'half-drowned?': Replacement Narratives and Violence Against Indigenous Women

“She animated her men with her presence as long as there was any hopes of success, but when they traiterously deserted her she fled to her canoe, hoping to pass the river in it...” (Neal 22).

“Whether she was first ‘half drowned,’ whether she was murdered by her people, or whether she met her death in any other way, equally violent, cannot now be ascertained” (Strock 332).

Viewing Hubbard and Mather’s accounts as a replacement narrative [link] breaks open new possibilities for examining how colonial and secondary histories have skirted the issue of violence against Indigenous women. Hubbard and Mather set Weetamoo up as a victim, but they cut out the perpetrator; they erase her final battle at Lockety Fight and construct her as a female body denuded by God, passive, conquered - but not by anyone in particular. The potential for violence in their narratives is sanitized out by their passivity.

However, questions linger about the potential violence manifest in later historical narratives. These accounts more explicitly acknowledge the possible role of violence in Weetamoo’s death, although they backtrack by attributing it to her warriors, not the colonial forces that were the obvious choice as perpetrator. Strock, in particular, displays awareness of the likely violent nature of her death: “whether she was murdered by her people, or whether she met her death in any other way, equally violent, cannot now be ascertained.” Through the colonial lens of presuming Weetamoo’s people as inherently violent (and moreover “traiterous,” as Neal highlights), Strock is able to slip in the possibility that she met her death through some “other” “equally violent” way, which can only be read as an act of colonial violence. He also aptly questions the meaning of “half drowned,” highlighting Hubbard and Mather’s uncertainty and inconsistency about Weetamoo’s death.

So the question that begs answering is: why? Did these authors (especially Strock) sense the contrived nature of the Hubbard and Mather narratives, and write some of that ambiguity about Weetamoo’s fate into their retellings? Or were they simply repeating bigoted assumptions about the “traiterous” nature of indigenous people to reinforce the colonial narrative?

Strock imagines that “if the tragic story of this ‘princess’ ended here, it would be well”—a history of violence, yet with notions of feminine victimhood then silence, perhaps the “story” of what happened to Weetamoo becomes easier to accept (332). Even without knowing for certain how Weetamoo died, what happens after Weetamoo’s death becomes unequivocally troubling for Strock. It is the indecency, the sexualization and exoticization of her body, the ways in which the colonial soldiers make public spectacle of her. All was not well:

...colonists found her naked body by the water’s edge. Their enemy was taken at last; yet she was dead, and more that that her corpse was the corpse of a woman. Surely they would bury it, if not with magnanimity, yet with decency, since the manly heart wars not on the dead. On the contrary, they indulged in taunts over the body [and] cut off the head (Strock 332).

Though Strock can only be speculative, it is one of the few instances in 19th century secondary sources in which colonists are explicitly indicted and condemned for committing violence on an Indigenous woman—it was their investment in creating a public exhibition, but also in her posthumous nakedness, the “taunts over [her] body,” that he found difficult to rationalize.

Such spectacle had a long history -- Mather and Hubbard’s image of Weetamoo’s exposed body mirrored images of the American land, naked, vulnerable, open, her fruits (and land) available for the taking.

The men who most desired these lands then treated the subsistence grounds that had fed Weetamoo's kin, those Weetamoo herself had so skillfully protected, in the same way.

 The representation of nakedness also implied that her body was untouched and unmarked, enacting a narrative erasure of any violence that might have been done to her, as if she had survived Pocasset swamp, Nipsachuck, Great Swamp and the Lockety fight, without any injury, no act of colonial violence perpetrated upon her.

Strock also questions Increase Mather’s motives in writing the narrative of Weetamoo’s death for “so bitter was the feeling against the Indians” (332). Mather’s narrative, authored and printed to be sold shortly after the war’s “conclusion,” suggest that after seeing the head of their “Queen” mounted on top of a pole at the Green in Taunton, her kinsmen “present there, made a most horrid and diabolical Lamentation” (71). Mather’s tone in representing the profound grief of her people after seeing her exposed on the Taunton Green suggest a man deeply confined to a racial hierarchy—an ideology of white Christian supremacy over the demoniacal “Indian” Other. Could Mather write “a true History” about the events in which he was enmeshed (Mather from Drake 35)? And further, why have most contemporary historians been unwilling to push back against it? Why do they retell his account as if it represents historical fact? Strock and other scholars have challenged Mather’s reading of the Pocasset prisoner’s reaction to Weetamoo. Strock called it “Mournful proof of their love,” an “expression to their grief in cries,”—an undeniably human (as opposed to animalistic) response to the unspeakable acts of colonial violence upon an Indigenous female.

Similar issues arose for Washington Irving in his narrative of the same event. Though he does not position himself as a sympathizer to Weetamoo nor validate her political actions throughout the war, he grapples with the behaviors of colonial subjects and their acts of dishonor upon the dead: “But persecution ceased not at the grave…Her corpse was the object of unmanly and dastardly vengeance” (Irving quotd Strock 333). Like Strock, Irving shifts the emphasis onto colonial accountability. He recounts the visceral grief expressed by Pocasset prisoners and quotes Mather; her people “were so affected at this barbarous spectacle” that they “broke forth into the most ‘horrid’ and diabolical lamentations’” (Irving quoted Strock 333). Irving retains Mather’s words, yet it was the “barbarous spectacle” created by white colonial men at Taunton, the intent to publicly display power and subjugation, which provoked an immense emotional reaction from her kin.

Positioning white colonial violence upon Weetamoo as “barbarous spectacle” opens additional questions. Surely a war had taken place—there were both Native and colonial/white casualties. But the treatment of Weetamoo after her death by white colonists in Taunton and the subsequent purging of her from colonial records (except for replacement narratives like Mather) should urge us to look beyond the scope of colonial ideology and men driven by conquest. Why were the Tauntonians so invested in making a spectacle of Weetamoo? Saltonstall described her “as potent a prince as any round about her, and hath as much corn, land and men at her command” (3). Hungry for the ecologically abundant land at the heart of the Three Mile River, colonists in Taunton and the surrounding areas were systematically dismembering her homelands of Pocasset with a series of “deeds.” [link to deeds page; Native territories map]  Weetamoo rarely acquiesced to Plymouth’s demands; it was only under great pressure that she would agree to parley with colonial officials. In grieving the loss of their “queen,” surely her people also understood the loss of her protection.

Although colonial writers like Mather and Hubbard attempted to reduce Weetamoo to her body as a symbol of expected feminine victimhood and settler colonial conquest, and although many historians have overlooked the extent of her political influence, “Whether she was first ‘half drowned,’ whether she was murdered by her people, or whether she met her death in any other way,” the singular act cannot be divorced from its context; “a price was set upon her head”- this was about colonial anxiety over unstable power relations, lust for land rights and natural resources, and the challenge the powerful woman posed to Puritan men (Strock 332; 331).