Fields, Rivers, Mountains

By Macaulay Woods

I am not sure where to begin except with water.

The Connecticut River runs the length of Western Massachusetts, carrying everything — snowmelt, sediment, the memory of ten thousand years of Abenaki and Nipmuck life along its banks in that valley. Salmon ran it in numbers that are almost unimaginable now. ¹ The Indigenous people who fished it, traveled it, and built their communities along its tributaries called it Quinetucket — the long tidal river. It was the spine of a world. A 410-mile river that reaches from the border of Canada to Long Island Sound.

My family came to this continent on the Mayflower in 1620, fleeing religious persecution in England. My grandmother documented this through extensive research to become a member of the Mayflower Society. Shortly after arriving in Provincetown Harbor, several of my 12th-great-grandfathers signed the Mayflower Compact. In doing so, they became participants in a colonial expansionist project that would annihilate the existing Indigenous population; historians estimate that their numbers fell from roughly one hundred million to ten million. ²

It is argued by people who pay to have history books written that many excess Indigenous deaths have been attributed to disease alone — as though disease arrives without cause. But starvation, displacement, trauma, contaminated water, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure are not neutral conditions. They are manufactured ones.

The mechanism of ethnic cleansing is familiar. Historians often describe settler colonial violence as something safely buried in the past. Yet the conditions that produce mass death—collateral punishment of civilians—remain visible in the present.

We are watching the same sequence unfold in real time today. Lancet researchers have estimated, extrapolating from available data, that between 186,000³ and 680,000⁴ Palestinians have died in Gaza. More than half of those killed were children under eighteen. For every violent death, there are an estimated three indirect deaths caused by the imposed conditions of mass deprivation.⁹ This apparatus is not new.⁵ History books often obscure these inconvenient truths.

An accurate mortality count in Gaza does not currently exist due to the conditions of war and closed borders. Unrelenting bombing has left widespread destruction and buried remains of thousands of people beneath piles of concrete rubble that scatter the flattened landscape. The people who are officially tasked to tally the dead, the actuaries, are not able to do so with any kind of accuracy. The wild and catastrophic use of bombs that liquefy and evaporate remains are today’s weapons of choice. The dead are not able to be collected and buried with any kind of dignity. Their bloodlines lost, their souls are cast to the wind.

I have been criticized and trolled online for speaking out about the brutal war on the people of Gaza, after the horrific events that transpired on October 7, 2023. I do not condone the violence that occurred that day. Killing is wrong. We know this as an absolute. Killing in self-defense is more accepted by society if people are being historically slaughtered and oppressed. People maintain the right to defend themselves and their loved ones if they are under imminent threat. That concept is also generally accepted as an individual’s right to stand their ground.

What occurred on October 7, 2023, is still unclear. We know that around 1,500 people lost their lives on that day. Many were young Jewish people attending a music festival; other Jewish families were killed in their homes. IDF members were abducted and taken over the border and kept as hostages for many months in inhumane conditions. They were used as bargaining chips in a conflict that reaches back to 1948.

Palestinians were subsequently rounded up and executed by the thousands after October 7th. We have no reliable account of how many individuals have met their death in Gaza. The bombing continues, the hunger continues. The lack of medicine and adequate civil systems continues to plague the Strip. Silence and harassment of activists such as those who sailed on the Freedom Flotillas go unreported.

But something occurred that was likely unexpected on November 3, 2026—our nation came out in droves to send a message of change. This was an epic turnout across our USA. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum oppose this war. Ninety million Americans declined to vote in 2024; many abstained to register their dissent. The Midterms were neither a Democrat versus Republicans referendum, nor a Team Red or Team Blue ideology fest.

This was about change.

Americans would like to return to a society that maintains a strong social safety net, one that espouses freedom of speech, human decency, and the pursuit of happiness. Americans came out to vote because our Constitution has been greatly battered by both parties and by Citizens United. Seeing the whole map of our nation turn blue restored my faith, not in politicians and their rhetoric and false promises—but in our people.

Our people have a heart. We saw that on Midterm Election Day. We cast aside our differences and ideological arguments for one day to say- something has to change here.

