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Nashua rich in Native American lore; ‘Indiginous Peoples Day’ a better fit than ‘Columbus Day’

By Dean Shalhoup - Senior Staff Writer | Oct 9, 2021

Dean Shalhoup

What I remember most when it came to this time of year back in my elementary school days is being cajoled into reciting, and reciting again, a couple of sing-songy phrases that inevitably got stuck in my developing little brain for hours after the final bell rang.

“In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

And the one that seemed to animate even the most stodgy, smile-challenged of teachers: who really enjoyed dragging out each syllable: “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria” became “The Neeenah, the Peeentah, and the Saaanntah Maarrrreeeah” because they so enjoyed dragging out each syllable.

I also remember a couple of the more mischievous boys (OK, guilty as charged) trying to rewrite something like 470-year-old history: “In fourteen hundred and ninety three, Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.”

Hey, it rhymes, right?

This drawing, which appeared in The Nashua Telegraph in 1945 with a submitted article on Native American history in these parts, depicts a rendering of the "Indian head" that was supposedly carved into a tree by Native Americans, which gave the area along the Nashua River the name "Indian Head Village."

Our lessons circa-Columbus Day each year were drawn, naturally, from the widely accepted account of Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus’s travels – although, as a closer look at history tells us, he slid a little to the south and landed his three-ship fleet not on the shores of North America, with which he’s credited for “discovering,” but on beaches of either the Bahamas or today’s Dominican Republic.

Now, as regular readers know, these weekly essays of mine are inspired by an almost limitless variety of topics, but one arena I have refrained from entering is the one that houses politics.

Not that I’m devoid of opinions on political matters; indeed, to have no thoughts or feelings on all that is going on these days in local meeting rooms to Capitol Hill to the far reaches of the globe would take someone as exceptionally adept at dodging all the noise as the original Brooklyn Dodgers fans were at dodging trolley cars.

So being careful not to delve into the political aspects of the subject: The more I read about the arrival of European explorers – Christopher Columbus, for example – and the ensuing waves of adventurous settlers anxious to stake their claim in the “New World,” the more apparent it becomes that whether the original settlers we now call Native Americans liked it or not, the white folks from foreign lands were intent on making this land their land, even if it meant bloodshed and death.

Historical accounts based on facts teach us that the migration of European and other global peoples to North America did of course happen over the decades and centuries before and after Columbus’s time. It’s also a fact that the settlers and the Native Americans often clashed, the Natives defending the land they lived upon productively and peacefully for generations, the settlers insisting they were entitled to move in and set up housekeeping.

Those events are, of course, an accepted part of any basic elementary school lesson plan, and have been since schools and classrooms were invented.

Over the past few weeks I’ve spoken with Mayor Jim Donchess and the small committee he got together to plan Nashua’s observance of Indigenous Peoples Day, an increasingly popular alternative to the traditional observance that is designed to focus more on the Native Americans’ perspective of that period in history.

The observance on Monday will include a brief ceremony at the confluence of the Merrimack and Nashua rivers, an area that in the early to mid-1700s was becoming quite populous as, according to a Telegraph account from the 40s, settlers the writer called “immigrants” began “pushing their settlements farther and farther into the wilderness and the rich valleys … “ around the site.

One thing I discovered in reading various historic accounts, some of which were shared with the mayor’s committee by Richard Widhu, a Nashua artist and community volunteer, is that the stories are almost always told from the white settlers’ point of view.

For example, who hasn’t seen Native Americans referred to as “savages,” or “hostile Indians,” in various stories?

A Nashua Telegraph of December 1945 carried a story about the history of the legendary “Indian head,” which, as the story goes, was carved into a tree somewhere along the Nashua River by a Native American who was said to be the only survivor of a battle with white settlers around 1725.

The carving was intended, according to the story, “as a mark of defiance … a taunt and a threat of vengeance” to the victorious settlers.

That story, which was submitted by a contributor who used the byline “The Old Timer,” described a scenario in which “the Indians began to be more and more insolent, killing the cattle and threatening the lives of the settlers.

“The ravagings became more frequent and more alarming with each passing sortie,” he wrote, trotting out an old stereotype in noting that “today, we can scarcely realize that a little more than two centuries ago, the yell of the Indian was heard … and the shriek of the murdered settler went up into heaven with the flames of his desolated home.”

If you’re driving around shuttling kids or doing errands this weekend, check out Nashua’s two most prominent historic markers and read their inscriptions.

One is at the corner of Allds and Fifield streets, although the homestead it refers to was actually a short distance away on Spaulding Street.

The other is opposite 88 Almont St., just north of the Bishop Guertin athletic fields. There’s no sign, but just walk a little ways down the paved path to find it.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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