In the early seventeenth century, Europeans viewed America as a wilderness. William Bradford, Plymouth’s longtime governor, repeatedly used the term in his famous account of the colony’s founding, as when he described New England as “a hideous, desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.” Europeans also called America a New World because it had previously been unknown to them. Yet there was little wild or new about this place, as one can see from the Plymouth colonists’ own writings, even if the authors missed the point. When the Mayflower reached Cape Cod in November 1620, the English had only to set foot onshore to encounter evidence of a civilization created by the Cape’s indigenous people, the Wampanoags, even though the Natives already had moved inland for the winter. Narrow roads wound their way from the beach through the dunes and forests to sources of drinking water and multifamily summer villages. These clearings were filled with wetus, the Wampanoags’ houses, made of frames of bent saplings, with sleeping platforms running along the interior walls, and the people’s belongings and some leftovers of past meals scattered throughout. In the summer these wetus would have been covered with mats, but when the people left the coast during the cold months, they took the mats with them, leaving the frames standing for use the next year, which is what the English found. Underground storage pits lay nearby, including one with “a fine great new basket full of very fair corn of this year … it held three or four bushels.” Predictably, a little bit more wandering led the exploratory party to “much plain ground … and some signs where the Indians had formerly planted their corn.” Roadways, villages, stored crops, and planting fields are hardly signs of wilderness or an undiscovered new world, whether by the standards of 1620 or 2020.1
Wetu.
Wampanoag wetus (more commonly known as wigwams) appeared in a variety of sizes, ranging from small domes for one or two families to longhouses capable of lodging multiple families and hosting political events. The Wampanoags covered them with reed mats in summer and with bark in winter. They left the frames standing for future use when they relocated to spring, summer, or winter sites. Remarkably, there are no surviving detailed images of New England Indian wetus from the seventeenth century, but John White’s watercolor drawing of North Carolina Algonquian houses from the 1580s provides a sense of what they looked like, as does this contemporary wetu from the Plimoth Plantation museum’s Wampanoag Homesite. Note, however, that there is no evidence that the Wampanoags lived in palisaded villages.
John White, “Indian Village of Pomeiooc,” 1585–93. © Trustees of the British Museum.
The English liked to think of themselves as civilized and of the Indians as savages, but the sordid behavior of the Mayflower passengers during this probe gave the Wampanoags reason to think that they were the ones suffering a barbarian invasion. Just beyond the planting fields, the English found “a great burying place, one part whereof was encompassed with a large palisade, like a churchyard.” They left the presumably elite burials within the enclosure undisturbed, but desecrated several of the nondescript ones outside it despite the obvious risk of antagonizing the people to whom this cemetery belonged. Their misconduct included ransacking the graves for funerary offerings that the Wampanoags meant for the deceased to use on the journey to the afterlife. The Wampanoags certainly did not expect their sacred gifts to become curiosities for strangers. What kind of people showed such disrespect for burials, that most sacrosanct of human rites?2
As the English continued their search, even the woods displayed signs that this was Wampanoag country. A spring trap made of a rope lasso attached to a bent branch managed to snag Bradford as he was walking by, providing the wary English with a needed moment of comic relief. There was “a path made to drive deer in, when the Indians hunt,” in reference to the Wampanoags’ communal hunts, which involved men spreading out through the woods and then gradually converging to force large numbers of game animals into a narrow space for easy slaughter. Elsewhere, the English came upon a dugout canoe left on the bank of a creek to enable travelers to cross back and forth, as if no one were worried about it being stolen. Actual Wampanoags did not care to be found, at least not yet, but this was unquestionably their settled place.3
By the end of the colony’s first year, the English had gained a fuller, if still incomplete, sense of the Wampanoags’ political order and lifeways. When the sachem (or chief) Ousamequin finally made contact with the English in March 1621 after keeping a cautious distance for months, he was clearly the people’s leader. It was apparent in the train of sixty matawaûog (or warriors) who paid deference to him, in “a great chain of white bone [probably shell] beads around his neck,” and in his dignified bearing. No mere show, Ousamequin was asserting his people’s authority over the site of Plymouth colony, which the Wampanoags called Patuxet, even though he lived forty miles to the west in the sachemship of Pokanoket. He was also assuming direction of the Wampanoags’ dealings with the English newcomers. It is no wonder that the English believed his proper name was Massasoit, when in actuality that was only an honorific meaning something like “the highest chief that speaks on behalf.” The English also mistakenly referred to him as a king, though he represented rather than lorded over his people.4
An early diplomatic visit by Edward Winslow and Robert Cushman to Ousamequin’s village of Sowams within Pokanoket brought Wampanoag society into even clearer view. The trip took place along a region-wide network of trails connecting dozens of communities and their fishing and gathering places. At various points along the route were holes in the ground that passersby would clear of accumulated debris or brush. Winslow understood that these sites were mnemonic devices, or memory prompts, to initiate the telling of a chapter of the people’s history, “so that as a man travels, if he can understand his guide, his journey will be less tedious, by reason of the many historical discourses [that] will be related to him.” Yet only a Wampanoag would have known what story the memorial symbolized.5
Deer drive, from Samuel de Champlain, Voyages et découvertures faites en la nouvelle France, depuis l’année 1615 … (Paris: Chez Claude Collet, au Palais, en la galerie des Prisonniers, 1619), opp. p. 52. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Not only was the route alive with history, but signs of the people’s civilization were everywhere: men using a weir to catch fish; women ferrying baskets of shellfish they had collected; cornfields lining the entire length of the Taunton River; forests left so free of underbrush because of deliberately set fires that “a man may well ride a horse amongst them.” Upon their arrival at Sowams, the English quickly had to learn and perform the protocols of Wampanoag diplomacy: the custom of visitors going straight to the sachem’s house to explain their business; sharing a pipe of tobacco before engaging in any political talk; sleeping right next to the sachem and his wife during an overnight stay. For a wilderness, this country had quite a number of rules.6
The vastness of the Wampanoag polity was also gradually becoming perceptible. Winslow took special interest in a “great speech” by Ousamequin in which he “named at least thirty places” under his leadership, making him one of a handful of great sachems in southern New England “to whom the rest resort for protection, and pay homage unto them, neither may they war without their knowledge and approbation.” In other words, Ousamequin managed the foreign relations of the dozens of local communities and received “homage” (or tribute) to fund his activities, but when it came to day-to-day domestic affairs, those places were autonomous and governed by their own sachems and councils. Winslow even had to admit that “myself and others” had been wrong in saying “that the Indians about us are a people without any religion,” for he had learned that the Wampanoags “conceive of many divine powers.” Englishmen commonly dismissed the Natives’ sovereignty and culture as no greater than that of roaming wolves because they defined difference as inferiority. Yet layers of burials containing the people’s ancestors ran as deep as the tree roots. Aboveground, their civilization was evident to anyone open to seeing it.7
