COLUMN LEFT/ GEORGE BLACK : Indian Lands, White Man’s Real Estate : In the quiet corners of Connecticut, memorials of slaughter and rapine.

History is made, and its meaning debated, not only in the eye of network television but also in quiet, unobtrusive places like the hills and hidden valleys of this corner of western Connecticut.

At first glance, this is the United States at its quietest and whitest, seemingly immune to the raging arguments about multiculturalism and political correctness that seize headlines when they take place at Stanford or the Smithsonian. Yet here, in microcosm, are all the same struggles over who is to control this country’s history and its sense of identity.

This area is full of the names of people who have become invisible--Waramaug and Naugatuck, Housatonic and Quassapaug. Even the English place-names often reflect the power relations that defined ownership of the land and led to the extinction of its earliest inhabitants. Nearby Kettletown, for example, is so called because a brass kettle was its purchase price, set by the 17th-Century colonists.

Tucked away at the end of a forest trail near the town of Washington is a small, lovely museum run by the American Indian Archeological Institute. A new exhibit opened there this summer, called “As we tell our stories.”

As the official celebrations of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas build in volume and vulgarity, some long-forgotten stories bear retelling. One of these took place on an idyllic May dawn in 1637, in what is now the harbor town of Mystic:

After morning prayers, Col. John Mason, commander of the Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay militia, laid siege to a Pequot Indian village. Most of those who were hacked or burned to death that day--as many as 600 of them--were women, children and old people.

Cotton Mather later described the scene: “It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”

The Connecticut Colony declared that it would punish any Pequot who “speakes against the only living and true God.” Members of the militia were rewarded with large grants of land in the Pequot territories, and Mason got an island to himself, which still bears his name. A statue in Mystic honors Mason, but makes no mention of the massacre.

The crux of the colonists’ claims to the coveted land often was that the Indians had not established their right of ownership. This argument was long used against the Schaghticoke, Weantinock and Pootatuck Indians of the northwestern portion of the state.

One of the standard texts on this part of the country is John DeForest’s “History of the Indians of Connecticut,” published in 1851. It includes a map of the state as it was in 1630, which conveniently shows the northwest as a trackless wilderness, inhabited only by “the birds and wild beasts who made it their home.”

Archeology, which is the most political of sciences if you know how to read it, has proved that this is nonsense. Potsherds, woodworking tools and arrowheads displayed in the Washington museum’s exhibit show 10 centuries of continuous Indian settlement. Yet an artful display panel of contemporary texts, from the New York Times Magazine to obscure academic papers, demonstrates how the original lie has become received wisdom.

DeForest’s history was even cited by the state of Connecticut as recently as last year in a dispute with the Schaghticoke, to prove that their lands did not meet the federal definition of “Indian country.” But why should the Indians be expected to seek title, retorted one Shaghticoke woman. “We could not own the land, just in the same way as you could not own the sky.”

On a side wall of the museum are some news clippings about the giant Hydro-Quebec project on Canada’s James Bay, the pet scheme of Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa. When completed, James Bay will affect an area the size of Germany, leaving the ancestral hunting lands of the Cree underwater so that New Englanders and New Yorkers can enjoy cheap electricity.

This in a nutshell is the Indians’ complaint about the white man: That he never saw a piece of land without thinking of it as real estate, something to be carved up and paved over for profit. And having done so, he writes the law, and the historical record, accordingly. But there are other histories, too, and other ways of thinking about the land, and they are all around us--if only we know where to look.