Absence of indigenous peoples and their languages in the Statistical Account of the town of Middlebury
Frederick Hall (1780-1843) was Middlebury College’s first professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, hired for that position in 1806 and started teaching in 1808. The two years in between his appointment and beginning of his tenure he spent in Europe, collecting samples, apparatus, and books for the college, as well as attending lectures at various universities. He was very well esteemed in Vermont, and has inspired several notable Middlebury alumni to pursue work in natural philosophy, including Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Edwin James. (“Frederick Hall” 2012) (“The Mineralogical Record - Library” 2016) He released several publications during his tenure at the College, including Statistical Account of the Town of Middlebury, in the State of Vermont in 1821.
In the Statistical Account, Hall doesn’t demonstrate numerical data as we would expect from modern statistical research, but more of a descriptive overview of the town of Middlebury, its resources, manufactories and flora. The only numerical data he presents were the selling prices of minerals and rocks, foods and manufactured products. Its significance for questions of Native American (Abenaki tribes/peoples) presence in the region is that he utterly fails to make any mention of them and present the settlers as discoverers and only inhabitants. It was a precedent set by colonial philosophy; as David H. Thomas puts it in the context of Columbus’s expeditions:
“After discovering a patch of ‘unclaimed’ land, the conqueror would wade ashore and plant his royal banner. He proclaimed that these newly discovered lands were now his patron’s domain and laid claim to the new-found riches, the natural resources, and the things living and inanimate—all of which was simply wilderness before being “discovered” and defined by Europeans.”
(Thomas, 2001, p. 4)
For example, Hall quotes a certain Joshua Hyde, Esq., referring to him as “one of the earliest inhabitants of the town.” (Hall, 1821, p. 5) Moreover, he writes in length about the crops and foods that can be grown in the soil, and how the settlers have found ways to cultivate plants that they have introduced, like wheat, pears, apples, peaches, grapes, not mentioning which consumable plants were native to the territory, nor what the Native peoples consumed in the area. One of two mentions of Native Americans appears in reference to corn: “The soil does not appear to be so well adapted to maize, or Indian corn, as that, which lies on Connecticut River.” (p. 18) He does talk about the necessary techniques for successful cultivation of grapes, “which has been cultivated in all ages of the world,” (p. 22) except, ironically, in the world he inhabited at the time. The only other time he implicitly acknowledges the native people is when he says: “When the town was first settled by white people, its inhabitants devoted scarcely any attention to the rearing of orchards.” (p. 15)
As for the natural resources, he talks about Otter Creek through an industrial lens, emphasizing its function in powering industrial mills of different kinds. (p. 6) He almost jokingly remarks how the river was probably named “from the circumstance of its having, formerly, been much frequented by the otter,” failing to mention that the otters went practically extinct in all of eastern North America due to loss of habitat and overhunting by white settlers. (Hill, 2001) He talks about other natural resources like granite, kaolinite, several varieties of limestone, and above all in abundance: marble. The language he uses in describing these minerals is that of profit: he uses words like “yield,” “extract,” “produce,” and so on. In a book called Intimate grammars: an ethnography of Navajo poetry, Dell Hymes is quoted in saying: “in actuality language is in large part what users have made of it. Navajo is what it is partly because it is a human language, partly because it is the language of the Navajo(s)” (Webster, 2016, p.11) In a similar way, English is a language of England, Western philosophy, and colonialism, so therefore it’s also a language of profit and industrialization. In creating a statistical account of the town, Hall created an inventory of resources that can be extracted, manufactured and sold cheaply and easily in order to advance the economic situation of (settler) people in the area.
Statistical Account also included a biological survey of fauna, prepared by Hall’s pupil and collaborator, Edwin James. Continuing the colonialist practice of “discovery” and naming, all plant-life was assigned a proper scientific name in Latin based on the Western nomenclature system, as well as a “vulgar”, or colloquial, name. According to binomial nomenclature, species are assigned names consisting of two words: first word indicates the genus it belongs too, and the other one indicates the species within that genus. The fauna of North America never existed in isolation from the rest of the planet, and in any case, all the continents used to be part of a single land mass called Pangaea: thus, many plants shared a common ancestry and similar physical characteristics, which scientists used to identify them. Therefore, many geni were already established because their species inhabited one of the more studied continents. In these cases, new plants would be sorted within the known genus, and a second word would be assigned to it depending on a certain primary or secondary physical characteristic, or locality.
