BOSTON – The fierce monuments honor an English colonist who, legend has it, slaughtered her Native American captors after the gruesome killing of her baby.
But the statues to Hannah Duston — one in Massachusetts where she grips a hatchet and another in New Hampshire where she clutches a bundle of scalps — are being reconsidered amid the nationwide reckoning on racism and controversial public monuments.
Historians, Native Americans and even some of Duston's ancestors argue that many of the details of the 17th-century story are lost in the telling, such as the fact that many of the victims weren't even Indigenous warriors, but children.