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July 9 - July 14, 2021
Indeed, the master narrative led to such surprising conclusions about Native American societies before the arrival of Europeans that it stirred up an intellectual firestorm.
In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.
Tisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of people whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years. And it is true that I refer to him as an Indian, because the label is useful shorthand; so would his descendants, and for much the same reason. But “Indian” was not a category that Tisquantum himself would have recognized, any more than the inhabitants of the same area today would call themselves “Western Hemisphereans.”
Patuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the Wampanoag confederation. In turn, the Wampanoag were part of a tripartite alliance with two other confederations: the Nauset, which comprised some thirty groups on Cape Cod; and the Massachusett, several dozen villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay.
In Massachusett, the name for the New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the People of the First Light.
Because rising sea levels continually flooded the shore, marshy Cape Cod did not fully lock into its contemporary configuration until about 1000 B.C. By that time the Dawnland had evolved into something more attractive: an ecological crazy quilt of wet maple forests, shellfish-studded tidal estuaries, thick highland woods, mossy bogs full of cranberries and orchids, fractally complex snarls of sandbars and beachfront, and fire-swept stands of pitch pine—“tremendous variety even within the compass of a few miles,” as the ecological historian William Cronon put it.
Among them is “glottochronology,” the attempt to estimate how long ago two languages separated from a common ancestor by evaluating their degree of divergence on a list of key words.
The Hopewell culture introduced monumental earthworks and, possibly, agriculture to the rest of the cold North. Although Hopewell villages were as small as those of their more egalitarian neighbors, they were stratified, with priestly rulers controlling the rest of the populace. Archaeologists have found no evidence of large-scale warfare at this time, and thus suggest that Hopewell probably did not achieve its dominance by conquest.
Hopewell itself declined around 400 A.D. But its trade network remained intact. Shell beads from Florida, obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, and mica from Tennessee found their way to the Northeast. Borrowing technology and ideas from the Midwest, the nomadic peoples of New England transformed their societies.
the nomadic peoples of New England transformed their societies. By the end of the first millennium A.D., agriculture was spreading rapidly and the region was becoming an unusual patchwork of communities, each with its preferred terrain, way of subsistence, and cultural style.
New England’s major river valleys, by contrast, held large, permanent villages, many nestled in constellations of suburban hamlets and hunting camps.
Because extensive fields of maize, beans, and squash surrounded every home, these settlements sprawled along the Connecticut, Charles, and other river valleys for miles, one town bumping up against the other.
Unlike the upland hunters, the Indians on the rivers and coastline did not roam the land; instead, most seem to have moved between a summer place and a winter place, like affluent snowbirds alternating between Manhattan and Miami.
Each community was constantly “joining and splitting like quicksilver in a fluid pattern within its bounds,” wrote Kathleen J. Bragdon, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary—a type of settlement, she remarked, with “no name in the archaeological or anthropological literature.”
the most important fish harvest came in late spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream that cut through the village. So numerous were the fish, and so driven, that when mischievous boys walled off the stream with stones the alewives would leap the barrier—silver bodies gleaming in the sun—and proceed upstream.
English visitors did not find this arrangement peculiar; chimneys were just coming into use in Britain, and most homes there, including those of the wealthy, were still heated by fires beneath central roof holes.
Nor did the English regard the Dawnland wetu as primitive; its multiple layers of mats, which trapped insulating layers of air, were “warmer than our English houses,” sighed the colonist William Wood.
Wood did not conceal his admiration for the way Indian mats “deny entrance to any drop of rain, though ...
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Although Europeans bemoaned the lack of salt in Indian cuisine, they thought it nourishing. According to one modern reconstruction, Dawnland diets at the time averaged about 2,500 calories a day, better than those usual in famine-racked Europe.
Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving—more so than English families, some thought.
Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development, and kept their offspring close by until marriage. (Jarringly, to the present-day eye, some Pilgrims interpreted this as sparing the rod.)
The primary goal of Dawnland education was molding character. Men and women were expected to be brave, hardy, honest, and uncomplaining.
Tisquantum’s regimen was probably tougher than that of his friends, according to Salisbury, the Smith College historian, for it seems that he was selected to become a pniese, a kind of counselor-bodyguard to the sachem.
Meanwhile, the Wampanoag were rivals and enemies of the Narragansett and Pequots to the west and the many groups of Abenaki to the north.
Most of those people lived in shoreline communities, where rising numbers were beginning to change agriculture from an option to a necessity. These bigger settlements required more centralized administration; natural resources like good land and spawning streams, though not scarce, now needed to be managed. In consequence, boundaries between groups were becoming more formal. Sachems, given more power and more to defend, pushed against each other harder. Political tensions were constant.
