فصل 28 - بخش 03

FOUR

King Philip’s War, a terrible, bloody business with much brutality on both sides, blazed through what is now called New England for more than a year. Many English settlements, including Providence, were burned to the ground, and more than six hundred English were killed—though not Roger and Mary Williams, nor Huldah and her family.

Running Hawk died, and all his family. So did more than three thousand of my people, and those who survived the war retained only tiny amounts of land. Philip’s head was cut off by the English and stuck up on a pole above the fort in Plymouth, where their Captain Miles Standish had put the head of Wituwamet half a century before. Hundreds of “Praying Indians” from our villages that had embraced Christianity died after being shipped to an internment camp on Deer Island, in Boston Harbor, and almost a thousand of my people were shipped by the English to Europe or the West Indies as slaves, including Philip’s wife and son.

I watched all this, as I have watched the fate of my tribe and all the others in the long years since.

My people still live in some parts of this New England, a few thousand of them, on tribal reservation lands. They keep alive our traditions and our spirit; they struggle to revive language in places where it has faded away; they fight for the rights of the tribes under the nation’s law. They are the soul of the land to which we belong, where once we roamed free. But now they share that freedom with others, in the new nation to which they too belong. They are Americans.

I have been watching it all so long, like a bird trapped in this house of sky and sea and land. Here I have stayed, on the salt marsh island where my tomahawk was born, and where it has rested for so long in the memory hole that John made for me. I have told my story, but even now I am not released. Somewhere, beyond our knowledge, is the long home to which we are all freed to go, in the end.

I want to go home.

I want to go home.