A Home Called New England: A Celebration of Hearth and History
320
A Home Called New England: A Celebration of Hearth and History
320Hardcover(1st Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781493018468 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2017 |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 1,073,664 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.10(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Before the Ships Arrived
As long as twenty thousand years ago (some estimates say three times earlier than that) people lived, worked, played, and died in a place we now call New England. It was a place no one in that ancient world could have dreamed would someday be overrun by people from another world, a world named Europe.
What the early natives' world was like before Europeans arrived, observed, and wrote down what they saw, or thought they were seeing, we know remotely from traditions, stories, and objects handed down generation to generation within the many native tribes who staked out their portions of what is now New England. Because these early natives left no written history, we turn to archaeologists, paleontologists, reports of fishermen and explorers, and written accounts from the earliest settlers to fill in what we know about that distant, earlier earth.
Except for place names — and Indian place names are everywhere in New England — little visible evidence exists of the Indian tribes who lived here when the English began landing, settling, expanding, consolidating, and finally and fully taking over.
But look far enough, dig deep enough, and you glimpse those long-ago civilizations. Unlike the Southwest United States, where remains of early native villages and shelters are still quite visible, New England's Native Americans lived in houses built of hide, bark, bulrushes, and branches, all long gone.
Today, what most of us understand about these early people can be boiled down to little more than a chapter in a middle-school history book. Yet during those many thousands of years before concepts of land ownership, written language, firearms, alcohol, and waste arrived in North America, civilization was already well established here.
Not just one civilization, but a lot of them.
Understanding What Was
These first "New Englanders" had families, routines, jobs, and many dialects of the same language, Algonquian. They fished, clammed, harvested fruits and nuts, grew corn and other crops, hunted every type of wild animal, and made maximum use of the land, forests, rivers, lakes, seas — all their many resources for food, shelter, and livelihood.
"They were our first environmentalists," says Dr. Lucianne Lavin, director of Research and Collections at the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, Connecticut. "They were sophisticated about nature. They would do controlled burns to make hunting better and clear out the undergrowth, to make the ground better for certain plants to grow. They did management of forests, lands, fisheries."
They also lived in communities of all sizes and in houses of all types, including wigwams, tepees, and longhouses. They had leaders, rivalries, wars, marriages, divorces, friends, and enemies.
Year after year they followed the seasons and the food.
Through [carbon] dating, DNA testing, and careful scientific examination of physical evidence, most of it long buried, what scientists know about early native culture comes from what they've dug up.
Despite the vast amount of objects, relics, and human remains that scientists, farmers, and amateurs archeologists have unearthed, that distant past remains murky and secretive.
Historians know the English, French, and Spanish versions of what's called "post contact" Indian history — what native life and culture looked like to the early European arrivals. Yet the full substance of New England native culture that existed before Europeans "discovered" them remains steadfastly opaque to us, a black hole in history as deep, remote, and as tantalizing as a distant star or the Stone Age itself.
"We only dig up the imperishables," anthropologist and American Indian expert Lavin says. To put it another way, we see only the fragments the early people left behind. What we don't see, she adds, is the "rich texture of their lives."
Lavin has spent a career finding, studying, and understanding the physical evidence of native culture in the Northeast to understand that complex texture.
Importing Europe into the New World
The period of AD 1200–1500 found the New England Indian tribes at their cultural and population peaks. But as Europeans began landing, exploring, claiming, and settling North America, unsurprisingly, native populations began to decline, Lavin said.
Of course the English at Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth were not the first outsiders to visit the New World.
The first Europeans to make contact were the Norse, whose presence mostly was confined to what became the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The Vikings likely traded with natives they came across — when they weren't slaughtering them. What's thought to be a Norse coin, though its provenance is unproven, is a thing called the Maine Penny or the Goddard Coin, which was dug up in 1957 near Maine's Penobscot Bay. If real, it would establish the Viking contact with an area of New England that supported a flourishing native culture, the Penobscot Nation.
After the Vikings came the Spanish, Italians (the very English-sounding John Cabot, sent by Henry VII to explore North America, was born Giovanni Cabato in Venice), French, Dutch, and the English — first in the Roanoke Colony of Virginia in 1586, then Jamestown Colony in 1607, then the Plymouth Colony in 1620, where the English founded what became a series of colonies that eventually melded into a single New England.
In the process of discovery, settlement, and resource exploitation, Europeans nearly wiped out the native population. They did not accomplish this feat by use of their relatively sophisticated weapons, which they did not hesitate to use, but through a means that the greatest killers in history could have appreciated — and found more efficient.
