Trauma?

"nor one house left standing" stays in house left standing

Oh thank god, big W for the natives.

Who tf is this guy?

Man what the hell is her problem???

It sounds like she's made friends in these people, why does she speak of them so poorly? Has she considered that she is the problem? Of course not, God is on her side.

Aww, the poor Christians. They'd never hurt anyone, right? Ahem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Christian_missions

How many of those towns were founded on the blood of their friends, parents, siblings, etc.? How many Europeans bothered to attempt to live peacefully with the natives instead of uprooting their entire way of life?

Right, it's so terrible to mourn a loss and celebrate a victory. Now why don't you tell us why they were fighting the English, Mary? I'm very curious.

Oh I just know Mary would thrive in Tel Aviv if she were alive today.

I know she intends this to sound disgusting and barbaric, and while it's not the most appetizing thing I've ever heard, it's thoroughly impressive what people can do to survive when it comes down to it. Also, rattlesnakes? I had to look it up, but sure enough there is one species of rattlesnake that is native to New England, the timber rattlesnake. Huh, cool.

Yeah, when you live somewhere for multiple generations you figure it out.

I thought everyone on Earth were God's people, or is that only white people? I hate this lady so much it's not even funny.

Now Mary, I know you think that the English are God's gift to humanity and that these stupid natives couldn't have survived on their own, but is it at all possible that they simply know how to survive in the conditions of the area they've inhabited for generations?

Your poor country? How are you going to diminish the impact of one of the most powerful colonizing forces in the history of the world?

Is she finally waking up to the absurdity of her own beliefs, or will this be short-lived as the rest of the reflection she's done?

She compares the natives to animals, but she also compares the English to animals as well this time. It appears the English people she compares to animals are children, however, and they are represented as prey animals rather than predators. This both exemplifies how she views the natives as predatory (lacking perspective), and how she views children as things (although animals are not "things," they would've considered livestock property).

Good! Absolute bum behavior from you Mary, I must say.

Haha 67

Mary needs to get a grip immediately! Not only does she complain about the natives and how selfish and barbarous they are, but she steals food off of starving children! Food that she was bumming to begin with because she has none! What an upstanding lady.

Yum! On a real note though, imagine walking into a stranger's kitchen and asking for some of the food that they made for their family. I'm sure some natives were more open to sharing than people in our culture, but like yeah obviously you couldn't get a taste Mary, get a grip lady.

God, she loves to mention her family that she doesn't give a fuck about when it makes her seem easier to sympathize with. Why does she have so many family members held in captivity by the natives? What did her family do?

I wonder if this was done by the natives as a looting, as humiliation, or for some other reason I'm not thinking of?

So maybe she's not being completely dramatic and these natives are really messing with her for their own amusement/gain, I don't know that I agree with the dehumanization of them though. Thomas Read could also be lying to lift her mood, who knows?

I wonder why she feels so guilty? Maybe it's just a Christian thing.

She's definitely at a low point, she usually won't shut up about the bible and God's grace.

She seems extremely depressed, she seems ready to give up completely at any hardship.

She is always relying on someone else to help her, she takes almost no initiative to get herself back to where she wants to be although she has proven herself able to survive on her own.

She's constantly flipping the script on these folks. One minute they're friends of hers and the next they're barbarous creatures.

I wonder if they're just saying that to get to her or if they actually ate her son. I believe there were cannibalistic tribes of natives recorded around the area that this account would have taken place.

Another example of her being treated as an equal. If her labor were truly being exploited like a slave, she would not have gotten anything in return.

She's a little harsh on the natives. I mean, obviously she's being held captive, but they are making an effort to bring her back home it seems and they aren't just going to go out of their way to stop somewhere that grants them nothing.

Why does she never accept the kindness of strangers at face value?

She feels most comfortable when she is subjugated to a man?

Why? What is going on?

If they're bringing her home and treating her as an equal, why does she keep complaining?

Maybe because the community just lost a child she is angry that Mary would complain about carrying a heavy load? Or, maybe they are just being cruel to her because she is their prisoner, although given the somewhat equal way they seem to treat her, this might not be true.

It's interesting that she is requesting to be sold back to her husband rather than released as a free woman, does she not see a place for herself in a society without subjugation to a man?

I'm starving right now this sounds incredible say no more

I've noticed that she's now attributing reason to their "yelling and hooting" rather than making it seem like they're just making animalistic noises.

This might be another instance of my White Man Worldview (trademark pending), but didn't many native tribes only use tobacco ritualistically?

They've been helping her this whole time, this is just the first time that she frames it that way in the narrative.

What progress we've made since the start of this journey

How does she know they're pagan? Is she using this word interchangeably with "Indian?"

How old is her son?

Ambush?

Are they going to use their English captives as leverage?

Or, they were distracted by the fire made to distract them?

If a person who invaded your land and used their religion to oppress/massacre you tried to use that religion as an excuse to get out of work, what would you do?

She's so judgmental.

It sounds like she's not being made to starve, she just doesn't like the food made available to her. Food that everyone else present is eating.

Yum.

