Discussions Continue on Haverhill’s Controversial Hannah Duston Statue After Resident Complaint

Hannah Duston still holds a hatchet three years after a Haverhill City Council subcommittee recommended the weapon be removed. (WHAV News photograph.)

Discussions on a controversial statue in GAR Park resurfaced last night amid a resident’s displeasure before the City Council.

The monument honors then-resident Hannah Duston, who in 1697 escaped her Native American captors after killing and scalping them. Resident Jonathan Plumb said he “felt compelled to speak out against generations of willed ignorance.”

“You have a statue across the street that commemorates the Massachusetts colonial government, which paid money for indigenous people’s scalps,” he said. “It was built in the year 1879 when our current national government was conducting or just finished conducting campaigns of indigenous dispossession and extermination.”

As WHAV reported in July, the Council in 2021 came to a compromise on the removal of the 1874 statue, where the statue’s original hatchet was to be removed and the word “savages” was to be removed from its inscription. Now-Council President Thomas J. Sullivan said at the time that the statue should remain within the park, while allowing the Abenaki to erect their own memorial.

Former Mayor James J. Fiorentini created the Native American Commemorative Task Force and, as WHAV previously reported, the group was tasked with addressing complex questions people have strong feelings about according to task force Chair Daniel Speers.

The statue was previously the target of vandalism. WHAV reported in 2021 that the statue was vandalized with red paint on or right before Thanksgiving, according to Police Chief Robert P. Pistone. Plumb weighed in on the vandalism.

“Someone could pour red paint over her head every Columbus Day and every Thanksgiving and it would never be bloody enough,” he said. “I marvel, I truly marvel at the lengths that this city has gone in the last few years to not tear down the statue of a woman that murdered children and butchered their bodies,” he said.

As WHAV reported in 2022, the task force visited the Hannah Duston statue in Boscawen, N.H., where members met with local residents and representatives of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook-Abenaki.

Three years later, the area remains unchanged, but Speers told WHAV in July “we have confidence we are on a positive track.”

Plumb criticized the city for failing to order the statue’s removal. “You can’t even bear to take down the statue of a murderer of indigenous children because she, to quote a member of the Council, is a ‘symbol of perseverance and survival,” he said. “Indeed, she is a symbol of the perseverance and survival of a system that dispossessed, that strips all of our words, that robs all of our relations to this land, of their fineness, of their richness.”

The Native American Commemorative Task Force will appear before the City Council at a future meeting, according to Sullivan. The date for the meeting was not announced at the time of reporting.

In other Council news, snowplow drivers this winter could see a pay increase of up to 19% as officials approved pay increases across the board, along with early sign-on bonuses for drivers who submit all required documents and complete inspections by Nov. 28.

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