Let us discard the notion of America as a New World, never mind a savage wilderness, as there is no better way to begin a reorientation toward a Wampanoag-centered history of Plymouth and Thanksgiving. We should not be beholden to the terms and perspectives of seventeenth-century Europeans. Documentable human history in the Americas goes back at least fifteen thousand years by conservative estimates and in New England at least twelve thousand years. Whereas archaeologists trace Native American origins to Siberia and South Asia, some indigenous people contend that they sprang out of the ground into their homelands, like the corn that has sustained them for centuries. Others tell of their distant forebears migrating to the homeland from other parts of Turtle Island, as they refer to America. Despite the variety of such origin stories, they all agree on a fundamental point: Indians are not only the first people of America; they are ancient. By the time Europeans arrived on the scene, there was nothing new about this world except what indigenous people had created during their long history.8
If the idea of America as a New World blinds us to the antiquity of Native Americans, it also contributes to two other misconceptions about the Indian past. One is the false divide between prehistory and history. The other is that Indian authenticity depends on adherence to a supposedly unchanging culture rooted in the precolonial period. To think of America as new and of Indians as prehistorical feeds the erroneous and fundamentally racist notion that indigenous Americans had experienced little historical change before the colonial era, that they had been stuck in a rudimentary, Stone Age existence since time out of mind. Subtly, the Thanksgiving myth buttresses this fallacy by making the Mayflower passengers the dynamic initiators of contact with a Wampanoag population that seems to have been waiting passively to be discovered. In turn, the portrayal of Indians as static contributes to a sinister racial double bind of long standing in American culture. It posits that the Native way of life at the time of European contact was and is the only authentic Indian culture. Nobody expects the Pilgrims’ modern descendants to look and act like their seventeenth-century ancestors, yet the public commonly judges that indigenous people who have changed since 1492 or 1620 have somehow relinquished their claims to be Indian. In other words, the New World concept of authentic Indians frozen in time until European contact denies Indians the right to continue to be Indians while changing with their times; it refuses to acknowledge the possibility of being a modern Indian. It is part of a colonial ideology designed to make Indians disappear.9
Besides being cruel, such thinking is plain bad history. No less than the English, the Wampanoags were already a people with a rich past before the arrival of the Mayflower, whose way of life was built on ancient precedents but continued to evolve in the face of fresh opportunities and challenges. Yes, their country was a settled place rather than a wilderness, an old world rather than new, but some core features of it, like corn cultivation and the regional authority of sachems like Ousamequin, were fairly recent developments. It takes an appreciation of those historical transformations to grasp the Wampanoags’ relationship to the land, their society and culture, and the logics by which they made their decisions. Wampanoag history did not begin with the Mayflower. Imagine it instead as a rushing, primordial river into which the English entered as a fresh stream.
We can get a sense, but only a sense, of what the Wampanoags’ old world was like before the founding of Plymouth colony by combining archaeology with historical documentation and oral histories from the early contact period. There are no chronicles about Wampanoag life before 1524, the date of the people’s first recorded contact with Europeans, because the Wampanoags’ ancestors did not practice alphabetic literacy. Without such accounts, it is impossible to include details of Wampanoag personas and politics in a discussion of their ancient watershed events, as such matters are not the focus of Wampanoag oral traditions. Nevertheless, archaeological evidence is unequivocal that Native America, including New England, had been developing for millennia. It is time to rediscover that old world to better understand the new world of mourning produced by the Wampanoags’ encounter with the English. Taken together, they also reveal the childishness of the Thanksgiving myth.10
CREATING A WORLD OF PLENTY
The Wampanoags were and are so grounded in their territory that their stories of ancient times take the existence of people for granted, whereas the landscape’s natural features require explanation. Seventeenth-century Wampanoags and the neighboring Narragansetts told the English that the humanlike god Kiehtan, or Cautantowwit, had created the original man and woman by first forging them out of stone, but they did not love each other enough, so he broke these models and carved new ones from wood. Other oral histories from Wampanoags on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, though, are less interested in these first humans than in the adventures of an ancient giant named Moshup, who shaped the people’s world. For instance, Wampanoags from Aquinnah say that their ancestors came to the island to find Moshup already living there with his wife, Squant, and their children. Moshup discovered the place when a Thunderbird, one of the most widespread figures in North American Indian cosmology, swooped out of the sky to seize one of Moshup’s children from the family camp. Moshup chased the bird southward from Cape Cod across Vineyard Sound until he reached Noepe (meaning “dry land amid waters”), now known as the Vineyard. Finding Noepe to his liking, Moshup decided to move his family there, and their activities left indelible marks on the terrain that future generations of people used as prompts for their storytelling. The peninsula of Aquinnah lacked great trees because Moshup had used them as firewood to cook his favorite dish, broiled whale. The multicolored clay that oozes out of Aquinnah’s shoreline cliffs originated from Moshup scooping whales out of the sea and smashing them dead against the banks. Moshup created the treacherous shoals off the Aquinnah peninsula by tossing rocks into the water so he would have places to go fishing. Dense fogs were the smoke from his pipe. And Nantucket (if an Aquinnah Wampanoag was telling the tale) was a deposit of his pipe’s ashes. In all likelihood, Nantucket Wampanoags told a different version.11
Archaeologists have different ways to account for the origins of Native New Englanders, but they concur with the Moshup stories that indigenous people are so ancient to place as to have adapted to seismic changes to the climate and landscape. People first appear in the archaeological record of southern New England about twelve thousand years ago as small bands of hunter-gatherers tracking big game like mammoths, caribou, mastodons, and giant beaver. It was a much colder time in which so much water was trapped in ice that the sea level was ten meters below its present mark, making it possible for a giant like Moshup or even a regular-sized person to walk on land well past today’s New England coastal islands.12
Stanley Murphy, Moshup, ca. 1971. Courtesy of Chris Murphy. Photograph by Ollie Becker and Danielle Mulchay.
This mural by the late Martha’s Vineyard artist Stan Murphy, which hangs in Vineyard Haven Town Hall on Martha’s Vineyard, depicts the mythical Wampanoag giant, Moshup, harvesting his favorite meal, whale, against the backdrop of the multicolored clay cliffs of Aquinnah.
