The Native Americans will be coming to get you soon. The word is spreading. You know those rolling hills in your back yard? Hypocrisy is no defense.
boston.com
Seeking respect for the dead at last
Indians seek to bar dogs in island park
By Donovan Slack, Globe Correspondent, 4/27/2003
ently waving a stick of smoldering sage, a 72-year-old Penobscot Indian summoned the Great Spirit, Manitou, imploring him to bless all earthly things - the forest, the stone, the rock, the pebble - and to right what has been wronged, especially on a spit of land in Boston Harbor.
''O Great Spirit, o creator of all living things, help keep us strong,'' Sam Sapiel said, intoning a prayer before a gathering of North American Indians in Jamaica Plain last week. ''We ask you to bless the wetlands and all the monuments and sacred burial grounds.''
Sapiel is a leader of New England's Muhheconnew Confederacy and says he has fought ''the war with the white man'' over such things as the arrests of Indian protestors in Plymouth and the creation of a survival school for Indian children in Boston. Now he is rallying for a somewhat different battle: to keep dogs out of a 60-acre public park on Deer Island.
The park and its miles of seaside trails have been a favorite haunt of dog walkers since it opened last June. But Sapiel and other tribal leaders suspect that the remains of thousands of Indians could be buried there, and they say that dogs relieving themselves and digging in the dirt are desecrating what could be sacred burial grounds.
''It's been an insult,'' Sapiel said. ''There are people walking all around with their dogs. It's terrible. We wouldn't do it to their graveyards in Boston.''
Even tribal leaders say they are unsure what lies beneath the soil of the 60-acre park, which was constructed by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. But the issue has resonated with several tribes in New England's Native American community, and they have launched a campaign to force the state to make the park off-limits to dogs.
A Boston city councilor has also taken up the cause, proposing a resolution banning dogs from the island, and two other councilors are mulling another measure on behalf of the tribes.
At the heart of the dispute is a sliver of land extending from Winthrop into the Harbor, used by Colonists as a concentration camp for Indians during King Philip's War, according to a 1985 study published by the Environmental Protection Agency. ''The English settlers feared that these natives might take up arms alongside Philip's hostiles, so they rounded them up from their towns and removed them to Deer Island.''
As many as 500 starved there before the end of the war, when the study says the island was converted into a prison camp, also for Native Americans.
The 200-acre island was later the site of a quarantine station for Irish immigrants, an almshouse, a county jail, a sewage pumping station, and, beginning in 1889, the Metropolitan District Commission's sewage treatment plant.
Since Shirley Gut was filled by beach erosion in the 1938 hurricane, the island has been a peninsula, and it can be reached by road from Winthrop.
Native American tribes began researching their claims to the island shortly after the state began plans to construct a new sewage treatment facility on Deer Island in 1985. The tribes tried to thwart construction in 1991, and began a series of reenactments of the Native American imprisonment by the Colonists. The tribes won concessions from the MWRA, including the right to have a memorial on the site, but failed to stop construction of the treatment plant.
Now they say they just want respect for any remains of their ancestors and the place where they died. But they say that would mean closing the park to a sizable constituency of dog-walkers, who say they have just as much right to be there as anyone.
''We clean up after our dogs,'' said one Winthrop resident walking a seaside path early one morning last week. ''I don't know where this came from. I don't know what's going on. We just want somewhere to walk our dogs.''
Gia Casale, another Winthrop resident, called the Indians' charges of desecration ''silly.''
''They're trying to find their identity, and they're finding it by doing this?'' she said, as she loaded her terrier into her car. She pointed out seemingly larger signs of disrespect on the island, including litter.
MWRA spokesman Gary Butler said that repeated archeological studies have shown that any Native American remains on Deer Island were disturbed and removed long before the MWRA occupied Deer Island.
''I'm not going to dispute their arguments about the dogs, but that island has been dug down to the core and rebuilt,'' he said. ''There is no such burial ground.''
Native Americans concede that they do not know whether their ancestors' bones are dispersed in the soil, but they say the site deserves more respect.
The Indians and the Irish are to be honored with ''appropriate memorials'' in the new public park, a project that Butler said the MWRA is assisting with. The agency is not funding the effort, but it has formed committees including Native American and Irish members and has helped them obtain grants for planning and design, he said.
Sapiel is on the Indian committee, and he and other advocates want to halt memorial planning until the dog matter is resolved. They say that the potential political fallout from failing to construct a monument for Native Americans is the only leverage the tribes have with the state.
''There seems to be a different kind of standard applied to Deer Island, as opposed to the way other concentration camps are treated,'' said Gary McCann, an advocate representing tribal interests. ''We believe the memorial needs to be handled as part of a larger process.''
Certain beliefs are common among Native American tribes across New England, said Bert Heath, tribal council chairman for the Chaubunagungamaug Nipmuck Indians. Human spirits are trapped in people's physical remains until they are properly interred and the spirits are freed with ''away songs,'' he said. Then they can roam and advise their descendants and tribes.
''Some people don't understand how much of the spirit world is us,'' he said. ''It's disruptive to your whole being when spirits are trapped; it even puts you at unrest.''
While no one knows for sure whether spirits are trapped in the ground of Deer Island, the natives say it is a sacred place nevertheless.
''They may have erased the evidence,'' McCann said. ''But they can't erase history.''
Late Friday morning in Jamaica Plain, Janice Falcone sat quietly on a folding metal chair as four young Native Americans beat loudly on a deerskin drum and as Sapiel prepared his offering to Manitou.
Deer Island ''is not only historic, but it's a sacred site,'' said Falcone, an Iroquois Indian and a member of the state's Commission on Indian Affairs. ''We certainly don't like to see it thought of so lightly.'' |
