1639年8月，肖皮什(?-1686?)和她的叔叔, Quassaquanch, met with the English colonist Henry Whitfield on the Connecticut coast. Shaumpishuh was the sachem (leader) of the community of Menunkatuck and Quassaquanch led the neighboring village of Totoket. While both Shaumpishuh and Quassaquanch acted as independent sachems of relatively small villages, they had some familial and political ties with the more powerful Quinnipiac sachem, Momaugin, 总部设在今天的纽黑文. Some English records referred to Shaumpishuh as Momaugin’s sister, 而夸萨夸克则是他的“顾问”.” Scholars have speculated that Quassaquanch was an expert diplomat. 经过一些谈判, Whitfield purchased the right to settle on part of Shaumpishuh’s lands in exchange for goods and promises.

With negotiations concluded, Whitfield wrote a deed and Quassaquanch made this map. In the map, he depicted both the lands Whitfield purchased and the surrounding territories. 南方在地图的顶部，北方在底部. The single horizontal line represents the coastline, and each vertical line represents a river. The small circle adjacent to one of the rivers represents the village of Kuttawo and the circles above the coastline are islands. 在起草完成之后, Whitfield and his scribe John Higgenson carefully labeled locations on the map and added the text below

从塔克希斯河到奥洛克科莫克河的全部土地 & 只属于你们广场萨赫姆 & is at her dispose: The description of it being given by Quassaquanch her uncle & 她自己同意的[...]

混乱和暴力的时代

Shaumpishuh and Quassaquanch sold rights to their land and made this map in a context of violence. 在1636到1638年间, 殖民者对佩科特民族发动了战争, 屠杀和奴役数百人. 在冲突期间, Pequot soldiers raided English settlements and besieged the English fort at Saybrook. As the English gained the upper hand in the conflict in 1637, soldiers captured and executed Pequot sachems on Shaumpishuh’s territory in an area that the colonists grimly renamed “酋长的头.” 为了寻找安全, Shaumpishuh and her people fled and lived alongside English settlements until the war’s conclusion. When Shaumpishuh sold rights to her land to the English two years later, it was to a people who had amply demonstrated their penchant for violence.

本土的映射

The Indigenous people of New England possessed what historians of cartography call “map consciousness,“意识到地图是有用的工具. 另外, 该地区的英国殖民者是一群, in 1639, 几乎从未制作过地图. Quassaquanch’s map is representative of the minimalist mapping culture of the region. 不像17世纪早期的欧洲地图, 或者后来由欧美人绘制的地图, Indigenous mapping in the Northeast eschewed representing imaginary boundary lines. 而不是, maps focused on identifying different major landmarks to demarcate the territory of different communities. 语言交流是地图不可或缺的一部分, and Quassaquanch and Shaumpishuh spoke at length to identify and explain what they drew to Whitfield.

同一契约的两个版本

Shaumpishuh’s lands were hotly contested by diverse groups of colonists and Indigenous people in the aftermath of the Pequot War. 昂卡斯, sachem of the Mohegans sought to bring many smaller villages, 像Shaumpishuh, 在他的权威之下. English colonists hungrily seized land as they began to migrate into the “conquered” territories of Connecticut. Communities who resisted received thinly veiled threats that referred to unpleasant “visits.” While the deed associated with this map represented a relatively traditional English acquisition of land, Shaumpishuh and Quassaquanch savvily provided their own version of the deal in their map and testimony. They made clear where the English rights ended and managed to protect essential hunting rights to those lands in negotiations.

However, colonists saw the utility of the map, labeled it, and eventually 复制它. 通过官僚程序, the English transformed it from a negotiated document, in which Shaumpishuh reserved lands and rights for her people, into something to establish English ownership and political authority in their own records. 

文/ Nathan Braccio, NEH Long-Term Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Assistant Professor at Lesley University