Over the next several thousand years, the warming of the earth and the melting of the last great glaciers forced a retreat of the tundra and creation of the deciduous forests we now associate with southern New England. The big game animals disappeared with the ice, probably because of a combination of human overhunting and climatic change, though the cause remains open to debate. In response, the people refocused the chase on the smaller species of the emerging woodlands, such as deer, moose, bear, rabbit, and fox. Controlled burns of the forest improved the hunt. These blazes cleared out the underbrush that impeded the hunters’ pursuit and created environments in which deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, and turkey thrived. Attracted by this prey, the number of carnivorous wolves, foxes, eagles, and hawks rose in turn. This pattern leads one environmental historian to emphasize that “Indians who hunted game were not just taking the ‘unplanted bounties of nature’; in an important sense, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating.” Trees that survived the set fires became sources of raw material for tools, archaeologically evident in stone gouges for woodworking and axe and spear heads designed for wooden handles. The people of this era also created mishoons, or dugout canoes, by felling large trees and then systematically charring and scraping them out until they were capable of carrying multiple passengers and their goods miles into the open ocean.13
Glacial advance, then retreat, followed by rising seas, fashioned a well-watered landscape affording plenty of opportunity to use these craft. Over the thousands of years when the great Wisconsin glacier was expanding, it functioned like a bulldozer, carving out channels and basins in some places, and irregular moraines in others. Then, as it began to melt and shrink northward, it deposited massive chunks of ice and gravel until it had formed the molds for southern New England’s mosaic of kettle and saltwater ponds, coastal bays, streams, slow-moving rivers, and marshes; Cape Cod alone, for instance, has 353 separate ponds. These places and the adjacent shoreline provided indigenous people with access to a seemingly unlimited amount of food. There were saltwater fish, including striped bass, sturgeon, bluefish, scup, tautog, flounder, haddock, shark, skate, and, of course, cod. In spring, alewives and shad appeared in astounding numbers to migrate up the rivers to spawn. Freshwater streams and ponds also contained bass, trout, and perch, while nearby swamps offered up turtles, frogs, and cranberries. Tidal estuaries fed by freshwater and saltwater attracted waterfowl like ducks, geese, and cormorants and nourished acres of edible plants and seagrasses in which shellfish anchored. At low tide, the shellfish were especially abundant in the form of clams, oysters, mussels, scallops, crabs, and lobsters. Between the estuaries and the wood line grew wild fruits like beach plums, raspberries, strawberries, and grapes. Herds of harbor seals lay basking in the sun on coastal rocks and remote beaches. When the people were especially lucky, drift whales became stranded on the shore, ready for the taking. Giant shell middens (or waste piles), some of them still visible today, testify to the people’s increasing focus on marine resources, as do the remains of their improving technology. Take, for example, ancient fish weirs on the site of what is now Boylston Street in Boston. Native people came to this site repeatedly over fifteen hundred years, laying down some sixty-five thousand wooden stakes that they interwove with brush to trap fish at low tide for catching with spears and nets. It is one of many signs that life was good along the coast.14
Theodore de Bry, “The Manner of Making Thear Boates,” 1588, after the John White watercolor. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
There are no surviving images of Wampanoag watercraft during the seventeenth century, but this painting by the Belgian artist Theodore de Bry, after John White’s paintings from coastal Carolina, provides a close approximation. The Wampanoags created mishoons, or dugout canoes, by patiently burning and scraping out the interiors of single trees. The precolonial old-growth forests of New England enabled them to make seaworthy mishoons as long as forty feet in length and capable of carrying twenty people and their goods. These mishoons gave the people access to islands such as Nantucket (thirty miles from the mainland), Martha’s Vineyard (seven miles), and Block Island (fourteen miles), to the densely populated Indian communities of the coast, and to the rich bounty of the sea. Today, indigenous people across New England have revived the tradition of crafting and navigating mishoons.
The weir is also indicative of indigenous people shifting from nomadic tracking of animal herds to the seasonal use of the same sites year after year accompanied by an increased sense of territoriality. Beginning in the Early Archaic period, 8000–6000 B.C.E., people began following a seasonal round in which they spent the spring at riverside fish runs, summer along the shoreline, and fall and winter inland to hunt terrestrial animals. Warm weather was a time for extended family bands to gather in larger groups, which is evident in the archaeological remains of communal rituals in different parts of what later became known as Wampanoag country. For instance, sometime around the year 2340 B.C.E., several bands gathered along the Taunton River to cremate eleven bodies of their dead and bury the remains in a single large pit. The living continued to visit this sacred ground for many years. Archaeologists have found a similar site in the town of Orleans on the outer part of Cape Cod. In these places, it was as if the inhabitants were laying claim to each other and the territory itself.15
The people engaged in increasingly long-distance cultural and economic exchange even as they became more grounded in particular places. Sometime around the year 443 B.C.E., a new “mortuary cult” spread from the Ohio River valley throughout the eastern woodlands, reaching as far as southern New England. Called Adena by archaeologists, this culture pattern involved interring the dead in a fetal position beneath an earthen mound, sometimes surrounding the tomb with ditches and earthen rings, and placing specialized goods in the grave made of materials from as far away as Ohio, Nova Scotia, the Great Lakes, and Carolina. Precisely how this cult and its funerary objects reached southern New England must remain unknown, but clearly it disproves the popular assumption that the people of this area lived in isolation until the arrival of Europeans. It also points to the long tendrils of history, for though the Adena cultural movement does not appear to have been widespread or long-lasting, similar practices marked elite Wampanoag burials well into the 1600s.16
Nothing so readily disproves the fallacy that these were people without history than an appreciation of the revolutionary effects of the arrival of the bow and arrow and of maize and bean cultivation around the year 700 C.E. (known as the Middle Woodland period). The bow and arrow, which had been adopted thousands of years earlier by Arctic peoples but reached eastern North America only after 500 C.E., was a vast improvement over the spear in terms of range and portability. It instantly improved the efficiency of hunting and probably also became a weapon of war. Maize and beans came from a different direction. These crops arose in Mexico some six thousand years ago, then spread through what is now the southwestern United States and up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers before arriving in the northeast. The expansion of maize was a stunning feat of human engineering in which cultivators—certainly women, given their responsibility for the crop—bred ever larger cobs and selected seeds that could grow in ever colder, wetter environments. There is isolated evidence of maize in New York archaeological sites from as far back as two thousand years, but there are no signs of it in New England before 1000 C.E. and not until 1300 C.E., amid a warming trend, is there proof of systematic cultivation. Beans also make their first appearance at that later date. Southern New England was the last place in America to which maize spread, as the crop cannot be cultivated successfully any farther north than lower Maine. That dividing line, between the horticulturalists of southern New England and the hunter-gatherers to the north, would have lasting implications for intertribal and Indian-European relations during the early colonial era.17
