Portsmouth NH Commemorates the 300th Anniversary of the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth with Speakers, Events
Portsmouth commemorated the 300th anniversary of the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth between the English and the Native Americans of the Maine and New Hampshire coast. Two special exhibits, "First Nations Diplomacy Opens the Portsmouth Door," at the Portsmouth Historical Society's John Paul Jones House Museum and at Strawbery Banke Museum were presented through October 31, 2013.
The exhibits featured historical artifacts from the era and replicas of the original Treaty from the Library of Congress and the British Archives, signed by New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Native American dignitaries. A series of talks and other programs were presented at the two museums and at Portsmouth Historic Houses Association roperties (including Warner House and Historic New England who own houses dating to the period), the Portsmouth Public Library and the Piscataqua Pioneers.
The 300th anniversary of the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth provides an opportunity to understand the history of the era, the nuanced diplomacy of the delegates (English and Native American) and its relevance to contemporary Rights of Indigenous Peoples issues, and the nature of life on the frontier in Portsmouth before and after the Treaty.
"The Treaty is important for the First Nations diplomacy employed, for the first steps toward recognition of a New Hampshire governing Council separate from Massachusetts and for the impact it had on opening the Portsmouth door to development as the commercial and military hub on the frontier," said Charles B. Doleac, chairman of the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth Tricentennial Committee. "The issues discussed in Portsmouth in 1713 have a direct connection with ideas concerning the Rights of Indigenous People that are in the headlines today."
On July 14, 2013, the 300th anniversary of the Treaty signing, Strawbery Banke Museum hosted Colin Calloway, chair of the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College for a talk and book signing, "Pen & Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty-Making in American Indian History." Additional programs at Strawbery Banke, presented thanks to a grant from the Roger R. and Theresa S. Thompson Endowment Fund, included:
Aug 18, Jere Daniell, author of Colonial New Hampshire and Dartmouth College professor of history emeritus, "Colonial
Portsmouth," 2 pm
Oct 6, Lisa Brooks, Native American Studies at Amherst College, "The Common Pot," 2 pm
Oct 20, Emerson "Tad" Baker, Salem State College, "Beer, Taverns and Witchcraft," 4 pm
Nov 3, John Bear Mitchell, U of ME Orono Native American Studies Program and Penobscot storyteller, 2 pm
In addition on Sep 22, Neill DePaoli, resident archaeologist at the Colonial Pemaquid State Historic Site in Maine will speak at the Portsmouth Public Library at 2pm.
The Portsmouth Historical Society offers Gallery Talks in connection with the Treaty exhibit at the John
Paul Jones house Museum (43 Middle St., Portsmouth NH):
Jun 29, Hollis Brodrick, Collecting Early Piscataqua Objects and Manuscripts, 11 am
Jul 27, Sandra Rux, Portsmouth Myth- The Story of the 1694 Ursula Cutt Massacre, 11 am
Aug 31, Sandra Rux, Portsmouth Myth- The 1696 Attack on the Portsmouth Plains, 11 am
Sep 28, Sandra Rux, Textiles in Inventories of Ursula Cutt (1694) and the Edmunds Family
(1696), 11 am
The Warner House has scheduled the following related programs , held at the Discover Portsmouth Center ( 10 Middle Street, Portsmouth NH):
Oct 5, Along the Basket Trail presented with the Kearsarge Indian Museum, 10-5 at Discover
Portsmouth Center
Oct 16, Sandra Rux "Game Change: How the Treaty of 1713 Affected William Pepperrell Sr and
Archibald Macpheadris" 5:30 pm
Oct 23 Martha Pinello "Archaeological Evidence for Native Americans in Portsmouth Before
European Contact," 5:30 pm
The 300th Anniversary commemorations, produced through a special fund created by the Japan-America Society of NH (501c3), build on the research developed for the official website of the Treaty of Portsmouth Tri-Centennial Committee (www.1713Treaty of Portsmouth.org) to present the interpretations of scholars of the First Period in New Hampshire and Maine including Tom Hardiman at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, Richard Candee at the Historical Society, David Watters at UNH, Tad Baker at Salem State and First Nations historians including Lisa Brooks at Amherst, and Micah Pawling and Robert Bear Mitchell at the University of Maine at Orono. The committee is partnering with exhibit sites (the John Paul Jones House Museum/Portsmouth Historical Society), Strawbery Banke Museum and other historic houses (Jackson House and Gilman Garrison/Historic New England, Warner House), historical commemorations such as the 300th anniversary of Old Berwick and various collections of c. 1713 artifacts.
