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Add link to map of places in the essay
Added a link to a map of relevant places in the essay.
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@@ -79,6 +79,7 @@ This paper leans on branch because that is the branch the records favor. Most of
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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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That erasure was not wholly complete, and the Wampanoag people are still here. Since 1993, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, founded by Mashpee linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird, has worked to bring back a language that had gone six generations without a speaker. A people the schools were built to convert and dissolve have used the archive to teach their own children their first words again. I cannot trace the particular Wampanoag community whose ground became Tinkhamtown with anything close to what I can for my own family. Whose learning gets written down and whose gets written over is in itself a large part of the history of American education and my own education.
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[See the full map of these places.](map.html)
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## References
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