Democrats will be greatly remiss if they ignore that message. Because, next time, it may not be the ballot box where we take our stand. Politics and geopolitics cannot continue to blindly barrel down the highway that we are currently on. One that treats our most vulnerable with abandon, one that puts the stock market above human rights and animal rights. Americans on both sides want change and action. We do not want to be divided along ideological lines by fake populists. We do not want to be lied to and manipulated by the narcissists in power who use deception as a weapon against the populace.

Americans loved FDR and JFK because they treated us as one unit. We harbor a long history of inequity from the Native Americans who were slaughtered by the millions to the African people who were trafficked here four hundred years ago to the Japanese citizens stripped of their property and held in detention. America has bad karma on this land and we need to heal ourselves and make ourselves whole. We need to acknowledge our bloody colonial history as well as praise and feel proud of our good and decent ancestors who fought in the many wars that have occurred both on our land and overseas.

Many of my ancestors are buried in and around the Quabbin in Western Massachusetts.

My English family were mostly farmers — some soldiers, doctors, and reverends —but to my knowledge, not governors and architects of policy. They were present during the ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous people in Massachusetts and they benefited by “settling” the land that had been someone else’s home since before recorded history.

They were colonists or colonizers, depending on the point of view — initially running for their lives in search of freedom, and in doing so, they disrupted a thriving civilization of millions of Indigenous people.

American children in history class are not taught about the scores of Indigenous people who were slaughtered and displaced by colonial settlers across our nation. We learned the anglicized version, the Cowboys vs. Indians version; we heard the propaganda lore of the “savage” Indians scalping and raping women with long blonde hair—not that the European bounty hunters were paid for turning in scalps of Native Americans across North America. It is the mechanism of propaganda and its intended metric—dehumanization—that allows genocide to march forward. Propaganda by design compels the guilty or enraged to stay silent as children are mass slaughtered. ⁶

My 5th-great-grandfather Ichabod Wood fought in the Revolutionary War and then moved his family from Middleborough, Massachusetts — where the Wood and Fuller families had been since the Mayflower generation — to the Swift River Valley in Western Massachusetts, sometime in the 1700s. The land where the Nipmuc and Abenaki had lived for thousands of years. He had a son and named him Ichabod Jr.

They both married women named Lucy.

Ira S. Woods and Mary Ball Montgomery lived in Enfield, Massachusetts, in the Swift River Valley, on land the Connecticut River system fed and flooded each spring. The river was life. The water fed that life. Fertile farmland, clear water, New England-Acadian forests, the river threading through meadows that flooded each spring and left rich black soil. Our family farmed it. Had children on it. Buried their dead in it, same as the natives ten thousand years before them—but it wasn’t their land. It had been taken at gunpoint. The people who had lived there for thousands of years were either killed, sold off to slavery in the Caribbean, or died of starvation and disease.⁷

My 2nd great-grandfather Henry Woods, Mary and Ira’s son, was born in Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1846— one of the four towns that sat in the Swift River Valley and was taken by eminent domain and later drowned by the state. He fought in the Civil War, Company K, 21st Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, which saw action in Roanoke Island & New Bern, Second Bull Run & Chantilly, South Mountain & Antietam, and Fredericksburg.

Henry was one of the few who came home. He became a carpenter.

This photograph is of Henry in his later years, standing on a street in Enfield with his Jack Russell terrier in a wheelbarrow. My grandmother Edna wrote his name in blue ink in the corner. The houses behind him, the telephone poles, the November trees stripped of leaves — all of it is underwater now. Henry died in 1931 before his home was flooded in 1938.

On April 27, 1938, the towns of Enfield, Dana, Prescott, and Greenwich were disincorporated, and more than 2,000 people turned out for a Farewell Ball that lasted until 2 AM. The flooding began in 1939 and took seven years to fill the now hollowed out native valley. In 1946, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts completed the Quabbin Reservoir project that still provides drinking water to the city of Boston. The four drowned towns are now lost underwater. ⁸

The Woods family headstones were moved to the Quabbin Park Cemetery with the other English and European inhabitants.

The Indigenous burial grounds along the river almost certainly were not moved before the flood. My whole family is buried in that ground, the ones that I know and the ones that I wonder about.