When and why southern New England Indians adopted maize horticulture has been subject to stringent debate. Until fairly recently, many archaeologists doubted whether southeastern New England Indians raised corn and beans at all until the 1500s and even the early 1600s. One explanation was that Indians took up farming so they could remain on the coast for longer periods of time and await the arrival of European trading vessels filled with coveted goods. Yet that theory has been swept away by the growing evidence of maize cultivation at archaeological sites dating as far back as seven hundred years, especially the discovery of a Narragansett village from 1300 to 1500 C.E. containing scores of maize kernels as well as corn hills and underground storage pits. It now appears that southern New England Indians were growing maize, beans, and squash at least two centuries before their contact with Europeans.18
From our vantage, this was a watershed in New England Indian history, but the people probably did not think of it as such. Tending crops did not require them to change their generations-long pattern of spending the warm months in dispersed homesteads and family hamlets along coastal estuaries and rivers. Nor did it significantly disrupt previous subsistence activities, though women, who were responsible for planting and weeding, would have had less time for gathering shellfish and wild plant foods. Indeed, horticultural produce appears to have eased some of the stress that the growing Indian population was putting on coastal resources. Of course, horticulture placed its own demands on the local environment, with maize exhausting a soil’s fertility after as little as eight years of annual planting. However, coastal people discovered that they could sustain soil fertility and increase their harvest yields by using fish as fertilizer, specifically by burying a herring in each of the planting hills they made to support the cornstalks. Such adaptations enabled them to turn horticulture into yet another source of plenty alongside the teeming coastal estuaries.19
KIEHTAN’S GIFT
One gains a better appreciation of the choices Wampanoags made in creating their civilization through comparison with other societies in the East in which maize horticulture produced more radical transformations. The most dramatic example is the rise of the Mississippians, as anthropologists call them, between 900 and 1300 C.E. This culture centered on the confluence of Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and extended along those waterways and their tributaries north to Wisconsin, south to Louisiana, west to Oklahoma, and east to the Appalachian foothills. Leadership came from great chiefs who claimed descent from the sun, and a priesthood that claimed to control the weather so essential to the people’s new crops. The Mississippians’ command of waterways that reached nearly every corner of the continent enabled them to import precious materials from hundreds of miles away, which artisans then crafted into pipes, statues, ornaments, and weaponry depicting the people’s religious icons. Earthen pyramids, some over a hundred feet high, contained the burials of chiefs, their wives, and their retainers, and massive amounts of grave goods. Not surprisingly, the skeletons of elites evince far better nutrition, particularly in terms of the consumption of meat, and far less physical stress (such as arthritis), than the remains of commoners. Elite graves also contain far more goods of higher quality, such as ornaments crafted from exotic materials, than those of everyday people. Atop the pyramids were chiefly houses and temples in order to locate the elites closer to the sun and symbolize the line of succession. The largest mound of a given town would sit at the head of a ceremonial plaza, around which were smaller mounds for lesser nobles. Signs of hierarchy were everywhere.
The most impressive of these towns, Cahokia, on the site of modern East St. Louis, contained 120 mounds of varying size within a five-mile-square area and boasted between ten thousand and thirty thousand residents during its heyday in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, making it more populated than medieval London or Paris. Defensive earthworks and wooden palisades made from tens of thousands of logs protected the people from their numerous enemies. Nine smaller mound centers and dozens of villages stretching across twenty thousand square miles formed Cahokia’s hinterland. Some scholars have characterized these satellite communities as suburbs. They raised the produce to feed the chiefly and priestly elite and probably contributed the labor that went into the great public works. Farther off still were remote outposts from which warriors guarded the military frontier and gathered exotic goods through intimidation and trade to funnel to the capital town. Most of these Mississippian city-states did not last into the sixteenth century—Cahokia had split apart by the fourteenth—probably because of warfare and overexploitation of the local environment, perhaps compounded by the earliest appearance of European epidemic diseases in a few cases. Yet for several hundred years they thrived, with maize horticulture as their staff of existence.20
Another striking example of the diverse ways Natives responded to the advent of maize comes from the Iroquoian-speaking societies of what is now upstate New York, southern Ontario, and the St. Lawrence River valley, just a few hundred miles northwest of Wampanoag country. In their case, the result was not steeply hierarchical chiefly city-states of tens of thousands of people with monumental public works but decentralized villages organized around female-descent groups. After centuries of experimentation, around 900–1000 C.E. Iroquoians took a “quantum leap” in their cultivation of maize, beans, and squash and made these crops the basis of their economy. No sooner had they completed this transition than they moved their settlements from the riversides to defensive hilltop sites surrounded by good horticultural soils. They also transformed their houses from the round or oval wetus characteristic of southern New England into multifamily longhouses as much as two hundred feet in length. Married men lived with their wives’ kin, with each house consisting of a senior woman, her daughters, and their nuclear families. All these women and their children (boys and girls alike) belonged to the same totemic clan—represented by such animals as turtle, bear, and wolf—while their husbands belonged to other clans traced through their own mothers. Clan identities linked the people to members of the same clan in other villages, thereby entitling them to hospitality and support beyond their immediate kin and locality.
Anthropologists see a number of purposes to these adaptations. Female-based kin groups facilitated cooperation among women for tending crops and supervising children while able-bodied men were away hunting, fishing, trading, and warring. The custom of sending men to live with their wives’ lineages reduced violence within the village because it broke up bands of biologically related men who were otherwise prone to fight males from other families for access to women. At the same time, women’s dominance of house and village enabled them to project male violence outward. War parties formed when a matron called on her clansmen to bring home a scalp or captive from the enemy to serve as a symbolic or literal replacement for a dead family member. In turn, women stationed in the village oversaw the acculturation of captives from previous expeditions while warriors ventured out to capture more.
As the Iroquians consolidated this way of life, they also created a wider web of alliances to defend the home front even in the absence of the men. They began with multivillage councils of male sachems chosen by the clan matrons. These were deliberative bodies focused on collaboration and peacekeeping rather than legislative assemblies premised on majority rule. There was no single leader. The goal was to achieve consensus through discussion. In the event of stubborn disagreement, families or clans did as they wished or, in the case of serious disputes, moved to another village or formed their own. Eventually, these councils gave rise to the tribes that would constitute the Iroquois League: the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. However, before the founding of the League these tribes fought each other furiously, not for territory, but to seize captives for torture (usually in the cases of men) and slavery and adoption (usually in the cases of women and children). In response to this violence, villages of just a few hundred people consolidated into “castles” of up to two thousand or three thousand people, around which they erected palisades that sometimes ran three spiral layers thick, creating a long, narrow pathway to the entrance. Going outside to tend the surrounding fields, to fish, or to hunt was, of course, essential to the people’s subsistence, but it also risked attack by enemy raiders, who could appear at any time. Iroquois archaeological sites from this era reveal numerous male skeletons riddled with arrows, separated skulls and torsos, and unburied human remains from what were probably captives. Iroquois oral histories are unequivocal that this was a terrible time to be alive, and often an even worse one in which to die.
