Indigenous Wayland: Native American Community Knowledge
Rafael Abrahams
According to Native Land Digital, the land that we now call “Wayland” sat at the intersection of four Native American tribal territories: the Agawam, Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket. While pre-contact Indigenous North American communities generally did not have writing systems and books, they recorded and shared knowledge through other methods. A narrow history of libraries in Wayland might limit its scope to institutions that collect and loan written texts. However, if we define “library” more expansively to mean “institution of shared community knowledge,” then we must acknowledge Wayland’s Native American communities as the forebears of today’s Wayland Free Public Library.
Native American scholars use the term “Native science” to refer to Indigenous systems of knowledge that emerged from human experience and participation with the natural world. Native science has been passed down through stories and oral histories. While Euro-American validation is not necessary to respect the legitimacy of Native science, it is worth noting that contemporary research among Euro-Americans has confirmed that oral histories are effective in teaching and learning science and that Indigenous agricultural practices are productive in maintaining biological diversity in ways that Euro-Americans are only now adopting. Considering that the Agawam, Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket peoples successfully lived off the land they inhabited for centuries before the intrusion of white settlers, we must appreciate their success in passing down knowledge through communal institutions that were both similar to and different from Euro-American texts and libraries. Further research, likely using oral history methods, is necessary in order to present a more complete understanding of the knowledge practices of the Native American communities that resided in present-day Wayland.
In the mid-seventeenth century, Indigenous knowledge systems synthesized with the European literary tradition when English missionaries began to preach the Christian gospel to Native Massachusett people. ” In 1661, Native American Christians (known as “Praying Indians”) collaborated with the Reverend John Eliot to translate and print the New Testament in the Massachuset language. This language was strictly oral before this translation project, and Eliot and his Native collaborators worked together to create a written analog. This text was the first Bible to appear in a Native language, as well as the first Bible published in North America. It is known today by a number of names: the “Eliot-Indian Bible,” the “Algonquian Bible,” and in the Massachusett language, “Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God.” The Praying Indians of Natick and Ponkapoag continue to be an active community in the present day.
Employing both oral histories and written texts, Native American peoples who inhabited present-day Wayland shared knowledge relating to agriculture, community life, and spirituality for many centuries before WFPL’s founding. Although the WFPL was founded by Euro-Americans in the nineteenth century, we should also recognize the legacy of shared communal knowledge that long precedes the establishment of this community institution.
Bibliography
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Mandell, Daniel. Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
Native Land Digital: Native-Land.ca. Accessed March 2023.
O’Brien, Jean. Dispossession By Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
“Our History.” Praying Indians of Natick and Ponkapoag: https://natickprayingindians.org/history.html Accessed March 2023.
Szasz, Margaret. Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.