PROLOGUE: CASKOAK, THE PLACE OF PEACE

THE “QUEEN” OF CASKOAK: CASCO BAY, 1623

It was spring, the salmon streaming upriver, when English explorer and colonial agent Christopher Levett arrived at Caskoak, the “place of herons,” in Wabanaki, the land of the dawn (map 2). Wabanaki leaders greeted him, hosted his visit, and diplomatically opened the way through the extensive coastal region. The leaders of Cascoak invited Levett to remain, and, he recounted, the “Queen” of “Quack” formally welcomed him, his men, and the fishermen who came to her homeland: “The woman or reputed queen, asked me if those men were my friends. I told her they were; then she drank to them, and told them they were welcome to her country, and so should all my friends be at any time; she drank also to her husband, and bid him welcome to her country too; for you must understand that her father was the sagamore of this place, and left it to her at his death, having no more children.”¹

In welcoming Levett into “her country,” the Queen initiated a diplomatic relationship. She spoke on behalf of a community, a “gathering” of extended families bound to each other through longstanding inhabitation, intermarriage, and interdependent relationships. The people who “belonged” to this place included those whose ties reached back through oral tradition and kinship to time immemorial, as well as others, like her husband Cogawesco, who had been incorporated through marriage or adoption. Belonging entailed not only residency, but kinship to a particular place and people, of which the sôgamo (sagamore or sachem) or sôgeskwa (saunkskwa) was the symbolic leader. The Queen’s leadership may have seemed anomalous to Levett, explained by the apparent lack of male heirs, but sôgeskwak, or female leaders, were not uncommon, particularly in communities reliant upon horticulture, where oral traditions emphasized the power of women. Evidence of women’s labor and management, in cultivating fields and allowing some to lie fallow, was all around Levett, who witnessed “a great quantity of cleared ground” from his position on the coastal waterways.2

2. Caskoak and surrounding territories

Located near the northeasternmost limits of horticulture, the people of Caskoak occupied a critical position in a distributive trade network, mediating between planting communities and northerly kin who relied on hunting, fishing, and gathering (see map 1). Sôgamak and sôgeskwak were responsible for ensuring distribution of resources within their homelands, and between territories, through a well-established ceremonial and economic system of exchange. A breakdown in the redistributive system could yield conflict, particularly in times of scarcity. Therefore, effective leaders facilitated the renewal of relationships and amelioration of disputes through diplomatic councils and annual ceremonies at places like Caskoak, where people of all ages participated in symbolic and material exchange, celebrating intercommunity marriages, relaying deep-time stories, sharing artistic and practical knowledge, and negotiating rights and responsibilities among contiguous communities, thus enabling social and ecological sustainability.³

Diplomatic negotiation was crucial at this juncture, as Wabanaki communities increasingly encountered European vessels and fledgling fishing and trading settlements on their coast, imposing a different system of exchange. At the same time, foreign diseases devastated Native communities. These transformations ushered in a time of great grief and change, where conflict could abound. Exchange was vital to diplomacy. Wabanaki men were already traveling between Ktsitekw (the St. Lawrence River) and the coast, participating in an extensive inland and maritime trade network, which included both Indigenous people and French, English, and Basque visitors. They adapted their language to accommodate the trade and even commanded European shallops. Some of their relations had been taken captive by English and French men, carried away in ships, far from their homes and their kin. Thus, Wabanaki leaders understood that there were dangers inherent to their interactions with European visitors and vessels; the Queen’s diplomacy was designed to bring both neighboring leaders and newcomers into right relations.⁴

Levett participated in such a diplomatic council at the Indigenous meeting place of Casco Bay with Wabanaki leaders from the region, who expressed a desire to bring him and his family into their kinship network. He humorously expressed that he “was not a little proud . . . to be adopted cousin to so many great kings at one instant, but did willingly accept of it.” In this world, one could not inhabit a place without belonging to a particular family, and as Levett witnessed at Caskoak, this “belonging” could be cultivated. The Queen explained that her husband belonged through marriage, and Levett himself was offered a place within her family and territory. However, these relationships also entailed commitment. Whether Levett realized it or not, his “acceptance” came with responsibilities.”5

