Thursday, March 16 at 6:00 pm in the Marc Jacobs Reading Room

Join Ed Ingrebretsen for a talk on the First Peoples of New England in the Marc Jacobs Reading Room! This presentation explores the contours of this forgotten history, beginning in the earliest days of the landing of the Puritans in Massachusetts, where it was the colonial practice to enslave  indigenous people for their labor and their lands. 

Massachusetts Bay Colony – under Gov. John Winthrop, himself a slaver — was the first of the colonies to pass a law approving slavery. The 1641 law – 10 years after the Puritans arrived and established the colony – was designed to sanction in retrospect the enslavement of the Pequot peoples taken by the victorian colonists in the 1636 conflicts with the native tribes.

The precedents set here would spread through the other colonies and eventually find themselves embodied in the 1789  Constitution by which enslavement became the law of a nation founded, ironically, ‘to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

One historian writes  "Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas -- in addition to 12.5 million African slaves.” Nor did enslavement end here. These numbers do not reflect post-colonial policies instituted under General George Washington, and Federal policies of land theft and genocide through the Western lands.

Ed Ingebretsen is Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University (GU). Ingebretsen's publications and work are in American cultural and social history, animal ethics and philosophy. This lecture program has its roots in Ingebretsen’s Enslaved Washington DC studies, in which he shares the history of the district and its founding as a slave market. His publications include "Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King." At Stake: Monsters and a Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture.  “Learning means change,” he says, “And it is never too late to learn from and to change our history."