Saving the Sachem

The Squaw Sachem Sells Her Land to John Winthrop, from a mural in the Winchester Public Library


The Boston Globe
January 23, 2000, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1569 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY;
WINCHESTER SCHOOL LOGO RALLIES RIVAL EMOTIONS DEFENDERS, OPPONENTS BOTH POINT TO HISTORY WINCHESTER'S SACHEM SCHOOL LOGO INSPIRES RIVAL EMOTIONS

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
WINCHESTER - At a time Sacagawea is being emblazoned with much fanfare on the new US dollar coin, a symbol evocative of another American Indian woman who befriended white settlers - Squaw Sachem - has been under fire at Winchester High School.

The Winchester School Committee last week took up a simmering controversy over the use of the Sachem nickname by athletic teams at the high school, voting 4-1 to retain the name, but encouraging a revision of the Indian logo that currently decorates the side of the school and its teams' uniforms. "If we limit ourselves to the use of words . . . that offend no one, we will deprive ourselves of the use of every word," said School Committee member Peter Haley, who moved to keep the Sachem name.

Critics of the Sachem tag have decried the adoption of an Indian symbol by an Anglo culture that they see as having oppressed the native peoples of North America.

Defenders have rallied to the symbol as a mark of town pride and athletic prowess and argued the term has been meant to honor - not caricature - local Indian history. A save-the-Sachem petition reportedly containing 950 signatures was presented to the School Committee last week. Opponents cite well-publicized campaigns by Native American activists against the use of such nicknames as Indians and Redskins by professional and college athletic teams, nicknames that the protesters say stereotype native peoples as warlike savages.

"To me, it's a human rights issue," said Sandra Thompson, coordinator of the Winchester Multicultural Network, which has lobbied for the retirement of the Sachem name at the high school.

"From what I've read, Native Americans don't want nonnative people using their places and names," Thompson said. "Why would we want to continue doing something that people don't like?"

But others maintain that the word "sachem" - like its close relation "sagamore," a word of Algonquian derivation meaning "chief" or "leader" - is not pejorative, and if used with respect, offers a tribute to the Native American past.

"There's no shame in it," said Edwin Morse Sr., or White Owl, sachem of the 207-member Chaubunagungamaug Band of the Nipmuck Nation in Webster and Dudley.

"They're not disrespecting Native Americans," he said. "They're really putting the sachem on a pedestal by using the name."

The name at Winchester High is in honor of Squaw Sachem, a female chief of the Pawtucket tribe who in 1639 sold land along the Mystic Lakes in what is now Winchester to the English of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for 21 winter coats, 19 belts of wampum and three bushels of corn.

With her people decimated by plague and intertribal warfare in the years before the English landed, Squaw Sachem and her heirs struck alliances with the settlers.

Squaw Sachem's husband, the Great Sachem Nanepashemet, once held sway over a vast territory from central Massachusetts to southern Maine. He was killed in 1619 by Tarratine Indians from Maine during a raid on his palisaded fort above the Mystic River in Medford.

One of their three sons, Wonohaquaham, a convert to Christianity who was known to the English as Sagamore John, is remembered in a monument in West Medford near his residence on the Mystic.

But it is the so-called "Indian Queen of Misticke" who has been particularly celebrated by artists and generations of schoolchildren in the Massachusetts towns that stand on her hereditary lands.

Squaw Sachem is depicted in a sweeping mural by A.L. Ripley above the front desk of the Winchester Public Library, and in a sculpture by Cyrus Dallin at the base of the Robbins Memorial Flagstaff at Arlington Town Hall.

How the legacy of Squaw Sachem and her people is to be preserved is at the heart of the current debate in Winchester.

The issue was brought to the fore last summer by Jamie Morrison, a former three-sport athlete and current junior-varsity basketball coach at Winchester High who called on the School Committee to change the Sachem symbol.

"I just feel that native people in this culture should not be used as emblems or logos at nonnative institutions," said Morrison, who is of Cherokee descent. "There are plenty of names out there. People are not mascots or logos, they're human beings.

"The Sachem, as far as mascots go, is mild," he acknowledged. "The symbol is not disgraceful, and I don't feel it was done with malice or cruel intentions. But the history of native and nonative peoples in this country is not one of peaceful or glorious times."