The problem, of course, was that English guests all too often misinterpreted such hospitality—when the Queen said they were “welcome” to her country, she did not mean they were “welcome” to possess it. Nor did she mean that the English and French fishermen were welcome to harvest all the fish from the sea, an abundance they misunderstood as endless. Having lived in this place for so long, dependent upon it for their survival, the people of Caskoak understood through experience the complex of belief, practice, story, and ceremony that enabled them to sustain balance among finite resources. This included the crucial role of leaders like the Queen in ensuring fair distribution at Caskoak, a place name that conveyed a meeting of multiple tributaries and nations, a site of diplomacy and exchange. When the Queen welcomed Levett and his “friends” into this space, she invited them to enter into its network of people, diplomatic practices, and reciprocal relations. It was up to him, and those that followed, to reveal whether they would “abide with” them and “share” in the first mother’s power and strength, or fall among the “brutes,” who would “steal” her “body” and refuse to “share in it” as she had intended.⁶

A REBALANCING: CASKOAK, 1631

Christopher Levett acknowledged that the Native nations had a “natural right of inheritance” and received praise from local leaders for “acting in a right fashion,” but others posed a direct challenge to the system of reciprocal relations. For example, Walter Bagnall, the first European to settle in Casco Bay, displayed little regard for either Indigenous rights or the protocols of exchange. In 1628, he set up a trading post on “Richmond” island, and became infamous for hoarding goods and repeatedly cheating Wabanaki people in trade. Bagnall neglected to acquire title from either his own government or local Indigenous leaders, but became wealthy through deception and “extortion.” In the Wabanaki world, such behavior represented the worst of infractions against the community. In 1631, Skitterygusset, whom Levett had acknowledged as a local sagamore, killed Bagnall and burned down his trading post, enacting a violent redistribution and asserting jurisdiction in this diplomatic space.⁷

“A BUSHEL OF CORN,” OWASCOAG, 1659

Skitterygusset belonged to a wide network of related leaders along the coast, who participated in negotiations that led to deeds, often signed by multiple representatives. He was the first to appear on a deed for land at Caskoak, in which “fisherman” Francis Small acquired the right to settle land from “the marshes and uplands of Capissic” to the fishing falls at Amancongan, on the south side of the Presumpscot River (between the contemporary Fore River and Cumberland Mills). Small pledged an annual “pay” of “one trading coat,” a symbolic recognition of Skitterygusset’s leadership, and “one gallon of liquor.” The exchange of wampum and tobacco, as Small later testified, in this and subsequent agreements, sealed a pledge to share space, creating a negotiated relationship as much as an economic transaction. He later sold the rights to part of this tract, including a mill privilege at Capissic, to John Phillips, who transferred it to his son-in-law George Munjoy, both of whom had come to Casco from Boston. In 1666, Skitterygusset’s sister, the saunkskwa Warrabitta, signed a deed with another leader, Nannateonett, allowing Munjoy to extend his claim to the “other side” of the Presumpscot, from “the lower-most planting ground” of Amancongan to the great falls at Sacarappa (Westbrook), an area far from the English settlements clustered on the coast. Four years later, Warrabitta, known also as Jane or Jhone, apparently consented to a local colonial land grant at Casco Bay to Anthony Brackett for “twenty shillings,” with her brother Sagettawon, who had married into a leadership family to the south, on the Saco and Kennebunk Rivers. Warrabitta and Skitterygusset also appear on deeds with leaders to the north, including Moxus, Sheepscot John, and the influential Androscoggin leader the English called “Robin Hood”; documents such as these often recognized the intersecting relationships and jurisdictions of “neighboring sachems” in the coastal region.8