An example of this is Cardamine pennsylvanica or Pennsylvania bittercress, belonging to a known genus of Cardamine, or bittercress, and it’s species name pennsylvanica, probably because it was first “discovered” and “identified” around the area of Pennsylvania. (James wrongly named the plant watercress, which belongs to a different genus, but the same family: Brassicaceae) (“Brassicaceae” 2016) Some other species names like this were: Corylus americana (derived from America), Lillium canadense (derived from Canada), Orobanche virginiana (derived from Virginia), and so on.
There were, however, many plants that did share a common ancestry with known plants, but evolved to a point where they did not belong to any known geni any more. They were still assigned names derived from the colonial, Western heritage, even though they existed independently from that world. One such plant was Dirca palustris, or eastern leatherwood (identified as American mezereom by James): Dirca is a genus of letherwoods only native to North America, but its name was derived from Dirce, a character in Greek mythology. (“Dirce” 2016) Another example is springbeauty (Claytonia virginica), named in honor of John Clayton, a colonial plant collector and botanist in Virginia. (Blois Lobstein 2016) What is more, the “vulgar” or common names of some endemic plants wore no association with their possible names in native languages, like partridgeberry (Mitchella repens), mermaid-weed (Proserpinaca palustris), climbing buckwheat (Polygonum scandens), false penny-royal (Hedeoma pulegioides), New Jersey tea (Ceanothus americanus) and so on, because they are clearly anchored in English or Western languages. Some common names included the word “Indian,” in order to differentiate those plants from their non-american counterparts, like Indian hemp, Indian tobacco,
Some names were borrowed and phonetically rendered, like musquash-root (Cicuta maculata), derived from Algonquian mòskwas, meaning muskrat (“Musquash” 2011); blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides), derived from Eastern Abenaki kkwὰhas; or partridgeberry again, also known as squaw wine, derived from Massachusett Algonquian <squa>, meaning “woman.” (“English Words of Native American Origin” 2016) There were some names that combined both like skunk cabbage, cabbage being derived from Middle English caboche, and skunk from Massachusett Algonquian <qunck>. (“English Words of Native American Origin” 2016)
One problem I encountered is that apart from common names that were directly borrowed from a native tongue, or that were clearly English, is that it is almost impossible to determine which names were translations of the native names for that plant. For example, James refers to Chelone glabra, a plant endemic to eastern North America, assnake-head, whereas nowadays it is almost exclusively called white turtlehead. (“English Words of Native American Origin” 2016): does that mean some botanist called it snake-head because that is how some native Americans called it, or the botanist simply called it that because of the shape of the flower? Some other names for it are balmony, white turtlehead, turtle bloom, fishmouth, codhead, salt-rheum weed, snakehead, bitter herb, and shellflower. (Roth, 2004) In his defense, James never claimed to be an ethnobotanist, and there are many books that might answer these question, but are sadly very difficult to access. (“BRIT - Native American Ethnobotany Database” 2016)
“Addressing a group of Miami, Potawatomi, and Wea leaders, [Thomas Jefferson] said, ‘Made by the same Great Spirit, and living in the same land with our brothers, the red men, we consider ourselves as of the same family; we wish to live as one people and to cherish their interests as our own.” (Thomas, 2001, p. 18) Alas, it was mostly just the interests of white settlers that were and remained cherished, due to a deeply engrained sense of superiority and righteousness. Hall and James were not bad men, nor have acted out of malice: they contributed greatly to Middlebury College, Vermont, and general scientific community. But we also need to criticize their methods for playing part in a systematic attempt to erase Native names, languages and cultures and substitute them with a new, white settler identity and values.