David J. Silverman

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David J. Silverman | "We chuse to be bounded": Native American Animal Husbandry in Colonial New England | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.3 | The History Cooperative

"We chuse to be bounded": Native American Animal Husbandry in Colonial New England

That which is common to all is proper to none. This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property; for they inclose no ground, neither have they cattell to maintayne it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion, or as they can prevail against their neighbours. And why may not christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods (leaving them such places as they have manured for their corne) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites?

—John Winthrop, "General Observations," 1629

WHEN the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, highlighted the Native Americans' failure to enclose and replenish the land, contrary to his understanding of Genesis 1:28, he used Indian hunting men to represent Indian society and pronounced the natives' territory open for English settlement. Winthrop's countrymen generally shared his attitude, as evidenced in the Massachusetts Bay Company seal of an Indian with a bow and arrow crying for help (see Figure I) and the Massachusetts legislature's 1652 ruling that Indians could justly claim only such lands as they "have by possession or improvement, by subdueing of the same."¹ From the colonists' perspective, Indian hunters violated both God's dictate to "be fruitful and multiply" and their manly responsibility to provide for their families. While native women tended to their gardens, their "abominably slothful" men, as Cotton Mather called them, seemed to do little else but relax, though occasionally they would go fishing, hunting, or warring.² The Indians' role-reversing laggard, "infinitely Barbarous" economy, combined with their lack of written deeds to the land, made their possession of the surrounding country illegitimate by English standards.³

FIGURE I: Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
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