can be an Indian, and those two things are not mutually exclusive.' And, they can exist in a kind of peaceful, perhaps a little bit uneasy relation or relationship with each other. But they don't cancel each other out. Wheelock just could not see that.

Kathryn Gehred 

The letter and the individual we're focusing on today is Mary Secutor. What do we know about Mary?

Ivy Schweitzer

Well, Mary was the daughter of a man named John Secutor who lived in Narragansett. He was part of the Narragansett tribe, they lived in Rhode Island, and she joined the school in 1763. What's interesting about the Narragansett is that of the 151 children that was there, about 50 of them, ended up going to the school run by Edward Deake, who then started funneling them to Moore's Indian Charity Schools. So, there were many Narragansett at Moore's Indian Charity School, I think there were about 60, or 70. Students are told over the several decades of the school's existence, and I think 18 of them were women. So, we're not talking about a lot of people. But that's a lot for that time, right? Getting it when women didn't really get education's right. So, this is pretty kind of amazing. So, she comes to she's probably about 12, 13, or 14, when she gets to Morris, Indian charity school, and she meets a guy named Hezekiah Calvin, he's a Delaware actually, and they become very close, and they're at the school for a while. And, then Hezekiah goes off to teach in upstate New York to teach Mohawk children. He later on asks Mary's father for permission to marry her, we can get into that whole; it's a kind of an interesting moment. Because John, the father, doesn't want to consent to the marriage, writes to Wheelock and asks him to intervene, which is really interesting, again, Wheelock involved in this. Mary then writes a letter to Wheelock and asks him for advice on marrying Hezekiah Calvin, and her letter about that is very interesting, because it gives us an insight into how native girls, young women thought about marriage, right. And, she eventually does not marry Calvin, who goes off and marries someone else. And, she never marries, and we lose sight of her then. But, her career at the school is a little bit checkered. She's there for about three and a half years, and in her fourth year, she has to sign and read out two confessions of drunkenness before the entire school, one of them in July of 1767. And, then one of them January, February of 1768. These confessions happened a lot. We have several examples of them. Both of her confessions were not written in her hand. So the first one looks like it was written by Wheelock. And, the second one looks like it was written by somebody else, maybe Bezaleel Woodward, who becomes the tutor at the school. But, this is a kind of really fascinating way that Wheelock kept the students in line. Right? It was by having them write these in the confessions are all very similar. They use the same kind of ritualistic language of a basement and the humility and shame and it's not really clear where Mary is in those confessions. 

Kathryn Gehred 

At the time of this letter, do you know what's going on in Mary's life and what's going on in Eliezer Wheelock's life?