Scholars participating in a 1713 Treaty Speaker Series at Strawbery Banke Museum (follow the links to notes and extracts) include:
Colin G. Calloway is John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds in England in 1978. After moving to
the United States, he taught high school in Springfield, Vermont, served for two years as associate director and editor of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and taught for seven years at the University of Wyoming. He has been associated with Dartmouth since 1990 when he first came as a visiting professor. He became a permanent member of the faculty in 1995. Professor Calloway has written many books on Native American history, including: Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (University Press of New England, 2010); White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (Oxford University Press, 2008); The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007); The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (Oxford University Press, 2006);
One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (University of Nebraska Press, 2003; winner of six "best book" awards); First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Bedford/St. Martins, 1999, 2004, 2008); New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); The American Revolution in Indian Country (Cambridge University Press, 1995); The
Western Abenakis in Vermont (University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); The Abenaki (Chelsea House, 1989); and Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).Emerson Baker
Jere Daniell, Dartmouth College professor of history, emeritus, is a NH Humanities Council speaker known for his programs on Colonial and Revolutionary era New Hampshire and the development of New England towns. He has published extensively on topics related to New Hampshire politics, including the ratification of the Constitution in New Hampshire, colonial history and the New England frontier. Jere was born in Millinocket, Maine in 1932. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and went on to graduate from Dartmouth College in 1955. He received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1964 and became a Professor of History at Dartmouth, specializing in early American history and the history of New England. Remembered by Dartmouth alumni for his courses in Colonial America, the American Revolution and The History of New England, Professor Daniell has written such books as Colonial New Hampshire: A History (17 copies available at Amazon), Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 1741-1794 and countless articles ranging from politics in New Hampshire to a history on village greens. He is a much-loved scholar in the NH Humanities Council "Humanities To Go" program and has lectured in about three quarters of the state's 235 towns and cities, frequently on the history of the community where he's speaking as he's done for us here in discussing early Colonial Portsmouth. Recent talks have focused on New Hampshire's town by town response to the Civil War.
Lisa Brooks, Ph.D, teaches courses in Native American studies, early American literature and comparative American Studies at Amherst College, Amherst MA. She received her Ph.D. in English, with a minor in American Indian Studies, from Cornell University in 2004. Before coming to Amherst, she was John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Her first book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press 2008) reframes the historical and literary landscape of the American northeast. Illuminating the role of writing as a tool of community reconstruction and land reclamation in indigenous social networks, The Common Pot constructs a provocative new picture of Native space before and after colonization. The Media Ecology Association honored the book with its Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture for 2011. Although deeply rooted in her Abenaki homeland, Professor Brooks's work has been widely influential in a global network of scholars. She co-authored the collaborative volume, Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (University of Oklahoma Press 2008), which was recognized by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) as one of the Ten Most Influential Books in Native American and Indigenous Studies of the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century. She also wrote the "Afterword" for American Indian Literary Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press 2006), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. In 2009, Brooks was elected to the inaugural Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and she currently serves on the Editorial Board of Studies in American Indian Literatures. In addition to her scholarly work, Brooks serves on the Advisory Board of Gedakina, a non-profit organization focused on indigenous cultural revitalization, educational outreach, and community wellness in New England. She is currently working on a book project, "Turning the Looking Glass on Captivity and King Philip's War," which places early American texts, including Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, within the historical and literary geography of Native space.
Emerson Woods Baker II is public historian for the Salem State College History Department and teaches a
variety of courses on topics like museums, archaeology, material culture, and architectural history - courses that relate to historians working in the public sphere. Before Salem State he was an historical archaeologist and a museum director and continues to stay involved in these fields through consulting for area museums, and directing ongoing archaeological excavations, including one in Old Berwick, Maine. He is the past Chair of the Maine Cultural Affairs Council, the Maine Humanities Council, and past vice-chair the Maine Historic Preservation Commission. Most of his fieldwork and research has centered on Maine, a place where English, French and Native American cultures collided. As such, his research involves Native American as well as Canadian history. He has also directed excavations at the John Balch House in Beverly, Massachusetts. Tad Baker served as an advisor to "We Shall Remain," a mini-series on The
American Experience on PBS television and the PBS series and website, "Colonial House." His principal area of interest is in 17th-century New England, particularly the transmission and adaptation of English regional culture to a New
World. His book (co-authored with John Reid), The New England Knight, is the biography of Sir William Phips, a Maine native who would rise from humble origins to become the first American to be knighted by the King of England, and first royal governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Successful treasure hunter, would-be military conqueror, and governor who ended the 1692 Essex County witchcraft outbreak. The work on Phips, and in Salem led Baker to pursue some research and develop a graduate course on witchcraft, magic, and popular culture in early New England.
John Bear Mitchell, Native American Studies Program, University of Maine at Orono, and lecturer on Wabanaki culture.
David Stewart-Smith, Ph.D., Union Institute Graduate School; is past professor of History and Cultural Studies, Vermont College of Norwich University; historian for the New Hampshire Intertribal Council. Stewart-Smith is of
Scottish and Pennacook descent. His research into New Hampshire's Indian archaeology and history began some 30 years ago as his grandmother's family history comes out of New Hampshire's frontier and Indian heritage. He is a NH Humanities Council scholar and offers five "Humanities To Go" programs around the state: "Indian Issues in New England – Settling with the Past," "Mapping the Merrimack: A Frontier Adventure into Uncharted Territory, 1630-172," "Native American History of New Hampshire: Alliance and Survival, circa 1400-1700," "Native American History of New Hampshire: Beyond Boundaries, circa 1700-1850" and "Native New Hampshire Before Contact: Archaeological
and Tribal Perspectives."
Neill De Paoli, Ph.D. has over thirty years of experience as an historical archaeologist, having directed archaeological projects in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. The resident archaeologist at the Colonial Pemaquid State Historic Site (Pemaquid Beach, Maine) since 1993, he is an adjunct professor at Southern Maine Community College and New Hampshire Institute of Art. More Information. He is researching the biography of John Gyles, interpreter to the First Nations who accompanied them to the 1713-14 Treaty conferences.