Diaspora and Displacement Workshop

On October 8th, 2024, Illume Magazine and the Interrobang Poets held a collaborative workshop to reflect on this year’s Indigenous People’s Day and the one-year marker of the most recent, and ongoing, genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Through collective discussion and a guided poetry-writing session, we held space and shared words in the face of the distances and displacements that engulf our lives. We meditated on the violences which we have either enacted or been faced with; probed the amnesias that allow such violence to be upheld; and we plotted possible avenues for liberation from the colonial and white-supremacist occupations that bleed into the lands we stand on and the communities we traverse. Above all, we crafted a space where the creative process can help us remember and organize, mourn and resist, and begin the process of illuminating a more dignified future.

This workshop was, and remains, itself a land acknowledgment and a small and imperfect bid to listen to the land and its original stewards. The institution which privileges all of us—“Northeastern University”—and its large and growing network of occupied land, is stolen from the following long list of Indigenous peoples: the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Pawtucket, Agawam, Nacotchtank (Anacostan), Piscataway, Muwekma Ohlone, Ramaytush Ohlone, Duwamish, Mississauga, Anishinabek, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat Peoples as well as the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquody and Penobscot Peoples of the Wabanaki Alliance, and the Catawba, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations, and the Naumkeag band of the Pawtucket Peoples.¹ In addition, this institution continues to enact gentrification and carceral militarization against historically Brown and Black neighborhoods in the Roxbury and Boston areas, the Oakland area, the Seattle area, and globally in their partnerships with military-industrial companies fueling imperial war and death on every continent.² 

Below are the questions from the dated workshop, edited for concision and clarity. 

—How do you situate your own tangible and physical contexts?

• Look around you: what and who do you see in your immediate surroundings? 
• Think of the buildings, the neighborhoods, the city, the land, and connect it with as much history as you can think of. 
• History as in: how did this come to be? What was it formerly, where did it grow from, and what has it lost? Who built these buildings? Who paid for them and who labored for them? Who has loved this land, and known this land? What were their lives like?

—What are the actual histories? (See: General History) 

—How can you reflect on and honor what was erased/occupied for your present context to exist?

• How can you reflect on what you cannot remember? How can you reflect on why you cannot remember? On how much you will never be able to remember?
• What is the real meaning of erasure? Of genocide? How was history curtailed to our knowledge? 
• How can you honor and grieve what was lost that you will never know?

—Now write your ancestry, your lineage, your history³

• One stanza of how you came into this present context, who you are, and how you position yourself here and in the world.
• One stanza of what you don’t know, what you can’t know, and how we can (if we can) possibly reckon with that.
• Alternating stanzas ad infinitum (until time runs out) going backwards as far back into your family tree (or any kind of kinship tree) as possible.
  1. As in: One stanza of how your immediate caretakers (parents, grandparents, etc.) came into their present context. 
  2. One stanza of how we can (if we can) possibly reckon with their histories that may never be retrieved. 
  3. One stanza of how their immediate caretakers came into their present context. 

—Reflect, compare poems, hold space, discuss, mourn, plot, etc.

• What is unsettled by an understanding of diaspora that centers the land on which we arrive and the violence and erasures which have formed it? What is made impossible? 

General History i.e. “the United States of America” is a genocidal settler colony

Genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing defines the land we are situated on, starting from the very first interactions between European settlers and Native peoples. In 1637 in present-day connecticut, John Mason, a settler, uttered the following clear enunciation of genocidal settler-colonial intent in his book A Brief History of the Pequot War: “Thus, the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.”⁴ This settler was reflecting on the English destruction of the Pequot village of Mystic where “at least 300–400 Pequot men, women and children were burned alive” and between 600–700 Natives were murdered.⁵ After English “victory” in the war, surviving Pequot were forcibly displaced to surrounding territories, violently enslaved to provide forced labor in the British Caribbean slave colonies, and denied any recognition as a sovereign people.⁶

Massacres both named and recognized, as well as forgotten, would go on to define the founding period of European settlement on the land that would then be termed “New England.” These massacres were predicated on land theft and dispossession paired with acts of forced assimilation in institutions like boarding schools, missionary plantations, and educational institutions (like Harvard Indian College) that have direct connections to modern institutions (like Harvard University).⁷ And as a direct precedent to acts of cultural erasure and extermination which continue into the present, a historical commission from the Nipmuc nation reads: “Children were taken from their families to be raised ‘properly’ in English homes, most returning as adults or not returning at all. This taking of Native children was precursor to the Residential Schools out west that many Native cultures suffered from in the late 1800s and into the 1900s.”⁸