Just as Iroquoians had earlier formed multivillage clans and tribes to reduce violence locally, in the sixteenth century they created multitribe confederacies to achieve peace regionally. Inspired by the prophet Deganawidah and his disciples Hiawatha and Tadodaho, the five nations of New York’s Finger Lakes region gradually banded together into the Iroquois League or Haudenosaunee, meaning “People of the Longhouse.” Like the tribal councils, League meetings of clan sachems focused not on policy-making but peacekeeping, specifically a halt to the cycles of revenge warfare. The sachems exchanged ritual words of condolence and gifts of shell beads thought to bring mourners insane with despair back into a state of society, which is to say, peace. Meanwhile, in what is now southern Ontario, five other Iroquoian-speaking horticultural nations allied to form the Wendat or Huron confederacy, probably as a defensive response to the Haudenosaunee. Though the formation of the Iroquois League suppressed revenge warfare among its member nations, it also empowered them to extend the scale of their raiding against other peoples until, by the mid- to late seventeenth century, it encompassed nearly the whole of eastern North America. Put another way, the transition to horticulture might have brought greater food security to the Iroquois, but it also spawned a militaristic culture that spread misery hither and yon.21
The effects of horticulture were more muted among southern New England Indians than among the Mississippians or Iroquoians. Though the Wampanoags had sachems and religious specialists, they were nothing akin to the Mississippian elite, residing high above everyone else, living off their labor, and claiming descent from the sun. New England Indians engaged in long-distance trade in exotic goods, but not on the continental scale of the Mississippians, and there was no specialized artisan class to transform those materials into status symbols for the rulers. Southern New England Indians also did not support a chiefly and priestly elite capable of marshaling great armies to reduce entire populations to tributary and even slave status. Without a mass of forced laborers, they did not build massive public monuments like the Mississippian mound pyramids, for free people would not perform such strenuous work for others. Given the Wampanoags’ access to coastal estuaries full of wild foods, it would have been futile for their chiefs to try to assert control over horticultural lands as a way to starve the people into Mississippian-type submission.22
The differences between southern New England Indians and the Iroquois were also pronounced in several respects, though just how many is open to debate. Modern New England Indians, including Wampanoags, say their ancestors also had matrilineal, clan-based polities, but anthropologists are skeptical. Anthropologists posit instead that after New England Indians adopted horticulture, they reckoned descent from both the male and the female lines. The anthropologists’ position is consistent with documentary evidence about New England Indians’ patterns of chiefly succession and nuclear family residence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though these might have been colonial-era developments shaped by English pressure. More certain is that whereas the Iroquois governed themselves through counsels of clan chiefs chosen by matrons, New England Indian communities were led by individual sachems (some of them women) who inherited their office through the male line. To be sure, these sachems were no autocrats. They always consulted with councils of family heads, who, in turn, consulted with women, with the aim of achieving consensus. Additionally, the people could unseat their sachem if he or she proved to be ineffective or abusive. In these respects, the polities of southern New England Indians were akin to those of the matrilineal Iroquois. Yet Indians on the New England coast had nothing resembling the densely populated, palisaded villages of Iroquois-speaking regions. In fact, archaeologists have been unable to find any palisaded forts anywhere in New England before the 1600s, which suggests that the people did not engage in lengthy, pitched battles. Nor is there other evidence of the kind of intensive warfare and ritual cannibalism practiced by the Iroquois. Without any need to live on constant alert near fortified settlements, southern New England Indians did not rely anywhere nearly as heavily as the Iroquois on horticultural produce from nearby fields. All of which is to say, the mere two hundred miles between the Wampanoags and the Iroquoian Mohawks were sufficient to produce striking differences in their societies even though both groups cultivated corn, beans, and squash.23
Southern New England might not have experienced a horticultural revolution by the standards of other northeastern Indians, but this new activity did carry a host of important long-term implications. As maize horticulture grew in importance, it added to the workload of women, who took the responsibility for planting the crops with digging sticks, using clamshell hoes to form hills around each cornstalk, weeding the fields throughout the summer until harvest time, and grinding the corn into meal using mortar and pestle (an activity that contributed to many older women developing arthritis in their hands and wrists). The efflorescence of horticulture also coincided with the rise of ceramic (fired clay) vessels for cooking and storage, which women also took the responsibility for making. A Native explanation for this gender division of labor would be that edible crops had female spirits and therefore should be tended by females, unlike tobacco, which had a male spirit and was the sole plant raised by males. Many Native peoples east of the Mississippi have traditions of a woman, a Corn Mother, visiting the people in ancient times to teach them how and where to plant maize, beans, and squash, thereafter called the Three Sisters, though if such stories existed among New England Indians they went unrecorded. Women’s responsibility for maize horticulture also extended from the principle, if not always the practice, that males were takers of life for the defense and sustenance of the people, whereas women were givers of life both in childbearing and plant cultivation. Anthropologists would contend that women had responsibility for this new activity because they already were in charge of raising other types of plant foods; because planting and weeding were compatible with the constant interruptions of child care duties; and because cornfields were close to homesteads where women’s work took place.24
The rise of corn, beans, and squash also made a difference spiritually and ritually. Most of the features of Wampanoag religious life extended from their long hunter-gatherer past, which encouraged careful observation of the natural world, including the dangers it held. Thus the Wampanoags and their neighbors conceived of animals, prominent geographic features, and meteorologic forces as possessing spirits capable of bestowing and withholding favor, of doing good and ill, depending on their whim. “If they receive any good in hunting, fishing, harvest, etc.,” wrote the colonist Roger Williams in the 1640s, “they acknowledge God in it.” By “God,” he meant their spirits, not the Christian deity. The converse was also true: “If it be but an ordinary accident, a fall, etc., they will say God was angry and did it.” Wampanoags sought favorable treatment by these spirits by showing them respect through songs and dances of honor. They prayed before going on the hunt and treated the remains of the kill according to ritual proscriptions. When things went wrong—for instance, when resources failed, the weather was poor, or a sickness broke out—the people tried to figure out which spirit was unhappy with them and how to placate it.25
To make such a determination, Wampanoags turned to dream interpretation. Wampanoags considered dreams the product of one of a person’s two souls leaving the body in the form of a luminescent blur and going out into the world to interact with powers otherwise invisible during waking hours (the other soul kept the body breathing during sleep). Dreams thus served to reveal hidden truths. Particularly important and trustworthy were messages from a person’s own guardian spirit. At or around adolescence, Wampanoag males would undergo a ritual of fasting, sleep deprivation, and imbibing of emetics and hallucinogens in the hopes of making contact with a spirit protector. That force would offer the seeker a lifetime of aid and teach him a song to chant whenever he needed assistance, such as in hunting or warfare. Williams remarked on an ailing Indian man who “called much upon Muckquachuckquànd [the Children’s God], who … had appeared to the dying young man, many years before, and bid him whenever he was in distress [to] call upon him.”26
