Long before there was one in Connecticut, there was a New Canaan where Quincy is, in Massachusetts.
This, land of the Wampanoags, is where a 43 year old English lawyer named Thomas Morton debarked in 1622, intending trade with them and the Nipmucs. A courtly adventurer, he meant to start a colony and live the free life in this arcadia he called "New Canaan".
Morton's would've been a classic rags to riches story had not the famous Mayflower Pilgrims attacked, jailed and exiled him. Hawthorne's The May-Pole of Merrymount depicts Morton's neoclassical Thanksgiving with the Wampanaugs and his violent arrest by the Pilgrims for the same.
Back in England, Morton published a description of what he'd experienced in New Canaan (1637; he was 58 years old). Instead of assuming the perspective of the Israelites, for that was the Pilgrims' worldview, Morton imagined himself a Canaanite, affiliating himself with Wampanaugs and Nipmucs.
As we know, being a "Canaanite" means being an indigenous person whose habitat is invaded and stolen by people who imagine their deity is giving it to them as "promised" once they have killed you and your relatives. The genocide and looting is proof of faith, and its "success" proof of union with, and providence of, the deity. The acting out of the story of Canaan is, essentially, our American history. It's our masterplot and all our lines are generated by it, even (most of) the ones that resist it.
In Regeneration Through Violence, Richard Slotkin explains why, and how, the Anglos committed genocide against the Wampanaugs and other indigenes in the "King Philip's War" (1675-1678)—setting the model for subsequent genocides of Native Americans by devout white supremacists. In 1675, Solomon Stoddard, minister of Northampton MA and grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, voiced their plutonic urge to annihilate indigenous people when he said the Nonotucks are "like wolves and are to be dealt withall as wolves". Morton's amiable, cosmopolitan point of view never included the urge to commit genocide. His less Biblical, more open, mind allowed him to appreciate, and collect valuable information about, the ways the people he met co-inhabited their lands and waters. For example, he detailed how they fired the woods twice a year—just after the snow melted and just after the leaves fell—practicing pyroculture to keep the forests looking like the open pasture-and-tree parks of England's noble estates: "very beautiful and commodious".
In Changes in the Land, environmental historian William Cronon riffed on this description, imagining how the Wampanaugs used fire to determine the habitats they shared with other creatures:
Here was the reason that southern [New England] forests were so open and parklike; not because the trees naturally grew thus, but because the Indians preferred them so. ….
By removing underwood and fallen trees, the Indians reduced the total accumulated fuel at ground level. With only small nonwoody plants to consume, the annual fires moved quickly, burned with relatively low temperatures and soon extinguished themselves. They were more ground fires than forest fires, not usually involving larger trees, and so they rarely grew out of control. Fires of this kind could be used to drive game for hunting, to clear fields for planting, and, on at least one occasion, to fend off European invaders. ...
[B]ecause the enlarged edge areas actually raised the total herbivorous food supply, they not merely attracted game but helped create much larger populations of it. Indian burning promoted the increase of exactly those species whose abundance so impressed English colonists: elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, ruffed grouse, and so on. When these populations increased, so did the carnivorous eagles, hawks, lynxes, foxes, and wolves.
400 years after Morton imagined "New Canaan", catastrophic fires consume the grasslands, forests, hills and mountains—and human infrastructures—of California. For too long, fires were prevented by colonists.
Read this article about how pyroculture was practiced by people indigenous to the chaparral coast and the mountain ranges. To keep catastrophic fires from happening, smaller controlled regular fires were lit and managed.
Any healthy future depends upon us learning the ways of the people who co-inhabit(ed) these lands for thousands of years. Let us imagine practicing pyroculture, using the methods, and the co-inhabitation bioethic, of indigenous people. In our new "New Canaan", let us LIGHT THE WOODS ON FIRE. Our children's lives depend on it.
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