FIELDS, RIVERS, MOUNTAINS

by Macaulay Woods

The Connecticut River runs the length of western Massachusetts, carrying everything—snowmelt, sediment, the memory of ten thousand years of Abenaki and Nipmuc life along its banks in that valley. Salmon ran in numbers that are almost unimaginable now.¹ The Indigenous people who fished it, traveled it, and built their communities along its banks called it Quinnetukut—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 the births of our ancestors, and after presenting her extensive research, she became 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 an expansionist colonial project that would kill and displace the existing Indigenous population; historians estimate that Indigenous numbers fell from roughly one hundred million to ten million people.²

It is argued by some historians and scholars that many Indigenous deaths have been attributed primarily 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 engineered.

The mechanism driving mass death and displacement behind the yellow line in Gaza is shockingly familiar.

Historians often describe settler-colonial violence as a phenomenon of the past. Yet the conditions and methods that produce the mass killing of civilians have not disappeared—they have been modernized. Today, armed quadcopter drones easily hunt down and kill unarmed civilians using remote operators.

We are watching these atrocities unfold in real time on social media.

Lancet researchers have estimated, extrapolating from available data, that between 186,000³ and 680,000⁴ Palestinians have died in Gaza since October 8, 2023.

More than half of those killed were children under the age of eighteen. The study suggests that for every violent death, there are an estimated three indirect deaths caused by these engineered conditions of mass deprivation.⁹ Yet the apparatus of manufactured famine is not new.⁵ History books often obscure or omit these inconvenient truths.

Unrelenting bombing has left widespread destruction and buried the remains of thousands of people beneath piles of concrete rubble; therefore, an accurate mortality count in Gaza does not currently exist. Internet blackouts, the targeting of journalists, closed borders, and the fog of war bury the truth.

As the war on Gaza has continued for more than two and a half years, it has become difficult not to draw parallels between the European colonists of colonial America and the settlers razing villages in the West Bank with impunity.

My English ancestors were mostly farmers — some were soldiers, doctors, and reverends — not governors or architects of policy. They were colonists or colonizers, depending on one’s point of view — initially running for their lives in search of freedom, and in doing so, they disrupted thriving and distinct civilizations of millions.

In their pursuit of happiness, they landed uninvited on an already inhabited continent. As more Europeans joined the colonial project in the New World, they kept pushing westward, rolling over and through Indigenous populations until they collapsed.

Land that the Nipmuc and Abenaki once guarded for thousands of years now ran with their blood.

American children in history class are not taught about the tens of millions of Indigenous people who were slaughtered and displaced by colonial settlers across North America. 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 killed en masse. 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 living since the Mayflower generation—to the Swift River Valley in western Massachusetts sometime in the late 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 that the Connecticut River brought to life each spring. The river flooded the valley, depositing fertile black soil across the bottomland.

Now dammed in thousands of New England towns, the Quinnetukut once threaded unobstructed through New England–Acadian forests and meadows, creating a pristine ecosystem that sustained wildlife and humans alike.

The Wood family farmed the Swift River Valley, had several generations of children on it, buried their dead in it. Same as the Indigenous people who lived there 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

Mary Ball Montgomery Woods

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 with Company K, 21st Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, which saw action at Roanoke Island and New Bern, Second Bull Run and Chantilly, South Mountain and 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 neighborhood homes behind him, the sidewalks, fieldstone fences, barren telephone poles, and trees—are all razed and 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 stones were moved to Quabbin Park Cemetery before they flooded the valley—the Indigenous buried along the Quinetucket River—almost certainly were not.

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.

Our family has been made up of artists on both sides—photographers, painters, singers, and musicians. 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 into another New England family whose lineage includes early English settlers in Plymouth, Massachusetts, including signers of the Mayflower Compact. Edna had two children with her first husband Bassett and several more when she remarried.

She learned to play violin as a young woman and ultimately performed with the Springfield Symphony. She played violin throughout her life until she went blind in her nineties and could no longer read sheet music.

At age five, my grandmother took me, her first grandchild, to Springfield Symphony concerts. She took me to see Fantasia in a dark, retro Springfield movie theater, where abstract forms collided with Bach, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, where color and shape became cosmos.

That was the day I knew that I wanted to make pictures move.

Edna C. Woods died at ninety-four. She is buried in the land of our ancestors, not far from the mountain her parents climbed for clean air, not far from the river that runs toward a valley later drowned for progress. She played violin her whole life until she went blind in her nineties and couldn’t read the sheet music anymore.

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.

The Connecticut River still runs. The Swift River Valley still lies drowned so that Boston could expand.

Henry Woods’s street in Enfield is still there, submerged alongside telephone poles, bare trees, fieldstones, and the razed house where Mary Ball Montgomery’s children were born.. The bones of the Indigenous people who first inhabited that valley remain beneath the Quabbin.

And I still make paintings about being haunted by ghosts.

©Macaulay Woods 2026, All rights reserved.