My great-grandfather Walter and his wife Grace Woods left the valley and settled in Springfield, where he opened a plumbing company at 25 years old. Grace contracted tuberculosis at some point, and Walter moved the family up Wilbraham Mountain for the clean air. They had five children. Two of the boys died young — Ethelbert in infancy, Stanley at three years old. Three children survived: Edna, Edythe, and Walter Jr.

My grandmother Edna Charlotte Woods was born in 1918 — the year the first World War ended. She graduated from high school during the Great Depression.

She married Duane Bassett, a grandson of William Bassett I of Plymouth, whose ancestors were musicians, merchants, and civic figures in Bennington, Vermont — a long New England line of artists and musicians carried forward through generations. She had two children with Bassett and several more when she remarried.

Edna learned to play violin and performed with the Old Post Road Orchestra, the Holyoke Civic Symphony, and the Springfield Symphony. She played violin her whole life until she went blind in her nineties and couldn’t read the sheet music anymore.

My grandmother took me, her first grandchild, to Springfield Symphony concerts. She took me to see Fantasia in a dark movie theater, where abstract forms moved to Bach and Beethoven and Stravinsky, color and shape becoming landscape, becoming cosmos. Something happened to me in that movie theater: I fell in love with the movies and the way form and color and music collide to create fantasies. That was the day I knew that I wanted to make pictures move. I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to write stories and make them come to life.

Edna C. Woods died at ninety-four. She is buried in the land of our ancestors— not far from her beloved mountain in Wilbraham—not far from the river that runs toward the valley that was drowned for progress.

When I was in high school, my great-grandmother Grace grabbed my arm and said, “Write a book about our family.” Then she squeezed it so I wouldn’t forget. I haven’t forgotten. My family came here to be free initially, but when my distant relatives colonized this land, many Indigenous people with thousands of years of history here in America were killed in the quest for progress.

Historically, Indigenous civilizations learned through many thousands of years how to exist symbiotically with the land. As we consider the current debate on the development of data centers and the environmental pollution and water consumption that are offsets of future progress—we must stop to consider what are we willing to sacrifice for that progress?

The stock market cannot dictate our course.

The Connecticut River still runs. The Swift River Valley still lies drowned beneath water so that Boston can expand. Henry Woods’s street remains down there, submerged alongside telephone poles, fieldstones, bare trees, and the razed house where Mary Ball Montgomery’s children were born.

The bones of the Indigenous people who inhabited that valley first still remain uncounted under unmarked graves beneath the Quabbin.

Endnotes

1. Haag, Robert E. 2023. Atlantic Salmon Return to the Connecticut River. EBSCO. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/zoology/atlantic-salmon-return-connecticut-river

2. Williams, Charlotte. 2023. 'Estimating Population Loss and the Ongoing Aftermaths of Colonization'. Dispossessions in the Americas. U Penn. https://dia.upenn.edu/en/content/WilliamsC004/

3. Khatib R, McKee M, Yusuf S 2024. Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential. The Lancet; 404, 237-238 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext

4.Hil, Richard and Polya, Gideon. 2025. Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/

5.Qureshi Y, Dawas K, Maynard N. 2024. Excess deaths in Gaza. The Lancet Global Health, 12e1395 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(24)00267-5/fulltext

6. Janelle Smart Fisher. 2025. Rum, Molasses, and Slavery in Boston. The West End Museum. https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/new-fields/rum-molasses-and-slavery-in-boston/

7. William S. Kiser. 2025. “The Long Shadow of Indian Scalp Bounties.” Yale University Press. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2025/03/11/the-long-shadow-of-indian-scalp-bounties/

8. Bourgault, Bethany, 2022. “Lost Towns of the Quabbin Reservoir” Yankee, https://newengland.com/yankee/history/lost-towns-quabbin-reservoir

9. Norwegian Refugee Council. June 2026. Gaza: Israel’s shelter restrictions force nearly a million people to endure summer heat in tents. https://www.nrc.no/news/2026/gaza-israels-shelter-restrictions-force-nearly-a-million-people-to-endure-summer-heat-in-tents