At Owascoag, just south of Caskoak, where Warrabitta and her mother lived and planted, they had allowed a group of settlers, represented by Andrew and Arthur Alger, to live among them. This produced the earliest record in which Warrabitta appeared. The documented agreement between Warrabitta’s family and the Alger brothers is typical of deeds in this region, although more revealing than many of those recorded in Plymouth, where Indigenous rights were often subsumed. In the document, dated September 1659, “Jane alias Uphanum” declared that she, “her mother namely Naguasqua the wife of Wickwarrawaske Sagamore, & her brother” Skitterygusset (who may have died by this time), had “coequally,” eight years previous (in 1651), “sold unto Andrew Alger, & to his brother Arther Alger a Tract of Land” on the Owascoag River (Scarborough). The deed reveals patterns of contiguous and overlapping inhabitation and resource use that had to be negotiated in order to maintain peaceful relations. The deed recognized the name of the river “in Indian” while naming several places that denoted recent settlement, such as “the great hill of Abram Jocelyns” (probably Orchard Hill). It also recognized the right of Warrabitta and her mother to continue to plant in this territory “so long as” they “both live.” Most important, the agreement required the Algers to give “one bushel of corne for acknowledgment every year so long as they both shall Live.”9

This annual bushel of corn, recurrently pledged on deeds and treaties, was similar to the contribution a Native family would be obliged to make to their community. Rather than simply acquiring an outright purchase, the Algers engaged in an agreement by which they, too, could belong to this place, through their annual “acknowledgement” to the local family leaders, enacting a formalized relationship to the land and its longstanding community. “Uphanum,” translated to “our sister” or “our woman,” acted as speaker for the extended leadership family, acknowledging that the agreement had been in place since 1651. Warrabitta reaffirmed the agreement again in 1672, three years before her death and the commencement of the war.¹⁰

While Warrabitta was party to multiple deeds over these decades between 1651 and 1675, the 1659 Owascoag deed bears close examination, revealing a great deal about the larger context of diplomatic negotiations and conceptualizations of relationships among people and places. Owascoag was “the place of good grass,” and the name may have translated more precisely to “Olaskikak,” or “sweetgrass gathering place.” This was the grass—known to some Algonquian nations as the “hair of Mother Earth,” a sacred plant used in ceremonies, art, basketry, and medicine—that is uniquely adapted to annual summer harvesting. Sweetgrass flourishes in brackish marshes, which were and are often tied to particular family territories. Owascoag was likely the place where Warrabitta and her family handpicked the blades of grass, distributing carefully woven braids and baskets among the networks to which they belonged.¹¹

This was also a place where they planted “our mother” corn, a practice clearly continuing here even as settlers like the Algers began their own plantings. Oral traditions relay that the Corn Mother, known in story and song as Nigawes, “our mother,” instructed that her own body be planted in order to feed her starving children, the Wabanaki people. And it was unlikely that Warrabitta and her mother planted alone; like other Native women, they must have shared the fields with their female relations. Naming here was important as well. The name given to Warrabitta and Skitterygusset’s mother was Naguasqua, which may have been an Anglicized spelling of nigawes (with the gendered ending “skwa”), recognizing “our mother’s” right to continue to harvest and plant in this place. Thus the deed recognized Owascoag as the place of “our mother,” on multiple levels, where “our mother” lived, planted and was planted, harvested and was harvested, to enable the peacemaking protocols for which Cascoak was well known.12

Like their predecessor, the Queen, these leaders of Cascoak were entrusted with diplomacy. Thus, part of their role was to create responsible relationships with the newcomers. With this agreement, they gave the Algers and their extended family permission to live at Owascoag, but negotiated some of the terms of sharing space and required “acknowledgment” of their continuing relationship to and leadership in this place. As Alice Nash has observed, such “deeds should be read more like proto-treaties” or councils in which rights, land use, and jurisdiction were negotiated, rather “than as simple property transactions.”¹³

This agreement was made at harvest time, when both the Algers and Warrabitta and her mother were gathering in the corn. Like any family in the territory, the Algers were expected to make a contribution that could be distributed to the whole. As Nash points out, the annual “acknowledgment” was not an act of charity, as Warrabitta clearly could plant her own field, but a symbolic act that embedded settlers in an Indigenous redistributive system. In giving them corn, the Algers were at least symbolically acknowledging not only the women leaders, but “our mother” from whom they also were drawing nourishment. The old stories warned that the newcomers would crave the Corn Mother’s body, would try to steal it. Part of Warrabitta’s responsibility was to encourage them instead to follow her original instructions, to “divide among you the flesh and bone of the first mother,” corn and tobacco, “and let all shares be alike” in order to “carry out” the “love of your first mother.”¹⁴