Stephanie Seed is an associate professor of literature at MIT and the author of “Empire of Letters.”
All over Massachusetts, an estimated 174 cast-iron plaques commemorate the state’s Colonial history. Some are freestanding on our roadsides; others are bolted to buildings or walls.
“Always read the plaque,” says Roman Mars of the cultural-history podcast “99% Invisible.”
It’s good advice. History is all around us, often in places we barely notice. But reading a plaque should also mean asking who wrote it, whose version of history it preserves, and what it leaves out.
When those stories were cast in iron and scattered across Massachusetts, it was a version of history told by a celebrated early-20th-century Harvard historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, who became famous for his 15-volume account of the US Navy’s role in World War II. Nearly a century later, we’re beginning to question the story he tells.
Those roadside markers are painted white, with simple black sans-serif lettering. Each describes an event that happened sometime between 1630 and 1930 and includes a reproduction of the Massachusetts state seal. The seal’s central image descends from the Colony’s 1629 original: a caricature of an indigenous man holding a downward-pointing arrow, with a banderole bearing the unthinkable motto “COME OVER AND HELP US.”
Massachusetts kept that figure on its seal even as it systematically undermined what remained of local tribal governance in Mashpee, Martha’s Vineyard, and elsewhere, and continued to appropriate Native Americans’ lands.
One of the tricentennial markers in Rockport records an early encounter:
Due east from here on July 16, 1605, the Sieur de Monts Sent Samuel de Champlain ashore to parley with some Indians. They danced for him and traced an outline map of Massachusetts Bay. These French explorers named this promontory “The Cape of Islands.”
European ships had been appearing off the coast of southern New England for decades. But in 1605, when Champlain sailed to Patuxet — later known to the English as Plymouth — disease had not yet wreaked havoc on the people there. He found a thriving community and wrote of “a great many cabins and gardens.”
Fifteen years later, when the Mayflower arrived, carrying religious radicals fleeing England, Patuxet had been devastated by epidemic disease. More than decimated, really: “Decimare,” in Latin, means to kill one in 10, a punishment meted out by ancient Romans against rebellious cities or mutinous armies. By 1619, European-originating pathogens had killed an estimated two-thirds of the indigenous people of southern New England.
As a child, I learned about the heroic interpreter Squanto, or Tisquantum, who taught the Pilgrims to plant beans, squash, and maize after a devastating winter and helped broker the “first Thanksgiving.” I did not learn that Tisquantum was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Europe or that he returned to find Patuxet emptied by disease.
The Rockport marker is just one example of what the historian Jean M. O’Brien, who is a member of the Native American tribal band called White Earth Nation, calls the “firsting” of New England: The practice by which local histories claim indigenous places as sites of European beginnings while relegating Native people to a vanished past. The people of Patuxet enter the plaque at the moment of Champlain’s arrival — dancing, drawing him a map — and then disappear, while Europeans acquire the power to explore, name, and remember.
As a state, we are reconsidering our official symbols: A state advisory commission solicited designs for a new seal, flag, and motto and identified finalists, but the process stalled this summer as commissioners called for fuller consultation with indigenous communities. That’s a start. But what of our roadside plaques? In 2030, the Commonwealth will observe the 400th anniversary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. We should not arrive at that anniversary with Morison’s words still defining the state’s beginnings.
The plaques should come down before then.
We need not simply remove the plaques. They can be inventoried and recorded so that they can be studied as the history Morison’s generation wished to tell. But they should no longer occupy Massachusetts roadsides and buildings as authoritative accounts of our past. Their presence turns inherited interpretation into an ongoing act of public endorsement.
In their place, the Commonwealth should commission new markers, working with the indigenous nations whose homelands they describe. Those markers need not pretend that a single plaque can contain the history of a place. But they can name the people who lived there, acknowledge what happened to them, and recognize that their histories did not end when Europeans arrived.
Always read the plaque. Then ask why it is still there.