The Gathering Place

Memory Lands ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
River Valley ◽  
Connecticut River ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
Tribal Communities ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gathering Place

This chapter focuses on the “Great River” (Kwinitekw or Connecticut River) that runs the length of the Northeast, and the multi-layered histories involved at its midpoint. At Peskeomskut, Algonquians from multiple tribal communities had gathered for thousands of years for fishing, planting, and socializing. This important waterfall came under attack in May 1676 in the latter stages of King Philip’s War, as colonial troops endeavoured to subdue and displace Algonquians who had not surrendered by that point in the conflict. These tensions arose from several decades of colonization in the river valley, which entangled Natives and colonizers in fur-trading relationships that sometimes spiralled into coercion and violence. Following the massacre of 1676 (led by William Turner), many Algonquian survivors regrouped with Native communities in other parts of the Northeast or followed a widespread diaspora in pursuit of safety. The chapter turns to how colonists at places like Deerfield, Massachusetts engaged in remembrance of the violences at the falls and nearby “Bloody Brook,” through ephemeral as well as more tangible processes. It accounts for the emergence of heritage organizations like the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, which pursued an extensive place-marking campaign in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Printer’s Revolt: A Narrative of the Captivity of James the Printer

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Brooks
Keyword(s):  
River Valley ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Connecticut River ◽  
Guerilla Warfare ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Connecticut River Valley

This chapter explores the beginning of King Philip’s War in the Nipmuc country, focusing not only on Native responses and resistance but also on the colonial drive toward containment, charged by fear of unknown spaces and increased racialization of “Indians.” The Nipmuc scholar James Printer and his mission community of Hassanamesit are a center from which the story spirals out to the broader Nipmuc country, the Connecticut River Valley, and Massachusetts colony. This chapter highlights Nipmuc gatherings at the sanctuary of Menimesit and the ambush and standoff at Quaboag, known as “Wheeler’s Surprise,” and the Brookfield siege, focusing on strategic Indigenous guerilla warfare tactics and environmental knowledge. It also focuses on Indigenous diplomacy, including the arrival of Metacom in Nipmuc country. James and his kin at first attempted to avoid any embroilment in the burgeoning war but soon found themselves drawn into the conflict, as scouts serving colonial companies and captives taken in colonial campaigns. This chapter conveys the context of James’s own captivity by Massachusetts forces and his imprisonment in Cambridge, the site of his earlier education.

The Hoe Complex of the Connecticut Valley

1946 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Development ◽  
River Valley ◽  
Connecticut River ◽  
Volcanic Origin ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Occupied Territory ◽  
Connecticut River Valley ◽  
Connecticut Valley

The aboriginal agriculturists discussed here lived in a somewhat secluded environment, the Connecticut River Valley from Bellows Falls to the Connecticut line. In this long-occupied territory, surrounded by high ridges of volcanic origin, heavily wooded, and watered by innumerable spring-fed streams, the cultural development of the inhabitants was apparently of a homogeneous nature. As late as 1636, when the English began to establish plantations throughout the valley, the natives were found united in a well-defined River Confederacy, with frequent intercourse maintained through river travel. While trade routes probably connected this section with many other parts of the country, cultural contacts had apparently persisted among the river tribes in spite of occasional raids of warlike groups from other regions.

The Captive’s Lament: Reinterpreting Rowlandson’s Narrative

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
River Valley ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Connecticut River ◽  
Mary Rowlandson ◽  
Connecticut River Valley ◽  
Indigenous Geographies

This chapter presents a nuanced close reading of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God . . . A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, framed within Indigenous geographies. Although Rowlandson conveyed a picture of a forbidding wilderness, she traveled through an intricately mapped network of Indigenous people and places, including the Nipmuc interior and the Connecticut River Valley. This chapter provides an alternative map and narrative of Rowlandson’s “removes” through Native towns and territories and elucidates the ways in which the stories of Weetamoo, James Printer, and Mary Rowlandson intertwined. Shortly after the raid on her town of Lancaster, Rowlandson was carried to the Nipmuc stronghold of Menimesit, where she encountered James and his extended family, and was given to Weetamoo, whom she followed deep into the interior of Nipmuc and Sokoki countries, as the saunkskwa sought protective sanctuaries for Native families who were evading colonial troops.

Algonquian Diasporas

Memory Lands ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Community Members ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Native American Tribes

This chapter examines how King Philip’s War gave rise to a significant but often ignored or misperceived history of bondage, enslavement, and diaspora that took Native Americans far from their northeast homelands, and subjected them to a range of brutal conditions across an Atlantic World. It focuses on Algonquians’ transits into captivity as a consequence of the war, and historicizes this process within longer trajectories of European subjugation of Indigenous populations for labor. The chapter examines how Algonquian individuals and families were forcibly placed into New England colonial as well as Native communities at the war’s conclusion, and how others were transported out of the region for sale across the Atlantic World. The case of King Philip’s wife and son is especially complex, and the chapter considers how traditions around their purported sale into slavery in Bermuda interact with challenging racial politics and archival traces. Modern-day “reconnection” events have linked St. David’s Island community members in Bermuda to Native American tribes in New England. The chapter also reflects on wider dimensions of this Algonquian diaspora, which likely brought Natives to the Caribbean, Azores, and Tangier in North Africa, and propelled Native migrants/refugees into Wabanaki homelands.

Protesting the “Perfect City”

Memory Lands ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Sewage Treatment ◽  
Sewage Treatment Plant ◽  
Treatment Plant ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Urban Indians ◽  
Tribal Communities ◽  
Dugout Canoes ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
Indigenous Perspectives ◽  
The City

This chapter follows Native and Euro-American communities in eastern Massachusetts through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining a series of commemorations and counterprotests that unfolded in urbanizing areas and related sites. It analyzes how Bostonians’ conceptions of the city and modernity tended to exclude Native peoples from both, instead relegating them to the past—despite the presence of numerous “Urban Indians” in the growing metropolis, who were seeking employment and social opportunities. It considers a series of pageants and historical markers erected across the Commonwealth, as well as Native pushback against dominant Euro-American narratives about history, such as a 1970 gathering in Patuxet/Plymouth, Massachusetts that foregrounded Indigenous perspectives and inaugurated an annual National Day of Mourning. The chapter also details how tribal communities challenged plans to build a sewage treatment plant on Deer Island, on grounds considered intensely sensitive for their ties to the incarcerations of King Philip’s War. Finally, it illuminates a recent series of memorial journeys along the Charles River and Boston Harbor Islands in which mishoonash (Native dugout canoes) have played important roles in reconnecting Native descendants to the landscapes of ancestors, as well as providing avenues for Indigenous solidarities into the future.

Jonathan Edwards's Change of Position On Stoddardeanism

1981 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
John F. Jamieson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
River Valley ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Connecticut River ◽  
Connecticut River Valley

When Jonathan Edwards was installed as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard at Northampton in 1727, he not only assumed the major pastoral responsibility for the largest congregation in western Massachusetts, but he also became coadministrator of the “lax” mode of admission to the sacraments that had prevailed at Northampton and throughout the Connecticut River Valley for some thirty years. This system granted both baptism and communion to all persons of age who had historical knowledge of the gospel and were of a “non-scandalous” life, on the grounds that all divinely established ordinances were capable of “begetting” faith. Although Stoddard did not originate the “lax” system, the practice was generally referred to as “Stoddardeanism” because from the time of his celebrated dispute with Increase Mather in 1700 (the so-called “Stoddardean controversy”) Stoddard had been its most systematic, persistent, and influential proponent in New England.

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