Читать книгу Faithful Bodies - Heather Miyano Kopelson - Страница 11

2. “Joyne interchangeably in a laborious bodily service”

In June 1675, Awashunkes, the saunks or female leader of the Saconets, an Algonquian people who lived on the coast of what the English called Narragansett Bay, had an important decision to make.¹ It was not one she could make alone, so she called for all those within her influence to gather for a nickómmo, a ritual dance and feast. Two decades earlier, the colonist, trader, and sometime religious exile Roger Williams had noted that Narragansetts (as did other peoples in the region the English knew as New England) held the nickómmo in times of crisis—“in sicknesse, or Drouth, or Warre, or Famine”—as well as “After Harvest, after hunting, when they enjoy a caulme of Peace, Health, Plenty, Prosperity.” This 1675 occasion was definitely the former, and was possibly a divination ritual.² Opposing sides in the military conflagration that later came to be known as King Philip’s War (1675–76) sought Awashunkes’s allegiance. Emissaries had come from the Wampanoag community at Mount Hope, Philip’s stronghold, as well as from the English settlements of Plymouth. Benjamin Church’s account of the war noted that Awashunkes had called her “subjects,” which included “hundreds of Indians gathered together from all parts of her dominion,” to “make a great dance.” When Church, the Plymouth military leader, arrived at the dance on her invitation, he saw that “Awashonks herself, in a foaming sweat, was leading the dance.” She and other Saconet leaders stopped dancing in order to conduct diplomatic discussions with Church.³

Figure 2.1. Map of selected Native and English places in seventeenth- century New England.

The political and military consequences of Awashunkes’s decision to ally with Philip against the English have been well explored elsewhere, as have the ways in which the outcome and aftermath of King Philip’s War fundamentally reshaped life in southern New England and contributed to racialized definitions of difference.⁴ Awashunkes’s recourse to a nickómmo in a time of crisis offers a different kind of opportunity to consider definitions of bodies among the Native peoples in present-day southern New England, one focused on practices that stretched across the divide of King Philip’s War and indeed continue today. These communal rituals both provided the means to move beyond the physical body to access spiritual power and served as the enactment of hierarchical community, of connection among human individuals. Long before English puritans brought ideas of the body of Christ to the land they would dub New England, Saconets and other Algonquian tribes in the region performed their own notions of the communal body, inscribing the land with their presence.

Roger Williams’s general description of a nickómmo in A Key into the Language of America, a phrasebook and collection of his observations on Narragansett life, emphasized the communal aspects of the event as well as the participants’ perspiration. Williams wrote that after a powwow, or religious specialist, began “their service, and Invocation of their Gods,” then “all the people follow, and joyne interchangeably in a laborious bodily service, unto sweating.” The movement of “all the people” was so unified, intricate, and vigorous that all perspired, while the powwow’s “strange Antick Gestures, and Actions even unto fainting” suggest particular movements meant to cross boundaries between seen and unseen worlds, or between human and other-than-human worlds.⁵ The physically strenuous characteristics of ritual dances and feasts, often noted in English accounts, were a means for their participants to strengthen the corporate body of the gathered human community as well as reach out to other-than-human persons who held animating power, or manitou, that could be brought to bear on behalf of the human supplicants.

The “laborious bodily service” described to Roger Williams (he feared potential negative spiritual consequences from direct observation and so used informants) as well as other feasting rituals offer a vantage point onto the actions and experiences of seventeenth-century Algonquian peoples in a time of accelerated change, a means to look over their shoulders as they danced and feasted, moving as individual and corporate bodies reaching to access the powers of the unseen. In considering the clothes, jewelry, and food they wore, consumed, gave away, or destroyed, we can also learn something of their embodied environments and the objects Pocumtucks, Narragansetts, Massachusetts, Nipmucs, Pokanokets, and others used to create and strengthen relations with other persons, whether human or other-than-human.⁶ A focus on ritually significant feasts locates specific people in a specific place, even if their names have often not made their way into the documentary record, places that continued to exist and change as English and other colonists enacted their own constructions of community, place, and body. The religious theorist Thomas Tweed has argued for “excavating the landscape’s moral history,” of knowing the contours of the inequalities of previous as well as current inscriptions of power. Partnerships of non-Native and Native scholars and current Native communities are doing just that, examining the resonances between the past and present and making rites of commemoration visible beyond the immediate participants.⁷

Landscapes also have an experiential history of people moving through and around them with purpose, creating enduring meaning through their performances even when the feeling of contracting and relaxing muscles and the sounds of tinkling and jangling beads, metal cones, and shells have long faded away. The interplay between part and whole, the level of physical exertion, and the multisensory actions come through even in imperfect, only partially comprehending contemporary English accounts of these events.⁸ When joined with the evocative objects recovered through archaeological research, the textual remains of this and other ritual performances expand the available archive for tracing Native definitions and imagining the experiences of faithful bodies, both individual and corporate. Those experiences were different from individual to individual and from one culture to another, even as all took part in a process of humans working to define the limits of their physical bodies, to understand and cultivate their relationships to the beings and forces with spiritual power, and to enact a balance between divergence and overlap, equality and hierarchy.

