“Witness Our Hands”: The Rhetoric of Indigenous Petitions in Colonial Massachusetts

This article examines how Native people in colonial-era Massachusetts engaged with English settler laws and assumptions around private property, land ownership, and accumulation: an ideology I term “colonial accounting.” Specifically, I examine Indigenous-authored legal petitions (a nonliterary genre that remains of considerable interest to literary scholars) submitted to the General Court in Boston between the mid-1600s and the end of the Seven Years’ War. Drawing on my reading of around three hundred such documents, I focus on four petition case studies: a Nip-muc village requests English aid following a Narragansett attack (1667); a Nipmuc community requests an allotment of land to resettle themselves following King Philip’s War (1685); the Mashpee protest to George II about their unfair treatment by English colonists (1760); and Mattakeesit farmers challenge attempts by their “Sachemiss” to sell communal lands (1755–57). I then consider the broader individualization of petitioning in New England across the colonial period, and I end by discussing an Abenaki declaration from 1747, arguing that it should be read as an “antipetition.” I focus throughout on the petitions’ formal and rhetorical qualities, and argue that they co-opt the rhetoric and conceptual tools of colonial accounting in order to advocate for Indigenous interests.