Could this not be acknowledged as an intentional accommodation made by her captors for her as she was injured?

I'm assuming this might be because everyone has enough food to keep themselves alive. She said she had two quarts of parched meal. Either that, or she just didn't want to share her food with the European captive.

If she was an enslaved person during American slavery, they probably would have just killed/got rid of her if she couldn't pull more than her weight. This leads me to believe that what is being depicted as slavery is different than what we might think of when we hear slavery.

Are they doing this simply because he's respected in his community, or because he is elderly and requires aid? If it's the former, I think that's a bit silly in a time like this.

They must pose a considerable threat if they're not confidently fighting with everything they have.

It seems they are being hunted and terrorized by the English. Could this be their motive for taking English prisoners?

It seems that she has good reason to stay with her captors. Although, she must know they aren't "barbarous creatures" if she trusts them to navigate her through the landscape. To her credit, she's stopped calling them that.

We are missing so much context as to why they're there in the first place. She cannot be that important to these people if they're letting her walk free. If she is not that important, then I would assume they were not going out of their way to inflict her any harm. I wonder how much of the harm she was inflicted was simply because of the harsh elements.

Are they slaves in the traditional sense of the word, or are they more akin to prisoners of war? I haven't heard any descriptions of forced physical labor or anything of that sort, but maybe she's leaving that out because she doesn't want to go into the gory details (unlike some other people who've written about the native encounter).

It's easy for me to say that this is an overreaction and that her captors simply weren't that bad, but if I had just lost a child and been forced away from the rest of my living kin while sickly and beaten, I'm not sure I would react any differently.

"God" this, "God" that, how many of these moments of grace have come from her supposed "enemy," and how often has she taken them for granted/attributed it to the grace of God?

How hideous and insulting is it to have a load of outsiders from overseas come and take your land, kill, and rape indiscriminately?

I should've waited a sentence to comment.

What exactly about their "noise and hooping" signified they destroyed twenty-three? 23 what? Lives? I know she's not here to do a cultural study, but this could've been recorded better.

I wonder what the motive is behind this pillaging? Is it resources? Fear? Retaliation?

This is the first mention of her son (I think, I haven't gone back to check). Are his captors not holding him under as strict restrictions as his mother and sisters?

Did native societies have nations with strict borders?

I wonder if this native society had always been this violent towards outsiders, or if that was in response to the European violence?

She is enslaved by a native?

It's hard not to feel bad for Rowlandson. She's clearly incredibly distressed by this whole encounter and the loss of her child.

This is heartbreaking, it also illustrates that she is in shock and maybe denial.

The kidnappers must've beaten this child pretty badly for her to die 9 days after the incident.

What horrible things that child must've witnessed and felt to want to die at such a young age.

Meaning they were knocking her out? This seems as merciful as possible, as I don't know if they had access to anesthesia in 17th century New England.

Sgt. Pepper?

What a name.

The Christian guilt is strong with this one. I can tell by reading this that the major driving forces in the society she comes from are shame and judgement.

Are they polytheists, or is she just assuming that? I'm going to go ahead and assume that she wasn't very interested in studying their culture.

Ah, definitely not nomads. Still, they seemed to be travelling for quite some time, and food was much harder to preserve in the 17th century.

And there probably wasn't any food for the natives either, as nomadic societies (which I'm just assuming these folks were a part of) eat whenever the opportunity arises.

I don't know if I missed something, but what exactly are their wounds? I know they'd been beaten allegedly, but she keeps mentioning how they're sick and injured without elaborating much further on that.

Still sounds like the natives are helping the Rowlandson's out. They can tell she and her child are too weak to travel on their own horse as they fell off of one before, so they're travelling on the same horse as a native. Obviously they aren't trying to help them too much, otherwise they wouldn't have abducted them, but they don't seem as comically evil as Rowlandson writes them to be.

Again, I am going to wager a guess and say that she would not have survived in the wilderness without the help of people who thrive in it.

It sounds to me like the natives, although they kidnapped her, were the ones carrying her through this. I'm getting the feeling that if they wanted them dead, they'd be dead already. Her husband is an important political figure (I'm assuming, I believe this was before the whole separation of church and state sentiment was popularized), so it stands to reason that having the Rowlandson family travelling with them is a massive advantage for the natives.

I wonder if they were actually laughing at their suffering, or at the fact that they are unable to ride horseback without a saddle? Or both?

Why is she calling her child it?

I'm interested to hear her describe what the New England wilderness looked like before it was developed.

For every European being killed, I wonder how many natives are being brutalized.

I ask again, what were her and her family doing to warrant this reaction from the natives? Could this really be an instance of innocent Europeans being victimized? Is there such a thing as an innocent European in 17th century New England?

I want to feel sorry for her, but I'm having a hard time doing so because of the horrific way in which she describes the natives. One would think that her and her family did something to warrant this outcome.

This might be my uniformed white man worldview speaking, but weren't most native societies very anti-wastefulness? If that's the case, what does she mean "waste that was made?" Also, y'all plundered their land first, it's fair game.

