New England once hunted and killed humans for money. We’re descendants of the survivors | Dawn Neptune Adams, Maulian Dana and Adam Mazo
The settlers whom many Americans mythologize at Thanksgiving as peace-loving Pilgrims issued government orders offering cash for dead Native American children
For more than 10,000 years, the Wabanaki peoples have been living in a region called the Dawnland. Captain John Smith rebranded the area “New England” in a map he made in 1614. He and the other colonial settlers renamed rivers and villages to claim the land for themselves and erase Native people from their homelands. But that wasn’t enough. Eventually colonial officials introduced a grisly incentive to hasten that erasure: bounties for dead Native Americans.
Yes, the settlers whom many Americans mythologize at Thanksgiving as peace-loving pilgrims were, just a generation later, issuing official government orders putting a price on the scalps of Indigenous children, women and men.
Maulian Dana is the Penobscot national tribal ambassador. Dawn Neptune Adams is a Penobscot Nation citizen and a member of Sunlight Media Collective. Adam Mazo is a co-founder of Upstander Project. Together they are part of the film-making team behind the documentary film Bounty
