The deepest silence to me is older than any of them. The few square miles I keep returning to were not empty when Peter Brown’s descendants moved into them, they were owned by the Wampanoag. Rochester was incorporated in 1679 on ground the colonists recorded by its Wampanoag name, Sippican; Mattapoisett is itself a Wampanoag word usually translated as “place of rest”; and the harbor had been “purchased” from the Wampanoag sachem Metacomet by William Brenton in 1664. The educational story I have been telling opens with that single Bible in 1620, but the land already held people with their own ways of teaching and remembering, and the opening that let English families settle Tinkhamtown was forced by King Philip’s War, breaking Wampanoag power across the region. The same Puritan conviction that placed a Bible in Peter Brown’s estate and encouraged literacy also produced, in 1663, the Eliot Indian Bible, as the Puritans translated their scripture into Wampanoag to create an instrument of conversion and schooling. The drive to make everyone literate in English scripture, which in my family looks like inheritance, is an erasure from the other side.
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