The topic has touched a nerve in Winchester, where pride in town athletic teams runs deep, but where tolerance has also been a pressing topic, with several incidents of hate graffiti being reported over the past year at the high school.

When the school board held a public hearing on the Sachem issue on Jan. 4, more than 175 people attended the 2 1/2-hour session in the high school auditorium.

As feelings have run high, coach Morrison has endured boos and raucous student renditions of the Tomahawk Chop. "I've heard people when I'm coaching say, 'Good luck, SACHEMS!' right in my ear," he said. "People love their Sachems. They absolutely love their Sachems.

"People say they're honoring" Squaw Sachem, he said. "This is not honoring. This is, 'We want this. We like this. This is ours. We want to keep it.' It's about power and entitlement."

Phyllis Williams is among the Winchester residents who have defended the sachem as a symbol of respect for the past.

"My generation grew up thinking of Squaw Sachem as someone very special," said Williams, who recalled being taught about the female Indian chief as a grade-schooler in town in the 1940s. "Winchester has its own claim on Squaw Sachem and the friendly Indians who gave the land to our predecessors. Sachem is intended to be a tribute."

As for her five children, who have graduated from of Winchester High School, Williams said: "They think it's sacrilegious to take the sachem down."

Historian Beth Ladow of Winchester, a scholar of the American West who is writing a history of the Montana-Saskatchewan border entitled, "Medicine Line: From Sitting Bull to Wallace Stegner on a North American Frontier," warned against "paving over local history in the name of identity politics.

"If the sachems of Winchester had all been murdered by John Smith and cohorts, it would be one thing," she said, "but in this case, there was a friendship, an agreement made for peaceful relations between natives and newcomers. It's not the national story of wholesale oppression and genocide. Just viewing Indians as oppressed masses doesn't do justice to real history.

"You can use this as an educational tool," Ladow said. "If you have something positive that happened multiculturally 400 years ago, why not use it? Teach children the complexity of history."

Interviews with several Indian tribal leaders in Massachusetts indicated feelings vary among native peoples on the logo issue.

"You know, if you spoke with 10 different people in Aquinnah, you'd get 10 different opinions," said June Manning, a member of the tribal council of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) on Martha's Vineyard.

Manning said she saw nothing offensive in the sachem symbol. "If it's been used, then continue to use it," she said. "If it's used in the context of respect, that's acceptable."

Morse served as a model in traditional feathered headdress for the Warriors logo on the gymnasium floor at the new Nipmuc Regional High School in Upton.

"We like that sort of thing," he said. "In Webster, where we originate, they have the Bartlett High School Indians, Nipmuc Liquors. It's a boost for us. Shows we're still around. The best thing is to keep the Indians going."

But Russell Peters, president of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council, expressed cultural and spiritual concerns over the sachem nickname. "The term 'sachem' should be used with all due respect for our own tribal purposes, not some high-school logo," he said.

As a student at Winchester High School, Simon Donovan created the large Sachem logo that was hung on the side of the building as a gift of the Class of 1977.

It was, he recalls, his earliest work of public art. Donovan has since gone on to a career as a painter and sculptor in Tucson, where his latest project is a 300-foot pedestrian bridge in the shape of a rattlesnake.

"That piece I did when I was 17 years old has more meaning to me now than it did in years past," he said. He opposes removal of the logo from the side of the high school, and said he is contemplating legal action under the Visual Artist Rights Act of 1990 if it is taken down without his say-so. "They do not have the right to remove this artwork without my permission," he said.

Yet the logo, suggesting an idealized version of a Plains Indian, has been criticized even by Sachem defenders as too little resembling an indigenous tribesman of Eastern Massachusetts. On Tuesday, the School Committee proposed a subcommittee be formed to revise the image.

The Sachem name, however, will survive in the Winchester schools, an outcome that was urged in a flight of oratory Tuesday by veteran School Committee member Edward O'Connell.

"I do not want to see Squaw Sachem relegated to the dustbin of history, to quote Abraham Lincoln, swept away by the 'silent artillery of time,' " O'Connell intoned. "She is a worthy heroine for the ages."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. The Sachem logo at Winchester High School dates to 1977. GLOBE PHOTO/BETHANY VERSOY 2. American West scholar Beth Ladow of Winchester, looking over the Squaw Sachem mural at the public library, says the story of the town's founding can hold important lessons for its children. GLOBE PHOTO/BETHANY VERSOY Top