Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America

by Victoria Freeman

As a North American of European ancestry, Victoria Freeman sought to answer the following question: how did I come to inherit a society that has dispossessed and oppressed the indigenous people of this continent? After seven years of research into her own family’s involvement in the colonization of North America, she uncovered a story that begins in England, in 1588, and concludes in Ontario, in the 1920s. Among many others, we meet Puritan fur-trader and interpreter Thomas Stanton, who in 1637 participated in a genocidal war against the Pequots of New England, and nine-year-old Elisha Searl, who was captured in Massachusetts in 1704 by Native allies of the French, eventually becoming a “white Indian,” but was eventually “deprogrammed” by the Puritans.

Through both the ordinary and remarkable episodes in her ancestors’ lives, and her own travels to the places where her ancestors lived, she illuminates the process of North American colonization. Freeman neither demonizes nor whitewashes her ancestors, but instead attempts to understand their actions and choices both in the context of their time and with the benefit of hindsight.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Indigenous

568 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2000

About the author

I am a writer, theatre artist, educator, and public historian living in Toronto, Canada.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was in fourth grade at Ely Elementary School in Duluth, MN, our teacher, Miss Juanita Williams, had us memorize a poem that altered the geography of my imagination:

Where we walk to school each day
Indian children used to play-
All about our native land,
Where the shops and houses stand.

And the trees were very tall,
And there were no streets at all,
Not a church and not a steeple-
Only woods and Indian people.

The next day as I walked to school I remember being very aware that other children had once passed this way, in a very different world, at a very different time. I had nothing to do with those children - their story was not my story, or at least it seemed not, and as I grew older and learned the details, it all seemed fairly superfluous, not ancient history by any means, but something that happened long ago that had nothing to do with me and the here and now. Whatever injustices had been committed, whatever betrayals taken place, there was nothing to be done now. It was only decades later, as I was preparing to teach American history myself for the first time that I remembered with a start that, in fact, sitting in that fourth grade classroom, memorizing that poem that day, had been four here and now Native American classmates: Michelle, Tim, Jack, and Billy. And suddenly I realized, with an even greater start, that somehow their stories and my story were inexorably bound - I, like them, had inherited the legacy of those forces that had stolen the lands of their ancestors and sought to strip them of their identity as "present tense" people. I determined that day that my own students would know, at the very least, that the story was on-going.

I was reminded of all of this reading "Distant Relations," a very truthful and unrelenting book by Canadian writer Victoria Freeman who got interested in discovering how her own ancestors in both The US and Canada had managed to steal a continent from those who had originally lived here. The simple answer is that they took it -- but the truth is, as usual, much more complicated and incredibly darker than that. The truth is they took it because they believed it was theirs, that God had given it to them. They took it because they believed it was their mission to bring enlightenment and truth to the those who so obviously did not have it. And they took it because they could. Starting with those who came in the Great Migration of Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Freeman's distant relations included a few people who had little or nothing to do directly with the Native American people who lived nearby, but, surprisingly, many who did: a young man who acted as translator in negotiations with various Indians groups in colonial New England; several men who fought in sundry conflicts involving the French, the English, the Spanish, with different Native American tribes fighting along side them or against them, first in New England, then in the Ohio Valley, and eventually in the West; a woman who was scalped by unnamed starving Indians and lived to tell about it; a young man, taken for ransom to far off Quebec who first "went native" and then returned to "civilization," and then "went native" again; a fervent Methodist evangelist who oversaw mission work among the Ojibway in Ontario; and a grandfather who ran a residential school for Anishinabe children on Lake of the Woods on the Canadian-US border. Each generation, each family's stories, were fascinating - set as they were against the much larger backdrop of the taking of land, inch by inch, mile by mile, and the devastating consequences for its original inhabitants who could neither win by fighting back, doing nothing, or giving in. It is a riveting, if unrelenting, tale, of human aspiration, greed, blindness, loss, betrayal, and survival, but told with such carefully researched detail that one comes to understand how EXACTLY the task was accomplished as individual tribe by individual tribe fell under the domination of the malignant, benign, or "well intentioned" conquerors. In the end, it is as Ogala leader Red Cloud was reported to have said, "The white man made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did"

