Connecticut commemorates the Holocaust every May with a solemn ceremony at the state Capitol building, a Victorian landmark that features an overlooked stone relief depicting a 1637 attack on a Pequot village that preceded what historians now view as a genocide.
There remains some debate over whether the attack led by John Mason, a Connecticut Colony founder honored with a statue in a niche on the Capitol, can be celebrated as Pequot War victory or a criminal massacre of women and children. Most accounts lean to the latter.
But there is no question that the document drafted by the victorious colonists to formally end the war, the Treaty of Hartford of 1638, directed that surviving Pequots be sold into slavery and stripped of their lands, history and tribal name. The text of the treaty speaks for itself.
And that meets the definition of genocide, David Simon, the director of the Yale Genocide Studies Program, said in written testimony submitted for a hearing Friday by the General Assembly’s Government Administration and Elections Committee.
The testimony was submitted in support of a resolution proposed by Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, that would condemn the Treaty of Hartford.
“This resolution is so meaningful for our tribe in so many ways, and we believe that this is long overdue — the condemnation of the genocidal provision of the 1638 Treaty of Hartford, an agreement that sought to erase the very existence of our people,” said LaToya Cluff, vice chair of the Mashantucket Pequots.
Osten, whose district includes the tribal lands of the Pequots and the Mohegans who warred with them as allies of the colonists, said she abandoned a similar effort last year, fearing it would be subsumed in the present-day debate over whether the Israel war on Gaza was an act of genocide.
The time seemed right to try again, she said.
“It is, in my opinion, of utmost importance that we, as a state and a governmental institution, recognize and condemn the actions induced by the language of this treaty, which was repeated over and over again across the United States as we populated this country, and our treatment of indigenous people, which I think cannot be minimized,” Osten told the committee.
Simon testified that his predecessor at the Yale program, the historian Ben Kiernan, included the Pequot War as an episode of genocide in his book, “Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.”
It would be another 310 years before the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide would convene in 1948 to define genocide as a crime.
“It’s central definition matches closely to what the Treaty of Hartford commanded,” Simon wrote.
Addressing such a past is always relevant, he wrote.
“I believe that we have a responsibility to acknowledge the complicated past in our own history and that we can only be faithfully educating the next generation to confront the challenges they may face if we do so in the awareness that we are not covering up historical wrongs,” Simon wrote.
Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, told Cluff, the tribal vice chair, he disagreed with such sentiments.
“The problem with these types of issues is that there are multiple sides of these stories, and I’m not taking a side by any stretch of the imagination,” Sampson said. “I don’t know enough about Pequot history or what happened in 1638.”
Osten’s resolution asks the General Assembly to “make a very powerful statement about something that I don’t think that the majority of our membership has any real knowledge,” Sampson said.
The text of the treaty is online and a quick read.
Cluff invited Sampson to visit her tribe’s museum and research center if he wanted to learn more.
Sampson said the treaty was struck by English colonists, more than a century before the colonies became a nation.
“I’m curious why you feel it’s necessary for an entirely different country, the United States of America, to address this issue. Have you brought this concern across the pond, you know, to England?” Sampson said. “And I’m just curious why it’s important for Connecticut to address it.”
Cluff replied that it is part of Connecticut’s history.
An effort four years ago to remove Mason’s statue failed. Cluff said the tribe still would like to see it removed and placed on display at the Old State House in a historical exhibit providing context.
“I think we should learn from history, and I think that’s important,” said Rep. Gale Mastrofrancesco, R-Wolcott. “Removing them actually takes them out of history.”
Cluff disagreed, saying erasing Mason from history is the last thing the tribe wants. It just doesn’t want him celebrated in a niche high in the Capitol overlooking Bushnell Park.