Sometimes dream signs were clear, but at other times they were inscrutable. In such cases, it was time to enlist a pawwaw, or shaman, someone (seemingly always male) with a deep roster of potent guardians and an uncommon ability to enter ecstatic trances in which his dream soul went forth to make discoveries. Afterward the pawwaws would exercise their variously held talents to cure, curse, enchant, prognosticate, and organize rituals dictated to them by the spirits. A Vineyard Wampanoag shaman explained to the colonist Thomas Mayhew Jr. that he had four guardian spirits who first came to him in dreams. One of them, which took the form of a man, “told him he did know all things upon the island, and what was to be done.” Another, “like a Crow,” lived in his head and could “discover mischiefs coming toward him.” The third, a pigeon, took residence in his breast, and it “was very cunning about any business.” Finally, there was a serpent spirit, which was “very subtle to do mischief, and also to do great cures.” The man’s faith in these beings and their powers was part of a pattern of shamanism so common across North America and hunter-gatherer societies worldwide that it must have had ancient roots.27
Wampanoag rituals and the forces they invoked changed as cultivation of corn, beads, and squash grew in importance. Each spring, when the running of the shad or the disappearance of the Pleiades constellation indicated that it was time to plant, the people would gather for ceremonies to secure favorable weather and a successful harvest. In August, when the first green corn appeared, and then after the fall harvest, the people would “sing, dance, feast, give thanks, and hang up garlands” in thanks and hope of future bounty. Also new was the emphasis on the deity Kiehtan, whom the Wampanoags credited not only with creating the first man and woman but with introducing the people to maize and beans. The story went that, sometime in the mists of history, Kiehtan took seeds for these plants from the fields surrounding his house, placed them in the ears of a crow, and then had the bird deliver them to the ancestors. There was more than a kernel of truth to this story, as Kiehtan resided far to the southwest, the direction of Mexico, from which these crops had actually come. Thereafter Kiehtan blessed Wampanoag farmers with “fair weather, for rain in time of drought, and for the recovery of the sick.” To complete the circle of life in which Kiehtan brought the people into existence, then sent them life-sustaining crops, good weather, and health, Wampanoags believed that the souls of their dead spent the afterlife in Kiehtan’s house.28
For that reason, shortly after the rise of corn-beans-squash horticulture, the Wampanoags and neighboring Indians in southeastern New England began burying their dead singly in permanent graves, placing the corpse in the fetal position, covering it with red ocher, and pointing the head toward the west or southwest. The fetal position and red ocher symbolized rebirth into the afterlife, and the westward orientation was supposed to direct the soul on its journey to Kiehtan. In earlier times there was no standard direction for graves, corpses might appear in either extended or flexed form, and burial was sometimes just a first stage before exhumation and reburial in a communal pit. The exact cause for this change is unclear, but it is probably no coincidence that a new mortuary practice emphasizing the journey to Kiehtan’s house arose at the same time that the people began cultivating crops thought to have originated with that very spirit.29
The people were grateful to Kiehtan because the consumption of maize, beans, and squash afforded them excellent nutrition, particularly in conjunction with tried-and-true hunting and gathering. Eaten alone, maize is nutritionally deficient because it lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan required to make proteins, but beans contain those very compounds. At the same time, maize provides the amino acids cysteine and methionine that beans lack. Together, then, maize and beans provide complete nutrition, with squashes contributing additional vitamins. These crops also complement each other in the growing cycle. Beans return nitrogen to soils depleted by maize, maize provides beans with a stalk to climb, and broad squash leaves at the base of the maize stalk help retain moisture and protect from excessive sun and rain and the spread of weeds. The Three Sisters thrived through their cooperation and added yet more resources to an already rich mix of Wampanoag foods.30
Wampanoag communities placed different emphases on horticulture according to their particular ecological niches. For instance, inland communities along the rivers, lakes, and ponds probably relied more heavily on cultivated crops and, for that matter, deer hunting than did people on Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, or the outer portion of Cape Cod, where marine resources were more abundant. In this respect, scholarly attempts to determine the percentage of calories produced by horticulture—with some estimates running as high as 65 percent—give a false sense of uniformity across a region that was actually characterized by local variability. Yet, rather than divide the people, this economic diversity helped knit them together. For instance, a Taunton River community with rich planting grounds and easy access to the game animals of the forested uplands might trade its cornmeal, venison, or bearskins to Cape and island people for seal oil, whale blubber, or deep-sea fish. Additionally, when a local economy failed because of adverse weather or enemy attack, its sister communities with different resources could offer assistance.31
The robust populations of southern New England Indians testify to their well-rounded nutrition. To be sure, any discussion of these figures rests on a shaky foundation. Indians did not compile censuses before the arrival of Europeans, and European counts of Indians in the early days of colonization tended to be estimates of warriors after vicious epidemics had already run their course. Nevertheless, recorded Indian testimony about their populations before the epidemics, combined with what we know about the average sizes of Indian families, has enabled scholars to produce convincing general estimates of the people’s numbers. The careful work of the historian Neal Salisbury posits a range of between 126,000 and 144,000 people for southern New England as a whole (bordered on the southwest by the Quinnipiac River and on the northeast by the Saco River) and between 21,000 and 24,000 for the Wampanoags. The Wampanoag community of Patuxet on Plymouth Harbor alone was said to have held 2,000 inhabitants before the epidemics. As for neighboring peoples, the Wampanoags’ northern allies, the Massachusett Indians of Massachusetts Bay, also boasted an estimated population of 21,000 to 24,000 people; the Wampanoags’ Narragansett rivals to the west had the region’s largest population at some 30,000 people. It would take colonists in southern New England over a century before their numbers reached the collective heights of these groups.32
The needs of this growing horticultural population added to the list of duties for Native leaders. Each locality was represented by a sachem, usually a man but sometimes a woman (referred to as a sunksquaw) who inherited his or her position from the previous sachem, usually a father but sometimes a paternal uncle, mother, or paternal aunt. However, if the people judged the first in line of succession to be incapable of performing a sachem’s responsibilities, they could bypass him or her for another candidate, just as they could remove an underperforming sachem and appoint another. The sachem handled relations with neighboring communities in consultation with a council made up of the male representatives from family lineages, a responsibility that included hosting important foreign visitors. When disputes arose between members of the same community, or when someone committed a crime, their sachem mediated the resolution or meted out the punishment. These obligations must have become more burdensome with the rising population densities afforded by horticulture. Also new was the sachem’s task of allotting family planting lands in a region where fertile ground was sparse. “If any of his men desire land to set their corn,” wrote Edward Winslow of the sachems, “he giveth them as much as they can use, and sets his bounds.” Seventeenth-century land deeds from Indians to colonists often mention how a past sachem had granted a particular family land to cultivate, sometimes for a term limited to the life of the sachem, sometimes in perpetuity. In exchange for this and other services, the sachem received the grantee’s pledges of love and loyalty and annual tribute in the form of produce, furs, choice portions of game animals, and/or labor in the sachem’s fields, collected by a special military elite known as pnieseosok. The sachem did not hoard this wealth or immediately redistribute it, though he or she was expected to sponsor certain ritual occasions and assist the poor and needy. Rather, the main purpose of tribute was to fund the sachem’s political activities. For these reasons and more, southern New England Indians called their communities sachemships.33
WHO WERE THE WAMPANOAGS?
