THE CAPTIVE

Once upon a time in a land not far away, a Queen lived by the name of Weetamoe. Her people inhabited a world in balance with Nature, and her culture had survived tens of thousands of years until disease and a religion that fueled a movement destroyed this world in just a few generations.

During Weetamoe’s revolt against injustice, and in her case the English invaders, her allies captured a Puritan minister's wife by the name of Mary Rowlandson. For a brief period, Mary was Weetamoe's slave. Weetamoe's short-lived reign ended as the European tsunami of disease and destruction swept over her and all the Native Tribes living on the American continent.

Consider this:

Every period of the past, when understood in it's own terms, is immediate to the present.

David Hackett Fischer.

Fischer's statement haunts me. As a descendent of Quaker and Puritan invaders, sometimes erroneously referred to as founding fathers, I am appalled at the violence, which has come down through the ages and continues to this day in the name of misnomers such as: PROGRESS? or DEMOCRACY? or TRUTH? To be fair, had my Quaker ancestors won the day, the Native Tribes might have survived more intact, although even devout Quakers such as Jonathan Dickinson owned slaves in the 17th Century.

Historians love to point out that Puritan Massachusetts won the city-on-the-hill game over Quaker Rhode Island. By comparing the two states a 100 years after the English migration that began in earnest around 1630, researchers find that Puritan-driven societies built more churches, farms, and buildings. Does the definition of civilization have to exclude wild animals, trees, and water sans-pollution? What useful knowledge to humanity did the pigs and cows of New England trample? What insight into human relations did religious dogma extirpate? Psychologists today explore the benefits to society of not whipping children, something Native People practised three hundred years ago.

The Captive is a dramatic play in two Acts.

I recently started to write this play during my graduate playwrighting workshop at the University Of New Orleans Maybe the miracle of my school surviving the Katrina flood will start a chain of miracles and resurrect a Queen.

To Be Continued...


© Conrad Reeder
All Rights Reserved

Painting: Indian Princess by Anthony Gruerio