Some of my ancestors were active participants in the invasion of what is now called “New England.” In my manuscript I relate a portion of the story of how they confiscated the land of New England in Massachusetts and Connecticut. They founded Springfield, Massachusetts and several other towns, of course without asking permission from the Native Americans already living there. They also participated in wars of near extinction of several of the Native tribes. The most destructive agents of annihilation were European diseases unknown to the Indians. These diseases preceded the settler-colonialists by diffusion, but in some extreme cases the settler-colonialists deliberately infected the biologically naïve Native peoples. They most emphatically did not consider themselves to be settler-colonialists, which they most emphatically were.
The paternal side of my family was from New England. The maternal link, the Reid family, is from Canada (Upper Canada, now Ontario) after immigration from England and Ireland, and the two sides of the family eventually converged on Ohio. They were invasive settler-colonialists there, too. Wherever my family moved across what was eventually called North America they were usurpers, directly and indirectly laying waste to the Indigenous Peoples they encountered. Willy-nilly they did this through the mechanism of capitalism. I will continue with this narrative in the next blog post.
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