Ivy Schweitzer

So, the letter we're looking at is dated July 28 1768, at this point in Mary's life, so she's been at the Moor school for about three and a half years. And she's really getting old enough to leave. She's really almost 18, we think, right, which was considered the age of majority and she's kind of ready to leave, I think, and we know that there are the there's been these two confessions of drunkenness the end of 1767 and the beginning of 1768, five to six months later, she writes the letter asking Wheelock for permission to leave the school. So, it's possible that she just was testing her wings. And she was chafing under this paternalistic care. She's rebelling in some way. Wheelock is really fascinating. At the time, he is busy negotiating about a new location for his school in Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts. He's suffering from from health problems. And the school is becoming too big for him to handle. Yeah, he hires a tutor. And he's also thinking he has to really find a larger site, and he has people, he has his agents going out to Pennsylvania, they're looking somewhere at the Susquehanna. They're looking in upstate New York and looking in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and also in the wilderness in New Hampshire. At this time, he wrote an extraordinary amount of letters. In August, alone, after he presumably received Mary's letter, he wrote 18 letters, and he received a whopping 28 letters. So that's one a month one a day for a month, right? That's just an August, right? So, Wheelock was a kind of mover and shaker he was he wrote to everybody. He tried to really control things. He was in everybody's business. He, he was constantly spinning the news and spinning people's attitudes about him. You know, he was a really kind of cagey guy. And letters were his modus operandi. Right? So, one of these 28 letters is from John Wentworth, who was the royal governor of New Hampshire agreeing to give land to the school if the trustees in England agree to relocate in New Hampshire. So, at this point, Occom is in England and Scotland, and Wheelock is doing all this movement around, you know, behind the scenes, but another letter, which is very relevant to our discussion, Wheelock received on August 18, from Edward Deake, who as I said, was an English minister and schoolmaster to the Narragansett. He was funded by the New England company, and he's taught his students to read English, write and cipher. He had lots of students, 53 students, boys and girls attended his school. He regularly consulted with a council of Indians for input on the best course of action for educating his students. And, he became the main recruiter among the Narragansetts for Wheelock school, he often corresponded with Wheelock to recommend students, but under the leader of a new more kind of radical preacher named Samuel Niles, the Narragansetts become disillusioned with Fish and with Deake. Fish is the minister there, they start to distrust their motivations for the school, and they fear that the colony wants to appropriate their land, and so in 1770, the Narragansett leader, John Shattuck Sr, tells Fish that he wants Deake to leave and the attendance at the school starts to evaporate, and eventually he does leave. So that's that's Deake's biography. But let me read you the letter here because this is really interesting. So, this letter arrives in 1768, and Deake is writing to Wheelock and he tells Wheelock that Hezekiah Calvin is come back to Narragansett, is in Charlestown, and that he's alleging that Mary Secutor and Sarah Simon, have been kept on to work as if they were slaves. That's his phrase, that they have no privileges that the school, they have no copper, no money allowed to them for, they're not getting paid for their labor. And, that Mary asked for a small piece of cloth to make a pair of slippers which you, Wheelock, wouldn't would not allow her to was too good for the Indians. So, he's Deake is paraphrasing Calvin. Calvin also alleges that Wheelock will not give the Indians more learning than to read and write, because it will make them impudent, and for which they are all about to leave you. So, the Indians are ready to conclude that their fellow Indians will never receive any great benefit of the large sums of money contributed by good people, that's the fundraising. To promote 'so good a cause.' Now that's a really damning set of accusations.

Kathryn Gehred

Oh, yes.

Ivy Schweitzer

So that's the context of Mary's letter.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah. It sounds like Mary has been sort of reaching out to people about her situation and complaining a bit about her situation, which honestly, if I was doing housework for somebody and just learning how to read and write, and I couldn't even get some nice slippers. I wouldn't want to stay at that school either.

Ivy Schweitzer

Absolutely. So now the letter. Mary's letter.

Kathryn Gehred 

All right. So here's Mary. Mary Secutor to Eliezer Wheelock DD, which stands for Doctor of Divinity. Lebanon, July the 28th 1768.

"Reverend And Ever Honored Sir. I am not insensible of my obligation to the doctor for his paternal care over me ever since I have been the school. My faults have been overlooked with tenderness when they have deserved severity. I am quite discouraged with myself. The longer I stay in the school, the worse I am. Don't think I shall ever do any good to the cause. And it will cost a great deal to keep me here, which will be spending money to no purpose. I have been more troubled to the doctor than all my mates. Don't think I deserve the honor of being in your school. If agreeable to the doctor, I should be glad to leave the school next week and be no longer a member of it. Honored sir, I would beg leave to subscribe myself. Your Humble Servant, Mary Secutor."

Okay, this is a very humble letter, it seems like she's bit, she's making the argument that she is a problem. And she is embarrassing him at the school. It could be a completely honest letter from a student expressing regret. But, I think you could also read it as strategic. How do you take the letter?

