Catherine Marten

“ For boys it was a lengthy process to finally achieve recognition as an adult member of the tribe. De Rasieres describes some of the aspects of Wampanoag initiation.
When there is a youth who begins to approach manhood, he is taken by his father, uncle or nearest friend, and is conducted blindfolded into a wilderness, in order that he may not know the way, and is left there by night or otherwise, with a bow and arrows, and a hatchet and a knife. He must support himself there a whole winter with what the scanty earth furnishes at this season, and by hunting. ”

“ The indigenous people were among the first to experience the ravages of contact with European colonists. Disease, war, and forced migrations throughout the 17th and 18th centuries effectively depopulated the area of most of its original inhabitants. Those few who remained were supposedly detribalized and merged with the Europeans. Even their artifacts were carted off across the ocean to be placed in cabinets of curiosities. To this day some of the best and largest ethnographic collections of New England Indian material culture are found in European museums and private estates. ”

“ However, before assuming that agriculture was the major food source for the Wampanoags, it should be remembered that these Indians and their neighbors were best known to the early chroniclers in their coastal farming settlements. When they were living in the forest during hunting season and in the winter villages they were probably seldom seen by the Europeans. Therefore, the foreigner’s view of Indian dietary habits may not contain the entire story. ”

“ It is true that archaeology in New England has been generally less immediately rewarding than in many other areas of North America. The poorer conditions of preservation, the apparent absence of deeply stratified sites and the dense settlement pattern in this region have contributed to this condition. With the emergence of what is now being called historical archaeology, however, new potentials are being realized in New England. ”

“ These new developments make southern New England an important resource for anthropological study. Inter-ethnic relations are now attracting the attention of students to a society which is no longer considered an inevitable melting pot. Portuguese, French-Canadians, Italians, and other immigrants have been a prominent part of New England towns and cities for decades, but we do not yet understand the processes by which they have adapted to American culture. ”

“ The world of the Wampanoags was well-populated with supernatural beings and forces. Of these, one was a sort of generalized power, called Manitou. [533] Many early observers of the Indians of northeastern North America, where this concept is widespread, developed the mistaken idea that “Manitou” referred to an anthropomorphic supreme being. Actually, Manitou is a force rather than a person. It could perhaps best be likened to that force for good luck that many Europeans think can be found in horse shoes, four-leaf clovers, etc. ”

“ There is evidence that another technique of hunting common in North America, especially among the Algonquians farther north, was also used by the Wampanoags: driving the deer into water where they are more vulnerable to the hunters. There is no direct description of this process taking place, but there is the information that laws made special provision for paying the sachem within whose territory a deer was shot in the water. [52] And Williams tells us that there is a special word to designate the skin of such a deer. ”

“ The best sources for information on Wampanoag culture are the journals and letters of travelers and settlers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Among the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow proved to be an exceptional ethnographer, having recorded a number of insightful observations on Indian culture. John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay sent a collection of Indian artifacts back to England, some of which are still preserved in the British Museum. Of lesser value to the present purpose are writings of the latter half of the 17th century by missionaries who were trying to teach Christianity to the Indians. ”

“ Bride-price is one institution that emphasizes their importance. The more women there were in a group, the more prosperous it was considered to be. In war, female captives were prized. A wife who wanted to leave her husband could run away to the enemy and be welcomed. [352]
The business of men was to hunt for game, catch fish, and provide protection for the weaker members of the village. [353] Raising tobacco was an exclusive activity of men. Men made and maintained their hunting and war weapons. They also manufactured many of the household tools and utensils. ”

“ Here coastal dwelling Indian groups such as the Wampanoags took the advantage. Being first to meet the Europeans, they quickly established themselves as go-betweens in the trade, and besides doing trapping of their own, they traded for the furs of inland tribes, which they then traded to the Europeans for a profit. [338] The fur trade caused increased emphasis upon hunting and trapping. Since it was more profitable to trade skins than to wear them, the fur trade was a force that encouraged Indians to adopt European textiles and dress. ”

“ The pages that follow attempt to describe as fully as possible the culture of the Wampanoags as it would have been during the lifetime of Plymouth Colony—1620 to about 1690. A few words are in order in regard to sources of information. The normal procedure for gaining ethnographic information is for a trained observer—usually an anthropologist—to live among the people he wants to study, interviewing informants and observing with the aid of notebook, tape recorder, and camera the activities and habits of the groups under study. ”

“ Deer were hunted in the fall; men moved away to the forest to catch the migrating animals. Sometimes women and children would be included in the hunting expedition, if the distance to be traveled was not too far from their summer home. But some people stayed in their summer residences through the hunting season, probably to harvest the last crop. Hunting sometimes lasted until the snow was too deep to move in. ”

“ A bad dream was considered to be a threat from the supernatural, and a man awakening from one would fall to offering prayers of supplication. If the vision were especially ominous, a man might call in his friends to keep watch with him. He would offer them food, but he himself kept a fasting and wakeful watch for several days and nights. [555]
Among the Wampanoags, names had supernatural significance. “Obscure and mean persons amongst them....” had no names. [556] Probably such persons were resident non-members of the tribe and youngsters who had not yet undergone initiation. ”

