Julianne Jennings: Memorial honors Indian prisoners of war

In October, 1675 (Just five months after the start of the King Philip’s War, 1675-1676) some 500 Nipmucks from what is now South Natick were forcibly removed to Deer Island, a barren strip of land off Boston Harbor, as a concentration camp for Indians (later it would become a holding area for Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine (1800s), a major hospital (1847), a prison (c. 1882-1988), and now a wastewater treatment facility and national park), was established by the Massachusetts Council that same year. King Philip’s War, or Metacomet’s Revenge, as it came to be known, was the first large-scale military aggression in the American colonies and the bloodiest conflict between settlers and Indians in 17th century Puritan New England. Without adequate food, clothing, shelter or medicine, the pro-English Algonquian coverts, who had been converted to Christianity by the zealous Congregationalist minister from Roxbury named John Elliot, half of the Indians confined on the Island died of starvation or exposure during their imprisonment; when John Eliot visited them in December, he could only report with horror, “The Island was bleak and cold, their wigwams poor and mean, their clothes few and thin.” These were the same Indians who once welcomed the English in 1621 with their Sachem, Massasoit.

In the years prior to King Philip’s War, Eliot worked with his devoted teacher (and servant of 35 years) Job Nesutan to learn the language. Later, Eliot worked with Nesutan and other Indians in translating the Holy Bible into the local Natick dialect of Massachusett or Massachusêuck (first published in 1663 at Harvard University); had taught hundreds of Indians to read and write; and had established fourteen “praying towns,” Indian settlements built as Christian communities.