Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology

4. The Pequots

130 4·The Pequots The center of Pequot communal life was the area between the Thames and the Mystic rivers in present-day Connecticut. At the time of colonization, the Pequots numbered approximately thirteen thousand,and they controlled some two thousand square miles of territory. Undeniably a powerful force in colonial New England, they were a commanding presence before European contact as well. This long-standing dominance may be one reason that Mohegan and Narragansett leaders allied against the Pequots during the colonial period despite their earlier association with them in trade and kinship networks. Like the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and other groups in the area, the Pequots followed a traditional cosmology guided primarily by Cautantowwit, the creator, and Cheepi, a spirit who linked the living and the dead. These groups understood themselves to inhabit a world infused by the spiritual; powerful people, animals, and objects were referred to as manitou. Largely thanks to European colonial prejudices, the Pequots have been known historically as brutal aggressors. Although recent linguists link the name Pequot to elements of the landscape, and the archaeologist Robert Grumet notes that modern Pequots connect the name to an Algonquian word for“ally,” colonial English writers used the translation“destroyer,” a stigma that contributed to the tragic events and aftermath of the 1637 war. The conflict, sparked by trade and land disputes among the Pequots, the Mohegans, the Narragansetts, the Dutch, and various English colonists, led to the burning of the Pequot fort at Mystic by English militiamen—a massacre so terrible that Bay Colony settlers felt compelled to defend the act in print—and a swamp fight that ended Pequot military resistance. Colonial authorities secured their victory by forbidding survivors to call themselves Pequot and by forcing captives to work as their servants or selling them in the West Indies. The war may be considered a defining aspect of Pequot history; however, contrary to the assumption of many historians, it failed to achieve the extinction of the Pequot people. In fact, Pequot survivors immediately began to leave their enforced servitude, reclaim their identities, and establish settlements in New England. Eventually, they acquired reservation lands at Noank, Stonington , and (in 1666) Mashantucket, a settlement that the Pequot Nation holds to this day. Most Pequots converted to Christianity during the Great Awakening in the first half of the eighteenth century. William Apess, a well-known early The Pequots · 131 nineteenth-century Pequot writer, published the Christian testimonies of several Pequot women in 1833. His other writings include an autobiography and pointed criticisms of English colonial history and its continuing racist legacy. In the 1980s the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation successfully sued for land reparations and federal recognition. Today the nation operates several prominent businesses, including the Foxwoods Resort and Casino. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center offers an especially rich resource for Native American scholarship and, through its website and exhibits , helps to tell the continuing story of the Pequot people. Suggested Reading Apess, William. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Ed. Barry O’Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Cave, Alfred A. The Pequot War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Hauptman, Laurence M., and James D. Wherry, eds. The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation. Norman: Unversity of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center website.Available at http://www .pequotmuseum.org/. Accessed 30 June 2006. 132 Pequot Medicine Bundle The object in question here,a Pequot medicine bundle,consists of a torn and folded page from a King James Bible and the front left paw of a bear which were contained in a small bag made of woolen trade cloth. This bundle was buried with an eleven-year-old Pequot girl in her community cemetery on what is today the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. A portion of this bundle was preserved because of its contact with an iron object, which turned the organic materials into iron salts. The original size of the object is difficult to determine; it is estimated that the bag measured 5–6 inches by 5–6 inches. In 1993 the funeraryobjectswhichhadbeendisturbedduringtheconstructionof aprivatehomewere reburiedwiththehumanremainsatthetribalcemetery.Wehavenotreproducedanimage of anyportionof themedicinebundlebecauseof itsnatureasafuneraryobject.  Bundles, Bears, and Bibles Interpreting Seventeenth-Century Native“Texts” kevin a. mcbride The subject of this essay, the academic interpretation of funerary objects from a Mashantucket Pequot cemetery, is a very...