Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880

5 Reality and Imagery

chapter five Reality and Imagery On February 12, 1822, Mercy Ann Nonesuch (d. 1915, figure 5) was born in a wigwam to the last Indian family on the Niantic reserve. She was bound out to white families until 1846 when she married Henry Matthews, a Mohegan stonemason who held a good-sized farm on the tribal reserve. A reporter who interviewed them around 1870 noted that they lived in “an end-frame house of moderate size, comfortably furnished, scrupulously neat,” with a parlor organ, many plants, two Bibles, and a picture of Samson Occom. Mercy and Henry were also traditionalists: she was an authority on spiritual and herbal medicine, and he made baskets for the Wigwam Festival and by 1903 served as the Mohegan chief.1 The Narragansett Council similarly described New England Indian culture in the mid-nineteenth century as combining “improvements” and traditions. “The Greatest part of our tribe live as well as the commontry [sic] of people we Raise pork & Beef and poultry &c.” While some of the men were away at sea, many others in the tribe were “trades men and women such as carpenters, coopers, shoe makers, tailors, weavers.” Their reserve provided land for farming; a swamp “for building Boards Shingles Ceder poles for fencing our Lands etc. [and] the old women get Bark for bottoming chairs, stuff for Baskets Brooms &c.”; and ponds and estuaries for “Salt water fish Such as Alewives and white fish and various kinds of fresh water fish.” Amid this activity, the tribe’s church and school served as cultural and social centers.2 Some Anglo-Americans recognized the complexity of contemporary Native life. In 1858, Rhode Island’s Narragansett commissioner wrote that the general condition of the tribe had improved over past few years, with “comfortable dwell- ings” and more temperate habits; some men went to sea and “few” farmed, but many were “masons, stone cutters, and wallers, [who] command good wages for their work.” Three years later, John Milton Earle reported that although the material culture and moral condition of Indians in Massachusetts were comparable to whites of similar incomes and social status, they were still “a race naturally inclined to a roving and unsettled life.” He noted, “Nearly all of the males, first or last, engage in seafaring as an occupation,” and as a result “are often absent for 144 t r i b e , r a c e , h i s t o r y Figure 5. Mercy Ann Nonsuch, Niantic, 1912. Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian. years at a time, frequently without their friends knowing where they are. The women, left behind, seek employment wherever it can be had, usually in the neighboring towns and cities.” Earle’s report also emphasized the continued importance to Indian communities of their protected reserves and separate legal status.3 By the outbreak of the Civil War, Indians were entangled in the region’s political and economic structures, even as in many ways they remained separate. Tribes with reserves obtained state funds for schools and were often visited by politicians and intellectuals. Many of their members continued to find work off the reservation; at the same time, more of the men returned in their late 20s to establish farms and families. State officials described nearly all tribes as more stable and better off, and statistics show increasing average ages and sexual balances, although some smaller groups and individual survivors seemed noticeably poorer and more prone to the socioeconomic and moral problems associated by officials with transient peoples. Families and individuals residing in towns and cities lived and worked alongside blacks or whites, even as many maintained their tribal identities and connections. Indians also continued to favor evangelical churches and to have a reputation for informal and multiple marriages and a tendency toward alcohol abuse—although these characteristics were also linked to New England’s plebian class. Thus, Indians continued to maintain their unique identities while illuminating often-cloaked aspects of class and race in the region. From the beginning of colonization, Natives were forced to find new ways of meeting the perceptions and expectations of the newcomers. This aspect of Indianwhite relationships remained significant in the middle of the nineteenth century even as Anglo-American perceptions of Indians in the region shifted noticeably. The New England intellectuals and magistrates involved in the interconnected movements of social reform and sentimentalism forged a new vision...