For hundreds of years, people have used “tribe” to refer to the confederacies of local sachemships known as the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Mohegans, and Pequots. Yet this word has also been applied so indiscriminately to so many different kinds of societies throughout the world that anthropologists consider it meaningless. They prefer “paramount sachemship” to “tribe” to describe the southern New England political structure in which a prestigious and powerful (or “paramount”) sachem collected tribute from a network of other local sachems to enable him to lead their foreign diplomacy, warfare, and trade and, in some cases, to spare them from his own attacks. Wampanoag oral tradition also has the paramount sachem serving as first among equals in periodic grand councils of the local sachems. These paramount sachemships or tribes were a reflection both of shared kinship and culture among the constituent peoples, and of the decision of otherwise autonomous communities to form temporary confederations under prominent, region-wide leaders.
To say that tribal divisions corresponded roughly to dialectical differences might be confusing cause and effect. All Indians in southern New England spoke one or another dialect of the broader Algonquian language family, so when people who previously spoke different dialects allied with one another, it tended to standardize their speech. Among the Wampanoags, that process was ongoing in the mid-seventeenth century, with the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard pronouncing some words slightly differently from mainland Wampanoags. The Wampanoags and Massachusett people to the north shared the same dialect and, perhaps not coincidentally, were close political allies. The Wampanoags also easily comprehended the Narragansetts to the west, whereas the speech of more distant Algonquian peoples such as the Eastern Abenakis of Maine or Mohicans of western Massachusetts was more of a challenge. Winslow explained that “though there be difference in a hundred miles distance of place, both in language and manner, yet [it is] not so much but that they very well understand each other.”34
Kinship was yet another foundation for tribal identities. Members of any given Wampanoag community were likely to have relatives in other Wampanoag communities. Yet the point should not be taken too far. Wampanoags also commonly had relatives among other tribes in the region, including political rivals. A better way to think about language and kinship as elements of tribal identity is as tools that leaders used when building a confederacy of local sachemships. When the English arrived in southern New England, those tribes (or paramount sachemships) included the Wampanoags (meaning “Dawnland People” or “Easterners”) under Ousamequin. His local sachemship was Pokanoket on the northeast of Narragansett Bay, while his paramount sachemship extended from Pokanoket, up the Taunton River to its headwaters, and due east to the tip of Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. There was also the Narragansett tribe on the west side of Narragansett Bay under the sachems Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomo, whose reach extended westward to the modern boundary of Rhode Island and Connecticut. To the northwest of the Wampanoags, in what is now central Massachusetts, was a collection of loosely affiliated peoples known as the Nipmucs, who often found themselves as pawns in the rivalries of southern sachems to reduce them to tributaries. West of the Narragansetts, in what is now eastern Connecticut, were the Pequots under the sachem Tatobem, and the Pequots’ tributary, the Mohegans, under the sachem Uncas. Finally, due north of the Wampanoags was the Massachusett tribe of Massachusetts Bay under the sachem Nanapashemet, who were allied with Ousamequin and the Wampanoags against the Narragansetts. There is a long-standing tendency among scholars and the general public to think of these groups as having existed since time immemorial, hence their appearance on textbook maps labeled “Native America in 1492.” Yet these were fluid political entities that formed in response to a combination of great dangers, opportunities, and charismatic leadership and might dissolve in the absence of those conditions.35
Aquinnah cliffs. Photograph by William Waterway.
The spectacular clay cliffs of Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard have featured prominently in Wampanoag oral tradition and economic activities since time immemorial. The cliffs still belong to the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah. During the colonial era, the Vineyarders pronounced some words differently from mainland Wampanoags.
