“I think that the Indian ought to keep the 25 of December and the Fourth of July as days of fasting and lamentation. For surely there is no joy in those days for the man of color.”
These words were spoken by Colrain resident William Apess in 1835 while delivering a eulogy for King Philip. Apess was a Pequot writer, minister and Indigenous rights activist in the early 19th century, born in the shadow of the American Revolution. This speech was given 17 years before Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” and underscores the state of life for Native Americans following the war for independence.
According to Drew Lopenzina, a professor of early American and Native American literature at Old Dominion University, Native American tribes in western Massachusetts were living in abject poverty and “out of the way so that they could be easily ignored” following the American Revolution. But he noted that while that was the truth, it’s important to look deeper than the surface level to examine their lives.
Lopenzina is part of a project in conjunction with Mass Humanities and Historic Northampton called Native Strategies, which seeks to better understand the lives of Native American tribes in New England and the Connecticut River Valley in the 18th century. Historic Northampton received a $20,000 grant, named “Promises of the Revolution,” from Mass Humanities in November 2025.
For the uncolonized Native American tribes living on the western edge of the newly formed America, treaties, such as the Iroquois treaties, were signed after failed campaigns to take the land. Before that, Gen. John Sullivan had led a “scorched earth campaign” against the tribes, burning their villages and fields and slaughtering their people.
“The reality is Indigenous people wanted to hold onto their lands and wanted to remain sovereign nations,” said Lopenzina, who recently gave a talk at the Greenfield Public Library about the lives of Native Americans following the American Revolution. “The United States, after winning their war of independence from England, really … wanted to continue expanding westward.”
The tribes that had already been colonized for a century or longer, such as those of New England and more specifically, western Massachusetts, saw themselves become further marginalized following American independence. For instance, the average Greenfield citizen in 1776 wouldn’t have had a lot of exposure to Indigenous peoples, Lopenzina said.
“These tribes really struggled to maintain themselves, to maintain the idea of themselves as coherent tribal nations or a people,” Lopenzina said. “They survived — today the Pequot are still around, the Wampanoag, the Mohegan and the Abenaki. They didn’t disappear as much as literary people at the time wanted to make it seem, but they lived really difficult and marginalized lives. … But they were there, and they were part of the community. They lived on the edges because they were economically disenfranchised.”
Part of this struggle emanated from the fact that Native American men had a much higher percentage of participation in the Continental Army than their white counterparts. Because of this, tribes in western Massachusetts and across New England, where colonization had taken root, lost entire generations of men in the conflict.
“What I’ve come to understand … is this isn’t because they were filled with patriotic fervor; this is because they had white overseers who put the enrollment papers in front of them and said, ‘Alright, you guys are all part of this regiment now,'” Lopenzina said. “This was the case throughout most of New England. Where there were enclaves of Native people … all the eligible men [enlisted] … either because it was an opportunity for them and they had so little of an opportunity to make money, or because they really had very little choice.
“Across the board,” he continued, “all the Natives in Stockbridge were also listed as having deserted, so they couldn’t get a military pension or the service payment that was due to them. … There was sort of a trend. Native people were asked to enlist, they fought and many of them gave their lives to the Revolutionary cause, but then they weren’t compensated for what they had done. It was easy for the government to just say, ‘Alright, they deserted and we don’t have to pay them now.’ … White people were given land, and they were often given land that had belonged to Native people.”
By looking at the history of Native Americans in western Massachusetts through an historical lens, stories that are often not told come to light.
“You go into the hilltowns a little west of Northampton, there was a woman who lived there during the Revolutionary period. Her name was Rhoda Rhodes and she was this medicine woman, an Indian doctor, basically,” Lopenzina said. “She shows up in the archives as somebody who used to travel around and attend to both Native and white people who were sick in the community, and she was really trusted. Her gravestone still exists in a cemetery in Huntington, and she’s listed as the ‘Indian Doctress.’
“She’s just one example of Native people who lived in those communities,” Lopenzina continued. “One of the things we’re trying to do is find [more of these stories] in the archives, and try to understand and respect their lives a little bit more, and understand what were their lives like in that time. We’re still sort of thinking that through. I mean, it’s easy to say they lived in poverty. They did, and it’s easy to sort of write that off — a dismal, dejected existence. But they had lives and complications and celebrations … and trying to figure out how all of that fits together is kind of an interesting puzzle.”