Ivy Schweitzer

I think strategic is a really good term. It has a tone of humility, and she's clearly understood and embraced the attitude with which she must approach Wheelock, she's got it down to a tee. But there are elements, I think, very clear elements of rebellion, disagreement, countering, I mean, I think, ultimately, she actually doesn't ask his permission. Ultimately, she says, I'm leaving. And I hope it's agreeable to you. She ultimately tells him what she's doing. I mean, I think, you know, we can look more deeply into it, but I think ultimately, the moment in which he says being at the school is not good for me, the longer I'm here, the worse I get. It's an admission that this is really a bad environment for me as a native woman. Right? I mean, that you know, so you could I mean, you can understand that it working in several different ways. But I think it starts with that opening, double negative not, I am not insensible that does really, you know, that really, I think, shows her ability to work to grasp the use of rhetoric, right, and the use of that double negative to suggest two different kinds of meanings. I also think the term paternal care is a wonderful phrase, which both makes him feel like yes, she gets it. I'm the father of the Tawny family. On the other hand, she's suggesting all this paternalism, that goes along with his notion of the superiority of a kind of English civilized program for the students. So, I think it suggests both paternal care and paternalism. And she also says she's been coddled that her faults had been overlooked with tenderness was sounds really positive, but she said, what I really needed was severity, I needed you to be hard with me. So that's kind of interesting. But my favorite is, the longer I stay in the school, the worse I get. So this, you know, it really suggests that this environment is not good for her that she really needs to leave. And then she mentioned two very important things, the cause and the cost. And so the cause was we logged obsession with this grand design. That was his cause. Right? And she and she, she's parroting him, she's imitating him, she's using his own language, but what she's saying is, I'm not good for it I'm not helping it. And, then she goes on to it really is kind of a little bit of a mockery of his obsession with money, which he was always obsessed with money, because he never really had a lot of it. And, you know, he did go into debt. And he did spend his personal fortune educating natives in a program that was destined to failure, but nevertheless, I mean, he did.  So, so this notion that she puts the cause and the cost together, right, is way of juxtaposing, you know, his spiritual designs on the on one hand, and then his material obsessions, on the other hand, right, she doesn't want to cost him any more money, right? That's kind of interesting. And then again, when she says, if it's agreeable to you, there's a way in which she is trying to negotiate a mutually agreeable exit strategy for both of them. This is not a workable relationship anymore. I don't want to just leave you and leave you in the lurch. I understand that I need to be with your program. I can't totally undermine your program, but I'm gonna leave because it's not good for me, and I need to save my face and save your face. And how do we both do it? Right. And I think that's important. A lot of what this what's happening in this letter,

Kathryn Gehred 

It feels to me I mean, the fact that she's 18, as we've been talking, it sort of strikes me a little bit as like, high school senior year rebellion. I know it's a lot more serious. But you know, she's drinking, she's done with it. She's, she's done with this education at this point. And she's ready to get out, and she's just letting them know. And it even almost feels like the way you know, a girl who's been in a too strict household would try to get out of doing something that her parents want her to do, by sort of appealing to what she thinks he wants to hear. And, I think she does a great job, also just the language, as you say, the rhetoric that she's using, is, this is very much the way a lady at this time would write. And she really captures it very well. And I don't think that necessarily reflects the way that she speaks. But it's showing a little bit of, she's portraying herself as the sort of woman that he would pay attention to. And she's appealing to what she knows he considers to be valuable. So I just think it's a really fascinating letter.

Ivy Schweitzer

No, I think that's absolutely right. And, you know, if you look at the other letters written by some of the other young women at the school, you see the same kind of very delicate and very intelligent negotiation of his ego and his program, so that they don't, they won't come out and just say, you know, we totally disagree with you, or you're bad for us or whatever, they can't do that kind of open revolt, right? Because they know that that's just not gonna work.

Kathryn Gehred

Right.

Ivy Schweitzer

But so they have to kind of negotiate his, you know, ego, and they have to kind of say, well, I'm kind of with the program, but the program really is not working for us. So, what does it mean that the program that your program hasn't worked for us? What does it mean, that we are failures? Is it our fault? I mean, she seems to say it, you know, I am quite discouraged with myself. But she doesn't actually take on the blame herself.

Kathryn Gehred

No.