Armed conflict was frequent but brief and mild by European standards. The casus belli was usually the desire to avenge an insult or gain status, not the wish for conquest.
Now and then, as a sign of victory, slain foes were scalped, much as British skirmishes with the Irish sometimes finished with a parade of Irish heads on pikes.
Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family, and familiar custom. But the world outside, as Thomas put it, was “a maze of confusing actions and individuals fighting to maintain an existence in the shadow of change.” And that was before the Europeans showed up.
British fishing vessels may have reached Newfoundland as early as the 1480s and areas to the south soon after. In 1501, just nine years after Columbus’s first voyage, the Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real abducted fifty-odd Indians from Maine. Examining the captives, Corte-Real found to his astonishment that two were wearing items from Venice: a broken sword and two silver rings.
Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens.
Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in—“as proper men and women for feature and limbes as can be founde,” in the words of the rebellious Pilgrim Thomas Morton.
the Pilgrims, who regarded personal adornment as a species of idolatry, were dismayed by what they saw as the indigenous penchant for foppery.
As a rule, young men wore it long on one side, in an equine mane, but cropped the other side short, which prevented it from getting tangled in their bow strings. But sometimes they cut their hair into such wild patterns that attempting to imitate them, Wood sniffed, “would torture the wits of a curious barber.”
(Not everyone in England saw it that way. Inspired by asymmetrical Indian coiffures, seventeenth-century London blades wore long, loose hanks of hair known as “lovelocks.” The imitation was entirely appropriate; much as European gentlemen took care to announce themselves in wigs and flamboyantly colored silk suits, Indian blades wore their hair and tattoos to proclaim their status as men of import and style.)
Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain smelly. (The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal cleanliness.)
The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?
To the Europeans’ confusion, their steel and cloth did not interest the Narragansett, who wanted to swap only for “little bells, blue crystals, and other trinkets to put in the ear or around the neck.” On Verrazzano’s next stop, the Maine coast, the Abenaki did want steel and cloth—demanded them, in fact. But up north the friendly welcome had vanished.
unlike the Narragansett, the Abenaki had long experience with Europeans.
During the century after Verrazzano Europeans were regular visitors to the Dawnland, usually fishing, sometimes trading, occasionally kidnapping natives as souvenirs. (Verrazzano had grabbed one himself, a boy of about eight.) By 1610 Britain alone had about two hundred vessels operating off Newfoundland and New England; hundreds more came from France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy.
A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges—British, despite the name—tried to found a community in Maine. It began with more people than the Pilgrims’ later venture in Plymouth and was better organized and supplied. Nonetheless, the local Indians, numerous and well armed, killed eleven colonists and drove the rest back home within months.
Despite the entertainment, the Patuxet eventually got tired of the foreigners camping out on their land. Giving their guests a subtle hint that they should be moving on, 140 armed locals surrounded their encampment. Next day the Patuxet burned down the woodlands where Pring and his men were working. The foreigners left within hours.
At some point a quarrel occurred and bows were drawn, Smith said, “fortie or fiftie” Patuxet surrounding him. His account is vague, but one imagines that the Indians were hinting at a limit to his stay. In any case, the visit ended cordially enough, and Smith returned to Maine and then England.
Smith left his lieutenant, Thomas Hunt, behind in Maine to finish loading the other ship with dried fish. Without consulting Smith, Hunt decided to visit Patuxet. Taking advantage of the Indians’ recent good experience with English visitors, he invited people to come aboard.
In Hunt’s wake the Patuxet community raged, as did the rest of the Wampanoag confederacy and the Nauset. The sachems vowed not to let foreigners rest on their shores again. Because of the “worthlesse” Hunt, lamented Gorges, the would-be colonizer of Maine, “a warre [was] now new begunne between the inhabitants of those parts, and us.”
About two years after Hunt’s offenses, a French ship wrecked at the tip of Cape Cod. Its crew built a rude shelter with a defensive wall made from poles. The Nauset, hidden outside, picked off the sailors one by one until only five were left. They captured the five and sent them to groups victimized by European kidnappers. Another French vessel anchored in Boston Harbor at about the same time. The Massachusett killed everyone aboard and set the ship afire.
it was not until I was poking through the scattered references to Billington that it occurred to me that my ancestor, like everyone else in the colony, had voluntarily enlisted in a venture that had him arriving in New England without food or shelter six weeks before winter.
In Europe, the Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the theory that they could use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting around Cape Cod for a good place to land, during which time many colonists became sick and died.
The colonists had intended to produce their own food, but inexplicably neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules, or horses. To be sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by farming but by catching fish for export to Britain.