The common diseases that Europeans had built up immunities to over centuries "were new and deadly to the Indians," Lavin said. That could explain why, in 1620, the Pilgrims on Cape Cod found evidence of an empty and apparently abandoned village. Many scholars believe that disease brought much earlier by French or Norse explorers and traders to North America may have spread, sickened, and killed that local population and others.
Alternately, some historians believe that the Indian settlement the Pilgrims found was seasonally abandoned until the natives returned from their inland winter settlement.
Fortunately for the Pilgrims, whatever had become of the Indians in what came to be called Plymouth, those natives who recently had decamped from Cape Cod left caches of seed corn for later planting. Lifesaving seed corn, as it turned out for the English. Although the Pilgrims came to farm, they were fairly unprepared for the job, because the Mayflower was so tiny that each family could bring a very small and limited amount of possessions.
A Plague by Any Other Name
Who had lived in the village? Where had they gone? The National Institutes of Health's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, explores a theory.
In the few years before the Pilgrims arrived, "most Native Americans living on the southeastern coast of present-day Massachusetts died from a mysterious disease," say the article's authors, Dr. John S. Marr and epidemiologist John T. Cathey. "Classic explanations have included yellow fever, smallpox, and plague. Chicken pox and trichinosis are among more recent proposals."
Marr and Cathey suggest it was none of these classic diseases, nor was it cold, flu, or other common diseases easily transmitted from person to person, for which the Indians had no built-up resistance.
"We suggest an additional candidate," they write: a bacteria-spread kidney and liver disease, "leptospirosis complicated by Weil syndrome," a serious bacterial infection. Marr and Cathey speculate that rats from European ships came ashore and infected "reservoirs and contaminated land and fresh water. ... Local ecology and ... practices of the native population favored exposure and were not shared by Europeans. Reduction of the population may have been incremental, episodic, and continuous; local customs continuously exposed this population ... over months or years."
Standard accounts of the founding of the first New England colony ordinarily fail to mention that disease brought by Europeans themselves "may have been instrumental to the near annihilation of Native Americans, which facilitated successful colonization of the Massachusetts Bay area."
The English had long ago developed immunities to the disease. The immune systems of the native population were ambushed and helpless against European disease. Natives who had died off by the time the Pilgrims arrived in 1620 could have contracted the disease from rats that had escaped from the ships of "Portuguese, Breton, and Bristol fishermen; Basque whalers; French fur traders; or English codders [fishermen] who had established a presence on the North Atlantic coast since the early sixteenth century," the National Institute of Health (NIH) reports.
The idea of European diseases leading to the death of Indians is not found in most school history texts, which tend to treat the Pilgrims as the first Europeans to set foot on New England soil. Yet well before 1620 Samuel de Champlain noted "100 Spanish sails, 20–30 Basque whalers, 150 French and Breton fishing ships, and 50 English sails along the coast of Newfoundland."
The NIH report adds that "English traders and fishermen had daily contact with indigenous persons but lived on ships or in segregated enclaves on land where salt-dried codfish stations (favored by the English) were built along Massachusetts Bay."
The earliest Europeans found "crippled Indian populations," Dr. Lavin said. "Disease, major epidemics — these could've been plague, smallpox, measles. ... They were also dying from childhood diseases," she said. "They had no resistance." In other words, measles, mumps, chicken pox, the flu — illness that most of us have experienced and lived to tell about — might well have killed any native without the immunities we take for granted.
Marr and Cathey write that the name "Squanto has entered American history and folklore as one of the last of the Patuxets, the man who assisted the Pilgrims in 1620. He was one of the few survivors of an epidemic that was crucial to the success of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies because remaining Indians had little capacity to resist the new settlers."
Two years later, "after having fever and a nosebleed, Squanto died of what was then referred to as 'the Indian disease.' "
Before Sails Appeared on the Horizon
To most historians and native people, the scores of centuries before Europeans arrived in North America are called the "pre-contact" period.
As there were no observant outsiders in North America during those pre-European centuries to chronicle the lives and customs of the people, we go to the earliest written descriptions and to archeologists, scholars, and existing tribes to help create a mind's-eye vision of what New England was like before sails appeared on the horizon.
The European discovery (or invasion, depending on perspective) occurred during the period of North American Indian culture that's now called the Late Woodlands period, a time when the New England tribes had a "very balanced society," Lavin said. "They lived in villages; they were excellent at hunting, fishing, and growing a great variety of foodstuffs."
"There was constantly movement in seasons," said Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, medicine woman and historian for the Mohegan tribe in Mashantucket, Connecticut (both town and state names are Indian words; Mashantucket is the native word for "western," as in the western tribe of Mohegans). "They would generally go back to the same place in summer, a different place in winter. In summer the huts had a different covering than in the winter. In the winter they were covered with heavy bark. In summer they would have a cover of cattails."