All of these settler-colonial tactics escalated to a truly genocidal intensity during and after King Philip’s War, which marked the last major act of armed Indigenous resistance against “New England” settlers, who retaliated with sustained genocidal violence in return, solidifying total Native dispossession and near extermination under the colonial white-supremacist society we live under today.⁹  Settlers in the interior perpetrated massacre after massacre to secure the “utter annihilation”¹⁰ of Indigenous life, in the process forcing Indigenous noncombatants into concentration camps on the Boston Harbor Islands, where hundreds (possibly thousands) were murdered in part due to forced starvation and exposure to extreme temperatures.¹¹ Surviving “‘male hostiles’ were taken and hung, drawn, and quartered” or simply “shot to death” in Boston city-proper, not far from where we study today, with the Common serving “as a prominent spot for executions” intended as public and dehumanizing spectacles.¹²

The material and overt violence—the massacres and “wars,” the forceful disposessions of land and life, the institutions that dominate over and above Indigenous existence, the denial of political existence and dignity, the erasure of cultural forms, the alienation from ancestral spiritual truths—are part and parcel of the same genocidal settler-colonial project that now engulfs almost the entirety of the American continent. Where we stand now, the land-filled remnants of the “Fens” or what marshy waterway settlers called the “Fenway,” was once a site of sustenance, community, and transportation into the greater Massachusetts Bay area for the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Abenaki peoples along with the peoples of the Pennacook confederacy, the Pawtucket peoples, and Narragansett peoples who would travel, trade, and commune in the area as well.¹³ The sheer cataclysm of the complete destruction of these communities, lifeways, and relationships to the land define the brutality of settler-colonization.

Our immediate surroundings are thus the embodiment of the continuity of this brutal and genocidal violence into the present, and a reminder that as citizens and benefactors of the institutions that make up settler society, we are complicit in these violence as settlers ourselves and must work to materially struggle in solidarity and as accomplices¹⁴ with Indigenous peoples in our immediate surroundings and around the world for total decolonization, land back, and the destruction of these systems of violence and dispossession. As the closing words of the Nipmuc Historical Commission read: “The loss of connection to our Land, and our very way of life has caused much difficulty even today in modern society… Generational trauma is especially evident in our relationships with the land and each other. There cannot truly be Reconciliation until responsibility is taken by those who continue to benefit from the injustices of the past and the present.”¹⁵

Citations:

1. Northeastern University’s DEI office provides a list of occupied Indigenous lands across campuses. While not within the scope of this workshop, it is worth noting that when land acknowledgements are not accompanied with language or plans for land repatriation, the acknowledgement remains abstract and immaterial. See “ODEI Messages.” n.d. Northeastern University. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 

2. For information on the racialized displacement of historically Black Roxbury, see Sasani, Ava. 2018. “The Roxbury Diaspora: How Northeastern University Is Displacing Long-Time Residents.” The Scope, April 20, 2018. Also see Jennings, James, Bob Terrell, Jen Douglas, Kalila Barnett, and Ashley E. Harding. 2016. “Understanding Gentrification and Displacement: Community Voices and Changing Neighborhoods.” For information on Northeastern’s military industrial partnerships see the Action Network campaign from Northeastern’s Progressive Student Alliance: “Stop Supporting War Profiteers!” n.d. Action Network. 

3. This writing prompt is, in part, greatly inspired by Professor Eunsong Kim’s Lineage Prompt written for her Poetry Workshop class, which is itself written in response to Etheridge Knight’s The Idea of Ancestry.

4. Mason, John and Royster, Paul, editor, “A Brief History of the Pequot War (1736)” (1736). Electronic Texts in American Studies. 42. p.21

5. Hilleary, Cecily. 2021. “Did English Puritans Commit Genocide in New England?” Voice of America, January 23, 2021.

6. ibid.

7. For an overview of European genocide against Indigenous peoples and the origins of contemporary settler-colonial society see Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press. For further analysis of Indigenous extermination and erasure in “New England” see O’Brien, Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. University of Minnesota Press.

8. “Remembering & Reconnecting: Nipmucs and the Massacre at Great Falls.” 2015. A Narrative Compiled and Presented by the Chaubunagungamaug Nipmuck Historic Preservation Office and Associates for the Battle of Great Falls/ Wissatinnewag-Peskeompskut Pre-Inventory Research and Documentation Project.

9. For a history of colonial violence in the Northeast and King Philip’s War, see DeLucia, Christine. 2018. Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. Yale University Press.

10. Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014. p. 66: “The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of the extreme violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to seek the utter annihilation of the Indigenous population.”

11. “Legacy of Genocide Resurfaces in Boston as Construction Is Planned on Burial Site.” 2019. Cultural Survival. April 18, 2019.

12.  See id. at 8 p.10 and id. at 9 p. 53

13. See the “Establishing Networks: Indigenous Routes” page by Beaucher, Steven. editor and curator, et al., Getting Around Town: Four Centuries of Mapping Boston in Transit (Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, 2023). Also see “History of the Esplanade.” n.d. The Esplanade Association.

14. “No matter how liberated you are, if you are still occupying Indigenous lands you are still a colonizer.” See Rudy. 2014. “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex.” Indigenous Action. May 4, 2014. 
15. Seeid. at 8 p.15 (emphasis ours).