Ivy Schweitzer

Right? She, she, she really doesn't, I mean, she really does say the environment is not good for me. Yeah, I have been just trouble for you. I don't deserve the honor of being at your school. But if the school is not good for me, then how is that an honor being there? So she's, you know, she, she's able to kind of undermine him, without him almost knowing that she's undermining him. But the other question as to like, how did he respond to it? Like, he didn't respond? He never responded to these letters, his response was silence. And what you see, and a lot of the male students write to him, begging him to respond. What are you thinking, what are you feeling? Oh, great, you know, father, a great white father, what you know what's in your mind, and he doesn't. He really withholds from them, which was one of his psychological tools, was to withhold his attention and his affection. I mean, one of the tools was to put all of this stuff into familial terms, right, so that if you're failing him, you're failing him not as in a professional capacity, you're failing him in a personal, in a familial capacity as his child, it gets all involved with the intimacy of the family, right, when really, it's just the school and he's not their father. But, but but he uses a lot of that stuff. And the other thing is, he forces them to think about themselves, their behavior and their failures, especially the drinking and the drunkenness in terms of sin and damnation, right. And that's not how they thought about it. That's not how Native Americans thought about those kinds of behaviors. They didn't think in those terms. So he's imposing that whole, a whole Christian set of values. So, he's imposing a male set of values, and a Christian set of values, and a white western set of values on Mary. And, she's trying to find a space where she can stand on her own. That's her own. And it's it's not a big space, but it's a space and she finds it. And I think the fact that she doesn't marry Hezekiah Calvin and goes back to Charlestown probably made her life harder, but she was not she got out from under Wheelock influence.

Kathryn Gehred 

So we know that she never married, was she able to? Do we know anything about whether she was really able to leave the school?

Ivy Schweitzer

We don't know. We know that she left the school on her own terms, right. And then four months later, she's back in Charlestown, she she writes to Wheelock to ask him advice about marrying Hezekiah Calvin because she's she really has doubts about him. And in the letter, she says something like, you know, I think he feels about me the way he feels about any other girl. In other words, he doesn't, he doesn't love me. He doesn't care about me. I love him, but I don't think he feels anything, any special affection for me. In fact, many of the male Indian students would talk about wanting help meets as if they were just servants, right? They they didn't talk about their wives in any kind of emotional way as companions. They were really people who would just do their laundry, and cook their meals, and you get that sense, and I think what Mary is saying, that's not what I want. I'm better than that. I deserve more than that.

Kathryn Gehred

Yeah

Ivy Schweitzer

Right? Native marriage was about was complimentary. The genders were seen as complimentary, equal and complimentary, right? Equal but not the same. And women could divorce men, husbands who they didn't, you know, we're not treating them well, by just putting their shoes outside of the door, you know, of their house. But his shoes out, he's gone. Right? So, they had the right of refusal. This was really very different than English women at the time. Right, for whom divorce was, you know, such an appropriate it was seen as such a failure.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, I just pulled up the other the letter that she wrote asking for advice about the situation. And she writes, "I think he has no, no regards for any more than he has for any girl. So I intend to live single." Right? Yeah. Which that is, I'm talking about how a lot of the way that she writes sort of fits the way that a white woman at this time with would write and I don't see white woman writing that very often that she would have the option of marrying someone and choose not to, because of something like feelings. That is really fascinating. Now, why do you think she wrote to Wheelock about this, though?

Ivy Schweitzer

That is so interesting. So what scholars have said, who have looked at the letters that the male Native students wrote, and compared them to the letters that the female students wrote, and what they argue is what they see is the men have to break with him. They just, you know, they have to break with him. It's a violent break, they have to oppose him, they have to counter him. And, they really have no relationship with him, like at some point Occom, in 1771, when he comes back from Europe, and he's so upset that the school has been moved, and all the money has been taken up to establish a college for white male missionaries writes,  Wheelock a four page letter. I call it the breakup letter. It's so bitter. It's so retributive, it's brilliant. It's a brilliant letter, but he's so hurt, he feels so betrayed, he calls himself he said, I went to Europe, I became a laughingstock to raise money for the school. And now you're telling me, You're not going to actually work with my brethren. Right? You've given you're giving up the whole, you know, he's so pissed off, I think the women saw that it was more important to have a relationship with Wheelock and continue that relationship than to break it off. Right? They didn't. It wasn't like an all or nothing for the women. For the men. I think it was like an all or nothing. Yeah, right. But for the women said, you know, he could still be helpful to me, I don't have to face him off male to male. I mean, I think it had to do with gender. And I think the women saw, Oh, we can manipulate him, we can push them aside, or we can evade, you know, his his manipulations and maneuverings, right, and still get what we want. And not necessarily lose that connection. I mean, I think, is the way women always want to have connection, maybe that's too essentialist. Right? You don't understand that, you know, having connection is better than breaking it off.

