VOLUME 22/NUMBER 3/SUMMER 2024       (c) Connecticut Explored

Joshua David Carter. photo: Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

By Joshua David Carter

Many, including the descendants of those who participated on both sides of the Pequot War, have deliberated why monuments to John Mason, a man responsible for the killings of hundreds of Pequots, have been erected in Connecticut. My father, Joseph Carter, and my cousin, Wolf Jackson, were members of the John Mason Statue Advisory Committee, charged with settling whether the Mason statue should be removed from ancestral Pequot lands. This committee was created in July 1992 after my father, my cousin, and other citizens of the Pequot nation presented the Groton town council with 900 signatures calling to have the statue removed from its 100-year-old home in Mystic. This controversy continues today and extends to the statue of Mason at Connecticut’s state capitol.

I contend that the all-important why in the debate over the John Mason statues is relevant not only to Connecticut residents but also to all citizens of the United States. Pequot ancestral lands, home to our nation for thousands of years, are also the birthplace of American slavery and attempted genocide, as seen in the Treaty of Hartford (1638) and further detailed in Harvard University’s Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report (2022). This is what Connecticut’s John Mason statues represent and why they should not be displayed in public: the statue that stands on the north face of the capitol building, with its hand gripping the sword that cut my people down, should be removed.

As detailed within the exhibits of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, the Pequot War led to the enslavement of my Pequot ancestors, the first documented people enslaved in Connecticut. It also resulted in the indentured servitude of the Pequot people and contributed to their subjugation, assimilation, and continued oppression. The colonizers believed that the war was a just means to the end they sought, embracing the false notion that we must separate and conquer and can justly destroy that which connects us all. Such a belief was repeated and fine-tuned throughout the colonization processes replicated across Mother Earth, all to create a false reality of separation.

In northeastern woodland tradition and culture, we understand that separation is an illusion. We believe that intimate, loving relationships with one another and the land that sustains all life are the source of holistic health. But this belief is challenged in an age of virtual connection with its diminished ability to empathize, heightened tendency to project our fears onto others, and overall lack of awareness about what connects us all. We must overcome the perceived separation to understand why monuments to John Mason embody and reflect the vicious, inhumane ideals of the past, which continue to hurt and haunt humanity as a whole. Taking Mason’s statue down is an attempt to change ideals, not the history itself.

Joshua David Carter is the executive director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. He is of Pequot, Narragansett, African American, and Irish descent.