Colonizing the landscape: memory, ritual, and perceptions of place in seventeenth-century Maine
Creators: name: Bottino, Daniel Robert
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: This dissertation analyzes the landscape history of English colonization in seventeenth-century Maine. Engaging with recent social historical scholarship on the early modern English landscape and the analyses of English colonization in New England explicated by Allan Greer, Lisa Brooks, Emerson Baker, and William Cronon, this dissertation draws on a rich archive of seventeenth-century Maine land deeds and related legal documents, the York Deeds. As the majority of seventeenth-century English colonists in Maine were not fully literate, colonial claims to land in Maine were not exclusively made within textual frameworks. Rather, while text was certainly an important tool in this style of early modern colonization, it was integrally supported by non-textual rituals involving the use of the spoken word, meaningful material items, and the memorialization of monuments in the landscape. Thus, the authority of a land deed derived not only from its text, but also from its words spoken aloud and retained in oral memory, the materiality of its form (paper, ink, seals, and objects symbolic of the conveyed land), and sites of memory in the landscape. These landscape monuments took on a wide range of forms and usually functioned as “bound marks,” delineating the extent of a colonist’s claimed tract of land. Seventeenth-century Maine was manifestly not colonized by the pen, but rather by the environmental changes and military actions undertaken by its English inhabitants. But, as physical proofs of enduring English inhabitation, landscape monuments worked in tandem with the authority of written text, oral memories, and the physical materials of the law to justify the righteousness of English colonization in Maine on both a micro scale (the individual colonial landholding) and a macro scale (the entirety of Maine as English space). But no matter how ardently seventeenth-century colonists believed in the righteousness of their colonization, they had to contend with the reality of the militarily potent presence in Maine of Native Wabanakis. Indeed, Maine’s lucrative fur trade, a key component of the colony’s economy, depended on Wabanaki participation. Accordingly, it is no surprise that Maine’s colonists contracted a significant number of deeds with Wabanakis during the seventeenth century. These Anglo-Wabanaki deeds reveal the attempted creation of syncretic Anglo-Wabanaki landscapes in the period roughly between 1640 and 1688. Wabanakis were not deceived or misled by the early modern English legal system, but rather were able to creatively adapt to it and use it for their own advantage. During this era of early colonization, Wabanaki military and economic power could not be ignored by colonists, and both Natives and newcomers were often willing to work together for what they perceived as their mutual benefit. But with the spread of King Philip’s War from southern New England to Maine in the fall of 1675, the resulting nearly eight-decade era of Anglo-Wabanaki warfare forever poisoned relations between Natives and English colonists. Emerging victorious by 1678, Wabanakis dictated the terms of a peace treaty (the Treaty of Casco) that recognized Native sovereignty in Maine, thereby formalizing what pre-war Anglo-Wabanaki deeds had established de facto. But most colonists refused to abide by these terms, and after the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Wabanaki War (King William’s War) in 1697, both Wabanakis and English colonists had come to permanently disavow attempts to create or maintain shared Anglo-Wabanaki landscapes.