Kathryn Gehred

Right.

Ivy Schweitzer

I mean, and, you know, I love when you point out when she says I will live single, it's like saying, I will be a marriage resister. I don't have to being married does not define me as a woman, where as we get to the 19 century, you know, in the US, and it defines women, you know, as marriage defines women, you are not a full woman until you are married.

Kathryn Gehred

Yeah.

Ivy Schweitzer

Right? But that was not true for these native women. They could live in their communities, because communities were defined with, you know, defined in different ways, right? You weren't you weren't a spinster, and you weren't a kind of social pariah if you were not married,

Kathryn Gehred 

It's another sign of his mission didn't quite work.

Ivy Schweitzer

Exactly. His mission didn't quite work. And I think I think what she's saying here, when she says, you know, "he has no more regard for me than for any other girl." It's like, he doesn't respect me as who I am. I am just another woman to him. He doesn't respect me for who I am. So there's this is an interesting acknowledgement of individual agency and importance. At the same time, it's built on a basis of collective care. And this is really true of Occom as well, how come really, as much as Occom, you know, was the the ideal who succeeded. He didn't see himself as an individual the way we see ourselves as individuals and the way white individuality is conceived. He always saw himself as part of that common pot. He always saw himself as part of a community and working for a community and in a collective relationship, and I think Mary also feels herself as part of that. And, that's why I think, not to be married is not inappropriate, and it's not a failure. Wheelock used writing and as a form of kind of emotional control, writing in which people talked about their feelings, and confessions were part of that the confessions were not just written, they were also read out in front of the school. So it was all a "norming" situation, and that later on in his life in 1769, Occom, is accused of being drunk in public, and has to sign a confession to the Long Island Presbytery, who then investigates him and absolves them of all the charges, because what they find is that he hadn't eaten all day, he had some alcoholic beverage. And, the point about alcohol, which is in the 18th century, it's all over. People are drinking alcohol all the time. Somebody said that declaration of dependence, they were all drunk, because they're drinking, they're drinking small beer because water tended to be contaminated by livestock grazing livestock. So you didn't know what water wasn't contaminated. So people tended to drink beer instead of water. Now, drinking spirits is different, right, drinking alcoholic spirits is different. So, Occom drank this and was intoxicated clinical, but he was absolved of his of any wrongdoing, although it did, you know, Wheelock used it against Occom when he was trying to manipulate people to get people onto his side of the argument between himself and Occom about the school moving. So, I think it's an important point to just put that into that context that Wheelock to use that stereotype of the drunken Indian, and he used it against the women. Because in the second confession that Mary signs, she signs it along with another young woman named Hannah Nonesuch, they sign it, they're they're caught together, cavorting in a cavern and dancing. You're right-they're going out, they're having fun. They're having co-ed fun, right? I think that's an important point as well, that Wheelock uses shame, public shame, as a way of controlling his students, as a way of belittling them, as a way of keeping them docile. And I think after the second time after Mary's second confession I just think she's saying, 'I'm out of here, I'm done with this.' I'm done with this. And good for her. Good for her, that she you know, and it's wonderful that we have these letters, she was not the only one. There were other women, Sarah Simon asked to leave the school under similar circumstances, and there were several other male students as well. So, I think that the conclusion is that as hard as Wheelock worked to impose his patriarchal Anglo Saxon beliefs on to his native students, he was not successful doing it. So ultimately, I think Mary is part of that is, that as part of that rebellion and resistance,

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, it's fantastic that we have these letters where we can show that,and see that history, and that this all survives, and it sort of gives a little snapshot into a moment in this the school's history. So, thank you so much for joining me today. For my listeners. I am going to link to all of the letters that we've talked about in the show notes. Thank you for listening to the podcast and as ever, I am your most obedient and humble servant. Thank you very much.