Marriage alliances were critical to a local sachem’s ascension to paramount sachem status. Male sachems typically had several wives related to neighboring sachems or other elite families, and married off their own sons and daughters according to similar strategic considerations. For instance, though we do not have any information about the marriages of Ousamequin, we do know that after the founding of Plymouth he negotiated a marriage alliance with the sachem Corbitant of the Wampanoag sachemship of Pocasset, who had previously been chafing under his authority. This arrangement had Ousamequin’s sons Wamsutta (or Alexander) and Metacom (or Philip) wed Corbitant’s daughters Weetamoo (or Namumpum) and Wootonekanuske, respectively. Marriage ties of this sort, not only among elites but common people as well, were part of what made the Wampanoags a people.36
So did a common enemy, which appears to have been one of the bases of Ousamequin’s authority. When the English arrived at Plymouth, Ousamequin lived in the village of Sowams at the head of the Mount Hope peninsula where the Taunton River empties into the east side of Narragansett Bay. This was a remarkably rich place to locate a community, as it boasted fertile fields, freshwater and saltwater resources, and many miles of broad estuaries. Yet in earlier times, at least during the lifetime of Ousamequin’s father (perhaps the late 1500s), Ousamequin’s people had occupied the head of Narragansett Bay, where the city of Providence is now located, as well as various nearby islands, and battled with the Narragansetts for territory and tributaries on the west bank. By the time the English arrived on the scene, the Narragansetts had driven the Wampanoags east of the Providence and Seekonk Rivers. Ousamequin’s claim to paramount sachem status probably extended from his serving as a war leader of the community on the front lines of this great contest. Heading the campaign against the Narragansetts would have justified his collection of tribute from distant sachems because mobilizing matawaûog and securing allies from other tribes required material resources. At the same time, the armed might he built through his marriage diplomacy and gift exchanges enabled him to intimidate remote sachemships on the Cape and islands into paying him tribute and deferring to his will in foreign affairs.37
Neither the Wampanoags nor the Narragansetts left any statement on record of what their rivalry was about, but there are several possible, perhaps overlapping explanations, all related to the rise of corn-beans-squash horticulture. One is that the Wampanoags fought for control of the planting grounds of Narragansett Bay, which were among the richest in the region because they were nourished by the alluvial floodplains of nine river basins and shoreline shellfish middens, which leached the soil with the lime required to grow nitrogen-fixing beans. When the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano visited the bay in 1524, he remarked that its “fields extend for 25 to 30 leagues; they are open and free of any obstacles or trees, and so fertile that any kind of seed would produce excellent crops.” Some of the earliest archaeological evidence for horticulture among southern New England Indians comes from Narragansett Bay. Given how quickly maize exhausts the soil, it seems likely that the tens of thousands of Narragansetts and Wampanoags living along this estuary would have competed for the best tracts.38
Another possible factor in warfare between the Wampanoags and Narragansetts was that they were both under pressure from the fearsome Mohawks, located just to the west of the modern city of Albany, New York, to produce shell beads for them. Recall that the Iroquois League, of which the Mohawks were a part, kept peace between the member tribes through the ritual exchange of such beads. Whereas the western Iroquois League nations looked to Chesapeake Bay peoples for those manufactures, the Mohawks focused on Long Island and southern New England, sometimes through trade, but also through raid. Given that League nations began acquiring disc-shaped beads of quahog and periwinkle from southern New England at least as early as the sixteenth century, and that Narragansetts of the seventeenth century were known to send shell beads to the Mohawks regularly, it stands to reason that the Narragansetts and Wampanoags would compete for tributaries and try to reduce each other to tributary status in order to acquire the shells and labor to produce those beads in large quantities. At play in this contest were the shellfish-rich communities of Coweset, Shawomet, and Pawtuxet (distinct from the Plymouth Harbor site) on the northwest side of Narragansett Bay, with the Narragansett tribe ultimately proving triumphant. Well into the seventeenth century, the Pokanoket Wampanoags would protest that they had historical political and kinship rights to these communities despite colonists’ assumption that they had always belonged to the Narragansetts. This argument hinted at a generations-old rivalry between the Wampanoags and Narragansetts for wampum-paying tributaries to meet Iroquois demand for wampum beads.39
A final consideration is that the Wampanoags and Narragansetts fought for control of Narragansett Bay in order to command access to European trade vessels, which began to appear intermittently at least as early as Verrazzano’s voyage of 1524 and regularly by at least the early 1600s. Native people clamored after the Europeans’ metal tools and implements, brightly colored cloth, mirrors, glass beads, and other jewelry. They especially prized European goods that resembled high-status indigenous productions acquired through long-distance, intertribal networks. For instance, Europeans could not help but notice that Indians had a high demand for copper even though Native leaders already possessed copper earrings and pendants from American sources. For sachems of a densely populated horticultural region trying to consolidate and extend their followings against competitors, securing a new source of exotic, luxury goods with which they could reward their supporters was a potential boon. It stands to reason, then, that when European ships began appearing in Narragansett Bay seeking trade, the Wampanoags and Narragansetts vied to dominate this traffic.40
All three factors—competition for planting grounds, shell-bead-paying tributaries, and long-distance trade—might have been at play in the Wampanoag-Narragansett rivalry for Narragansett Bay, which leads to a more general point about the nature of paramount sachemships on the eve of European colonization: they were fragile systems, often dependent on the political talents and resources of a single person and his or her family, rather than a set of institutions that lasted from generation to generation. A sachemship was ever a work in progress, and tribal instability was normal. At any given time, a tribute-paying community within the confederacy might break away to throw its loyalty to another paramount sachem or make a bid for independence, particularly if its local sachem lacked kinship ties to the tribute-collecting, paramount sachem. Take the Wampanoags, for example. Though the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard paid tribute to Ousamequin, there is no evidence that the island sachems were related to him, whereas they clearly had close connections to sachems around Massachusetts Bay. It is probably no coincidence that in the early years of Plymouth colony, Ousamequin was concerned about the islanders forming an alliance with the Bay Indians in order to buck his authority. Regional sachems also had to worry that a local sachem upstart, even a relative, might parlay military honors, a new political marriage, or a cause célèbre into a bid for power. Unhappiness with a paramount sachem’s performance might prompt local sachemships to disavow his or her authority, even at the risk of war. The challenge faced by paramount sachems trying to keep multiple communities within the tribal fold was captured in the 1670s by the Massachusetts Bay missionary Daniel Gookin when he remarked that “their sachems have not their men in such subjection, but that very frequently their men will leave them upon distaste or harsh dealing, and go and live under other sachems that can protect them; so that their princes [the sachems] endeavor to carry it obligingly and lovingly unto their people, lest they should desert them, and thereby their strength, power, and tribute would be diminished.” A paramount sachem like Ousamequin always had to keep one eye on his home base and another on enemies abroad. As the anthropologist Eric Johnson puts it, “The power of an individual sachem should not be assumed, but should be a topic of inquiry.”41
When Europeans appeared in southern New England, first as explorers, traders, and slavers, and later as colonists, they entered this old world in motion. They would be met by indigenous people who had proprietorship in the land stretching back countless generations, even as they had been cultivating corn, beans, and squash on it for only a few hundred years; people who added new ceremonies dedicated to the corn-giver spirit, Kiehtan, to the dream interpretation and vision quest traditions of ancient hunter-gatherers; people who for centuries had sought exotic goods from far-off places deep in the continent even as they now also looked to the sea for vessels carrying the riches of Europe. Population growth, horticultural needs, and defensive considerations had encouraged the people of southern New England to group themselves into local and paramount sachemships or tribes. They deferred to their sachems, yet these leaders had to work constantly to maintain their followings through marriage alliances, trade, and war. None of this changed once Europeans entered the stage. Indeed, initially Native people treated colonial towns like so many new sachemships in an already crowded field. Over time Europeans tried to impose their own systems and customs on indigenous people, leaving behind a long trail of blood and mourning. But in the short term they were on Wampanoag turf, where Indian ways of doing things, old and new, dictated how things ran.