The following letter was written by Donna Ruth Caruso in December 2003. Donna has MA in Journalism from Suffolk University, Boston. Her late husband supported her search for her birth mother for thirty years. She lives in New England and writes for magazines, newspapers and so on.

"Note: Patricia Cosentino, our teacher from the Life Program at Mt. Wachusett Community College in central Massachusetts, requested that we write a letter to Salma Khadra Jayyusi, a Palestinian writer who described a childhood of beauty in her now destroyed homeland. The term “Indian” is used to describe the indigenous people of the northeast woodlands of North America in this letter to a native Palestinian.

Dear Salma,

Thank you for the description of your childhood in your homeland.

Like you, my land is also occupied, also in a “legal” way by a foreign government. Unlike you, our survival as a people required us to suppress our race, our nationality, our cultural traditions. We went under-the-ground.

Our suppression has been so complete that sometimes we do not know the meaning of symbolic records kept by our own grandparents: the belts of wampum, or shell weavings. Sometimes, we must depend entirely upon the memory held within the cells of our blood to get back the knowledge, say, of the power of a sacred plant.

My ancestors prayed for my well-being. This is how, despite the suppression, I knew that I was an Indian girl. One morning prayer:

“I pray for the seven generations to be born.”

Seven generations ago, my ancestors prayed for me. I pray for the seventh generation from me so that she will know who she is: An Indian girl.

As European powers enslaved us as workers or killed us or shipped us to foreign islands as slaves or forced us onto reservations called “praying Indian towns” and to Deer Island, my people walked and ran and canoed north on the waters and watershed of the Long River. They stayed north in Canada for a few generations, barely enduring the conditions of St. Francis before returning on foot with new names to the sight of the Great Falls Massacre: Peskeompscut, now known as Turner’s Falls (For Major Turner who led the massacre) and now themselves identified to the strangers on their land as French-Canadians.

Now speaking Mohawk secretly and French publicly, they learned English, too. They did not indicate bitterness to anyone, even themselves, while living in a town named for the man who massacred their elders and children.

In spite of newspaper articles about the family Indian circus acrobats and later work as painters of the many new houses, there is no written record or “vital” statistic of my family once it returned to Peskeompscut. There is no border crossing record, no ship’s manifest, no death certificates, birth certificates, or even (God forbid) social security records. We are not even listed in the census records released in the late twentieth century!  Our disappearance is so complete because we not only hid ourselves, except through our undeniable life ways, but the newcomers pretended and legalized our disappearance. Indeed, we do not reappear in writing until my grandfather’s death in the 1960s, until his obituary that even still subtly describes his Native race and raceways in veiled terms:

Soldier to two governments, served in three conflicts … Retired national guard, state police …

“Warrior,” we translate. “He was a freaking’ warrior.”

People think our enslavement, the taking of children, the stealing of our property and language, happened a long time ago in New England, but that is not true. A little Indian girl from Peskeompscutwas placed in an orphanage by attorneys from Portsmouth, NH, in 1928. That little girl’s mother, who had died, had an inherited English fortune, but because her father (George) was Indian, the little two year-old was stolen from him and put away in an orphanage. The attorney, Francis Waldron, became an attorney general of New Hampshire and may not have even been consciously aware of his racism. Interestingly, he was a direct descendant of Major Waldron, whose atrocities toward Indians at Dover, NH in the seventeenth century (and who was rewarded for his actions with the position of first attorney general) resulted in the Deerfield, MA raids of the French and Indian Wars in the eighteenth century.

I know these things because that little stolen girl was my mother. I spent my lifetime trying to locate her, a common problem to Indian people even today, but not commonly understood to be a New England problem, too. My mother’s own father (George) never knew where his daughter was sent and spent eighteen years worth of Sunday family dinners “all right” until dessert, when he peppered his parents with his anguished, muffled weeping in their attic where he went to smother his grief by holding his daughter’s hidden infant clothing to his face. We have led entire lifetimes searching, connecting the most gossamer of segments, to weave our seven generations back into memory.

Ours was a conscious knowing of who we were without ever saying it! Our marriages, all to other Native people, but never acknowledged in words even to one another. Our new-style homes, always on ancestral lands, always with a symbol outsiders might consider an interesting artifact, like a collection of feathers, a braid of sweet grass, finger weaving become crocheting Yet, we always prayed to the directions, the grandfathers, the mountain. Yes, I insist, we always retained our reverence of the wind, the stones, and the sacred hill, Mt. Wachusett.

We can now sing in public but we have lost a lot of the words, so we use vocables to express our ideas. Indians from all over this continent can understand one another’s vocables. When I sing in public today, in order to remember and honor, I wear the clothing worn for special occasions by women from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River Valley before the great removal periods. (Perhaps you have heard of the Long Walk of the Navaho, or the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee. There were also great removals of Indian peoples at gunpoint from the Great Lakes region. The soldiers would order the people to put on their best clothing, so that the townspeople would think we were simply having a parade).

In my senior year of high school in the 1960s I wrote a poem for a class taught by a remarkable woman who I felt might hear me, for she had taught Native Hawaiians for two years. Unfortunately, she read my poem which identified me as Native to our class. She then asked me, “Are you Indian?” I had to say “no,” for how could my family not fight and deny me. I have always hated myself for this first public denial.

We began to come up from underground individually and then faster and faster and collectively in the 1970s.

Unlike you, Salma, who actually lived your ways of old, we are newly living these ways. The suppression in New England of our people was so complete that today, we go as individuals to many other indigenous groups to find our way.

Elders or teachers from the Eastern Woodlands, the Great Lakes and the Lakota Nation come together at ceremonies to teach the starving about how to uncover our indigenous languages, our genealogies, our traditional medicine and ceremonies. We save for a year to travel to sacred grounds far north of here and be together to revive customs and to hear the simplest of words, as long as they are spoken in some old, old language:

“Mawiomi,mawiomi!”

This phrase means “gathering of the tribes” and is sung, shouted, whispered, and drummed in expectation of meeting old friends, participating in ceremony, camping out.

Time in terms of our age and learning becomes reversed. Our first sweat lodge may take place at our chronological age of fifty-two, but what is learned is accepted by the self-child of six or seven. You can see middle-aged ladies learning the steps to a round dance in front of their vans parked at a powwow: steps formerly learned while a toddler. We go willingly in reverse, laughing and crying, in order to grow.

The grandmother who adopted and raised me was born in Ireland. The youngest of the grandchildren she was to raise, I was often alone with her. To occupy me, she set me at a huge, black round table covered with a thick, shawl-like tablecloth. She placed her jar of buttons and oversized spool of thread before me.

“String the buttons,” she would say. “String the buttons from Button Hill.”

My older brother explained the origins of the buttons one day as we sat under the weeping willow tree on a great, gray slab of granite. “There was once a button factory on the top of the hill,” he said. “The factory blew up and buttons went flying all over the place. All Grandma’s buttons were collected from the dirt.”

So I would string and string those buttons as a child and wonder at their origins from dirt; not unlike today, when now middle-aged, I weave and weave beads of shells at my round table, my black dancing shawl draped over a chair, and marvel at the beads’ origins from the sea."

© Donna Ruth Caruso (Ogawata), 2003