Okay, I understand that she's just been beaten and taken from her home, but were Europeans so insulated from the cultures of the people who's land they were living on that this came as a shock? Or is she not shocked, but rather disgusted?

I wonder if they actually asked her this, or if she is trying to garner sympathy. Stripping people of their sexual autonomy is more of a European endeavor. Besides, they wouldn't want their political prisoner to die from exposure before they even got the chance to use the leverage that grants them.

This isn't too far from where her and her family had been staying, I wonder if they've settled close to a native society?

Harsh language for sure. I don't like the choice of describing native peoples as "barbarous creatures", but if I were in her position I don't know if I would be thinking about the implications of my presence on these people's land. I would probably also curse whomever kidnapped and beat me.

I was hoping this would be included in the anthology, it's always nice to see what people who analyzed the text before you were thinking.

Especially because America itself is such a diverse nation built on ideals, questioning what America even is is more of a valid question than it might appear at first.

That's us!

Fun, fun.

True, but is this not an early American lit course? Why would we focus on change? Unless we're talking about how the definition changes constantly.

Who would not expect any of these texts to be included in an anthology about American literature? Certainly not our class, as we've already blown to shreds any preconceived ideas one might have about what American literature is.

Shared identity is probably the single most important aspect of literature.

It seems that for the purpose of this class, we are identifying America as North and South America, along with any American territories, to get as broad a scope as possible.

No one person or group can define what American literature is, there are simply too many different perspectives to consider.

How does it give us the tools to think critically on current events? Are there sections that include other students dissections of texts (not including those made by our class on hypothes.is), or are we given the tools for critical thinking simply by reading the texts ourselves?

What sets this apart from other scholarly conversations on literature? Don't most scholars recognize things like film, music, and other art to be literary?

Diverse how? Diverse ethnically? Religiously? Geographically? Sexually?

As we discussed in class, this is important because of the lack of said voices being taught in primary and secondary schools.

Are there not a lot of these? I'm assuming not. Regardless, it's important that we hear from student voices on what literature should be taught, because the things that made an impact on people our age in recent classes are likely to make an impact on us as well and inspire us to keep learning.

It allows us to understand the events that shaped our country and led to the social and political climate that exists today.

In class, I think we touched on this already. History is a study of events as they happened, while the study of historical literature studies the author's perspective more heavily.

We also question ideas like what makes an author American, and I'd say that it runs deeper than asking what "counts" as American literature. It's about how far we can push the boundaries, and if American literature even exists. If Native American literature can't exist because of the many cultures and areas that could be considered Native American, why can American literature exist when we end up running into the same issues?

This is an overstatement, but for someone living in the late 19th century I'm sure it came across this way. People were a lot more open to "miracle cures" back then.

This is very interesting, as certain hallucinogens have been shown to help people recover from ailments like alcoholism and other addictions.

This is interesting, hallucinogens fall in and out of the scope of psych research often for this reason.

Many people report feelings of clarity during psychedelic experiences. People report having profound religious experiences when using mescaline more than with other hallucinogenic substances, but I don't know if that's caused by the substance itself or by the way it's often used.

What an absolute unit, holy hell. I can see why religions were formed around this substance when people had nothing better to do than stay awake for weeks imbued with religious fervor.

People keep making biblical connections to Rave's psychedelic experiences, it makes me wonder if the people responsible for writing the bible had been hallucinating for one reason or another.

Oh my god.

This might be a silly connection, Rave's testimonial almost reminds me of those given by people unwittingly dosed by Deadheads in the 1960's. I wonder if there's a similar motive behind these rituals.

The thought of ingesting such a potent and mind altering substance without the knowledge of such a thing even existing is horrifying. He probably thought that he was dying.

This entire process is so fascinating. It's always interesting to see how completely different religions can come together to form something new. It's beautiful to me that a religion historically used to conquer and control can be taken by the conquered and transformed into something more meaningful to them than their oppressors could've ever imagined.

If this was written by a native I don't think I would take issue with this phrasing, but I feel like the use of the word "permeated" strips the individual of any authority over their own beliefs. Many natives were forcefully converted, but since many seem to be freely practicing their own beliefs here, that doesn't seem to be the case. Is it possible that more young people were practicing Christian beliefs due to easier access to those doctrines? One could argue that having easier access to those religious texts is an erasure of native beliefs, but I feel like there's a pretty even level of access to these belief systems for the people being described here.

Also what a name, this guy was born to do peyote rituals.

I wonder how beliefs from protestant/catholic sectors of religion have mixed with beliefs from sectors of native spirituality.

This whole ceremony almost reminds me of a therapeutic support group.

How can we be sure that they aren't using it recreationally? I'm not denying that they could use it as a spiritual medium, but is this an instance of outsiders making native culture seem more mystical than it actually is?

I understand that mescaline gives it's users strong auditory and visual hallucinations, but what exactly are they worshipping? Are they worshiping the substance itself as this phrasing implies, or do they believe it brings them closer to a higher power/spiritual entity?

So "cult" and "religion" are being used interchangeably?

There's a thin distinction between what we consider religious activity and cult activity, and I think the term "cult" may be used here simply because it's not a mainstream religion.