“ The general result of the settlement of Europeans in New England was to further the trend of Indian depopulation. Whereas the Europeans might hope to have developed or inherited a degree of immunity to the diseases which they carried, such infections proved fatal to the Indians almost without exception. In 1632-33 the Narragansetts suffered a smallpox epidemic which killed some seven hundred, and at the same time it destroyed what remained of the Massachusetts [4] tribe. ”

“ The Indian village of Patuxet had formerly been located on the site where the Pilgrims were to establish New Plimoth; it had been wiped out by a plague. The sole survivor from Patuxet was Squanto, who had joined the band of a sachem called Massasoit.
Political relationships among the Indian groups of southeastern New England were variable depending upon the leadership abilities and popularity of their several sachems at various times. ”

“ If, as reports indicate, twelve to twenty men went out from each summer village in the fall to their hunting camps, and it may be assumed that these represent most of all the able-bodied adult male population, then we would seem to be dealing with summer village populations whose total numbers would equal in size the population of a winter longhouse. ”

“ Notable among those who took up the mission to the Indians of southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island were Roger Williams, John Elliot, and the Mayhews, father and son. Quite a number of converts were made. [23] Converted Indians were encouraged to dwell together in what came to be dubbed “praying towns”. Such Indians were required to adopt European culture wholeheartedly in terms of dress, housing, habits, etc., and they were required to learn to read as part of their conversion so that they could study the scriptures. The majority of Indians seem to have refused conversion ”

“ A longhouse in one of the winter villages might shelter 40 or 50 people; there is no indication as to the number of longhouses that might have been found in such a village. [323]
Fall hunting encampments were, like the summer settlements, dispersed. Men moved onto the lands to which they had the hunting rights. Since more land was needed for hunting than farming, the spread of dwellings would have been much thinner. As for the spring fishing camps, it is known only that large numbers of people gathered at them; sources give no hint of settlement pattern. ”

“ Further, Colonial towns were located on prehistoric and early historic Indian camps and villages, and in other ways the growing industrial complex of the Northeast covered over or erased the Indian sites. As a result, at the end of the 19th century, when anthropology as a formal discipline emerged, the native peoples and most of the material vestiges of their presence were gone. ”

“ The Wampanoags were skillful both in the use of their weapons and in avoiding enemy fire. In the woods, where most fighting seems to have been done, warriors used trees for cover. In the open, bark shields were used to ward off arrows, and the fighters were skillful at dodging out of the way. [478] As a rule, when a warrior had run out of arrows he left the battle. [479] As a result, mortality was not high, judged by the standards of European wars of the period. In a large battle, however, as many as twenty men might be lost. ”

“ Annual Cycle: The environment of coastal southern New England was rich in a variety of wild food resources. Because these resources were available seasonally in several differing localities, the Wampanoags, who lived by a combination of hunting, fishing, collecting, and horticulture, moved several times during the year.
Beginning in about April, large numbers of Indians, probably the populations of several localized winter camping groups, would gather at the falls of certain rivers for the upstream runs of fish such as herring. ”

“ Basketry everywhere serves what is basically a container function, and among the Wampanoags there were available pottery, birch bark boxes, pouches of leather, wooden dishes, and later the metal pots and kettles brought by Europeans—all of which could carry out the job of holding something. ”

“ Indeed, this may, according to the thinking of anthropologists, be the direction from which they received the corn that they were cultivating in at least the 16th century. However, the question of a true tribal history must, as is so often the case with pre-literate peoples, remain unanswered.
Early explorers and settlers had their own ideas as to the origins of the Indians they found in the New World. ”

“ For heavy work, such as felling trees and dressing game, stone tools were used.
The increasing substitution of metal tools for stone ones brought about changes in Indian technology that continued through the seventeenth century. The situation for New England Indians in general is summarized by Willoughby:
After and during the first two or three decades of the seventeenth century the Indians received from European traders, especially from the French and Dutch, cloth, kettles, hatchets, and many other objects, and the graves of that period have yielded numerous articles of this nature. ”

“ The small groups of surviving Algonkian Indians in southern New England, who retained few visible evidences of their traditional culture, therefore attracted almost no attention. Frank G. Speck is a notable exception among the younger anthropologists who were prominent in shaping the discipline in the United States.
The practice of anthropology today is considerably different from the anthropology of 70 years ago. Tribal cultures and societies which are still relatively intact continue to be an important concern, but new dimensions for the study of man have appeared. ”

“ When fish or game was captured by the man of the house he left the kill where it had fallen and sent his wife to fetch it in. Having collected the game, the woman skinned it, prepared the meat and dressed the hide, which she might then make into clothing or some household article. [350] Besides these things women had the job of motherhood. Along with the household goods, the baby rode on his mother’s back when the family moved. [351] Women were valued as highly productive members of the community. ”

“ There were two techniques for weaving baskets, twining and plaiting, though there were probably enough variations upon these basic techniques that not all baskets looked alike to the casual observer. Twined basketry was the more common type at the time that the Europeans arrived in New England. The baskets of “Hempe and Rushes” that Wood describes were probably made by this technique. [165] The manufacture of twined basketry involves wrapping a horizontal weft element, the hemp in this case, around what is usually a more rigid warp, the bulrushes. ”