Who Saved Edinbur Randall? The Wampanoag of Gay Head, Race, and the Telling of a Fugitive Slave Escape

In 1854, members of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head on the island of Martha’s Vineyard rescued an escaped enslaved person named Edinbur Randall and led him to safety. All traces of an Indigenous presence in the story were erased when local and regional newspapers reported on the escape. Contrastingly, members of the Wampanoag Tribe, which has a long history of incorporating outsiders of different races, told and retold the story of Randall’s rescue in ways that highlighted their Native identity, but simultaneously downplayed their African ancestry. During a period when Massachusetts was using strict blood interpretations of race to support policies designed to eliminate Native tribes, the different ways in which the identity of Randall’s Wampanoag rescuers were portrayed in these accounts shows how members of the tribe both actively challenged Euro-Americans’ conceptions of Native extinction and racialized Indianness even as Wampanoag identity became tied up with notions of racial belonging. Looking at how Native and non-Native authors from different generations characterize race in their telling of the Edinbur Randall story therefore reveals how the Wampanoag negotiated defining their own identity in ways that allowed them to survive eliminationist policies that would later be replicated across North America.