A Happened-Upon Snapshot of Native Culture
Before the English at Plymouth had encountered a single native, they explored the area, dressed in armor and equipped with swords and muskets. On one foray a scouting party discovered fields of recently harvested corn. Going farther they came to the remains of a small village, either an abandoned one or a seasonal one.
As recounted by Edward Winslow and William Bradford, both early governors of Plymouth Colony, the group set about discovering what they could of the mysterious inhabitants — the savages (usually referred to in the English of that day as "salvages") of Cape Cod. What they found suggests both the existence of a well-developed civilization in the modern sense of the word, as well as evidence to the Pilgrims that they were not the first Europeans to set foot on the soil of New England.
In Mourt's Relation, a sort of travel book published in London in 1622 and subtitled A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England, we read original observations of native life:
We found a place like a grave, but it was much bigger and longer than any we had yet seen ... and resolved to dig it up, where we found, first a mat, and under that a fair bow, and there another mat, and under that a board about three quarters long, finely carved and painted, with three tines, or broaches, on the top, like a crown. Also between the mats we found bowls, trays, dishes, and such like trinkets.
At length we came to a fair new mat, and under that two bundles, the one bigger, the other less. We opened the greater and found in it a great quantity of fine and perfect red powder, and in it the bones and skull of a man. The skull had fine yellow hair still on it, and some of the flesh unconsumed; there was bound up with it a knife, a packneedle, and two or three old iron things. It was bound up in a sailor's canvas cassock, and a pair of cloth breeches. The red powder was a kind of embalment, and yielded a strong, but not offensive smell; it was as fine as any flour.
We opened the less bundle likewise, and found of the same powder in it, and the bones and head of a little child. About the legs and other parts of it was bound strings and bracelets of fine white beads; there was also by it a little bow, about three quarters long, and some other odd knacks. We brought sundry of the prettiest things away with us, and covered the corpse up again. After this, we digged in sundry like places, but found no more corn, nor anything else but graves. ...
Modern Day Mohegan
Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel is an author, storyteller, and historian for the Mohegan tribe. She's related on one side of her ancestry, through nearly a dozen generations, to Uncas, a seventeenth-century sachem of the Mohegans. Another strain of her history goes back to the Mayflower. Her office in Mashantucket, Connecticut, northeast of New London, is part of the tribal museum and library.
Her aunt Gladys Tantaquidgeon was a Mohegan tribal medicine woman, anthropologist, author, tribal council member, and elder. Beginning in 1934, she worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs for more than a decade. She published several books about Native American traditional medicine and about healing with plants. In 1994 she was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame. She was the third of seven children born to Mohegan parents, John and Harriet Fielding Tantaquidgeon, on Mohegan Hill in Quinnetucket (Uncasville, in New London County, Connecticut). She was a tenth-generation descendant of the Mohegan chief Uncas.
Beside the Water
Water is vital to all living things, but to the early natives, water was also a source of food, transportation, and culture. Before Europeans arrived, native culture grew up around water — ocean, rivers, and lakes.
"Thinking of waterways is important. New England is a network of both rivers and lakes," Zobel said
For her tribe, the Mohegans, the principal waterway is the Connecticut River. "What is a modern native New Englander? Connections through genealogy and religion. But it's all still along that river — all the people who lived within a distance of utilitarian usage of that river."
At the end of the Connecticut River is Long Island Sound, another source of transportation, trade, and food. "The coast is a connector," she said. "You can easily scoot up both river and coast. When you get to Maine, you've got a miasma of rivers."
Countless rivers, streams, and lakes throughout New England still bear their original Indian names. "Every name in native New England talks about the place," she said. "It tells you something about the environment. Misquamicut means 'the place where the salmon run.' New England still has a lot of the names, original names — New England has a wonderful remembrance of native words built into its landscape."
Native Americans never named places after people. "The place goes on forever," Zobel said. "People are transitory. The land goes on." A tribe's name is synonymous with the place. "This is true of all the tribes in New England. When I visit a place, I visit the place and not a person."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Home Called New England"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Duo Dickinson and Steve Culpepper.
Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Introduction: At Home in a New England, iv,
1. Before the Ships Arrived, 1,
2. Building a New England, 25,
3. Hearth and Home, 73,
4. Through War to Independence, 109,
5. From Factory Towns through Two World Wars, 167,
6. Building a New Culture, 187,
7. Where We Live Now, 245,
Appendix A: Native American Place Names Across New England, 275,
Appendix B: The Tribes of New England Today, 287,
Index, 296,
Acknowledgments, 307,
About the Authors, 308,