BUT the most amazing thing about this book is that it is not just about distant relations -- it is about all of us now. In the final chapter of book, entitled "Judgment Day," she writes essentially an essay that is worth the whole price of the volume. While none of us are responsible for the actions (or non-actions) of our distant relations, we have, she points out, inherited their legacy. We may not bear the guilt, but we do bear the privilege and that privilege invites us to look unflinchingly at what we have inherited and face it, even when its truths are very inconvenient . "Today, whenever a Native person meets a non-Native person, the wrongs of the past take up a lot of space between them," she writes. She goes on to discuss specifics about how all of us, Native and non-Native, might go about healing the history in the here and now. Rather than outlining them in my review, though, I commend to you this remarkable book . I promise you, it is well worth the time and effort and pain.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves to be a best seller.

We all know (or should know) that the aboriginal or native peoples of North America have less wealth, more poverty, less health, more disease, a higher rate of alcoholism, a higher rate of incarceration, and a shorter life-expectancy than the rest of us. Beyond that, most of us know little. Very little.

Some of us have a vague sense of injustice. Some, a profound sense of injustice. And some have probably not really taken any time to think about these people.

Victoria Freeman’s profound book brings us, native and non-native alike, face-to-face with each other. It is, first and foremost, a book about people: real people. People with names and families, dreams and expectations. The author focuses the light through the lens of her own family tree but that lens, like a prism, refracts the light into brilliant and varied colours. The author Freeman has done her research. I daresay that most of us would have found the process of searching out baptismal records, old newspapers, and other dusty documents unbearably tedious. Fortunately for us, Victoria Freeman is both a thorough historian and an engaging storyteller.

The documentary trail begins in 1588 with the marriage of Mercy Jelly and Dominick Wheeler in Salisbury, England, and wends its way through 412 years of Wheeler, Eliot, Stanton, Janes, Harris, and Freeman family history to the present. Where the documents are lacking in detail, she asks brilliant questions that draw us into the narrative. We thereby become part of the dialogue.

As a child, I played cowboys and Indians. The good white cowboys or the good U.S. Cavalry saved the good white people from the bloodthirsty Indians. I of course was a good white cowboy. (This is hugely ironic because I am really black. Black invisibility is however a different story for another time.) Now, in the age of political correctness, some have reversed the paradigm to good Indian, bad white man. In so doing we accomplish little because it neither gets us closer to the truth nor helps us live together.

As the author concludes, “I believe it is possible to move beyond this ugly and often violent history to be a society that is founded not on mere ‘tolerance’, but on respect, a society that lives up to its word. But I know that we can’t move forward until we look the past in the eye, until we understand ourselves more deeply, acknowledging and exploring even the darker aspects of our history – not to damn our forebears, but with hope for a more humane world.”

Victoria Freeman has looked the past in the eye and continues to do so. Now it is our turn.

[Richard Birney-Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves to be a best seller. I will write a detailed review during the coming week or two.

[Laura Benson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a very long time to get through this very detailed excavation of history to examine how Freeman’s ancestors were implicated in the ongoing colonization of North America and genocide of Indigenous people. It was worth it.

Freeman uses primary and secondary sources about people in her family tree contextualized within the non-indigenous academic understanding of North American history circa the 1990s. This really drove home for me how drastic and world-shattering the meeting of European and Indigenous worldviews was in the first decades of contact and settlement, especially paired with viruses, pathogens and nutty religious zeal.

This work also really brought home how impoverished the historical record without Indigenous forms of remembering.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible and important archival work. If only every settler had the courage examine their own family’s connection to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the privileges they enjoy as a result.