“All their neighbors, kindred, and friends, meet together”

A nickómmo such as the one Awashunkes initiated enacted an underlying approach that guided relations among human and other-than-human persons. In redistributing wealth, some of which was displayed while dancing, these rituals kept the resources of the “one dish” or “common pot” in balance.⁹ Although the “one dish, one spoon” language comes from a later period and more northern location, the concept of connection among all members of a community held true among the Ninnimissinuok, Wabanakis, and other Northeast Native cultures and is reflected in contemporary English descriptions.¹⁰ While the southern Algonquian common pot emphasized shared resources among humans and other-than-humans as it mandated particular sets of relationships between parts (individuals or specific communities) and the whole (the space of the Northeast), communities allocated those resources in stratified ways. Leaders controlled access to valuable types of goods and displayed their power through the redistribution of those goods rather than through their accumulation, as was more common among Europeans. A shared common pot did not create an egalitarian paradise among Natives. Rather, its maintenance was the means by which peoples realized inequalities in economic, social, and political arenas.¹¹ They also fought over who might get to share a particular space and who was an outsider to be kept away. These contested embodiments of the concept offer a rich starting point from which to consider the Native bodies, Native communities, and Native space that underlay the puritan English body of Christ as a way of structuring the Northeast.

There were significant ritual variations within groups and also across groups, but the related iterations pointed to the fundamental concepts of connection, reciprocity, the cycle between destruction and regeneration, and the permeability of bodies. Kathleen Bragdon has argued that rituals sponsored by leaders or other individuals for more personal reasons were more centered on accessing manitou than those public events that occurred on a calendrical or seasonal cycle.¹² While calendrical rituals might have been less focused on an individual’s access to the specific power of a particular other-than-human person, they were part of the corporate quest for spiritual health that required interaction with other-than-human persons. In both cases, the gathering of individuals into a community that acted in concert was key to the performance of the ritual. According to Edward Winslow, Pokanokets would “meete together, and cry unto” the creator god Kiehtan “when they would obtaine any great matter.” Participants would “sing, daunce, feast, give thankes, and hang up Garlandes and other thinges in memorie of” or hope for “plentie, victorie, &c.”¹³ In rituals such as the Keesakùnnamun, Roger Williams observed “a kind of solemne publicke meeting, wherin they lie under the trees, in a kind of Religious observation, and have a mixture of Devotions and sports.” Various Algonquian peoples held “great dances” annually on the ripening of green corn, which happened in August or September. In August 1637, Conanicus and Miantonomi, Narragansett leaders, sponsored a “strange kind of solemnity” that lasted for nearly two weeks during which “all the Natives round the country were feasted,” while “the sachims eat nothing but at night.” An Eastern Niantic green corn dance in 1669 was the supposed occasion for a conspiracy led by Ninigret, a plot that members of several Native tribes had hatched at an earlier dance hosted by the Mashantucket Pequots. Regardless of any plans to assault the English, the dances were occasions to reconnect with kin and assert community autonomy.¹⁴ Among the Nipmuc, the missionary Daniel Gookin noted harvest feasts in which “all their neighbours, kindred, and friends, meet together.” At those times, “much impiety is committed,” not least because “They use great vehemency in the motion of their bodies, in their dances.”¹⁵ The assembling of large groups of people enabled humans to connect more easily with each other and with other animate beings.

Throughout the Northeast, particularly significant dreams could prompt an individual to call for a communal ritual. Williams recounted one man’s “vision or dream of the sun . . . darting a beam into his breast; which he conceived to be the messenger of his death.” The man gathered his “friends and neighbours” in a nickómmo that went on for “ten days and nights.” While his friends and neighbors feasted on “some little refreshing” the man had prepared, he “was kept waking and fasting, in great humiliations and invocations.” Invoked in response to the intimacy of a dream, the event strengthened a community through the sharing of food and ritual.¹⁶

Other occasions for ritual dancing and feasting, which could include the destruction of goods, happened around illness. When a powwow cured a sick person’s illness, the happy patient or friends and relatives gave “corn and other gifts” to the powwow at a specific time which became the occasion for a nickómmo. Ritual destruction might also take place to ward away sickness, as Wampanoags told Edward Winslow that Narragansetts had done successfully to avoid the smallpox epidemic that hit the area from 1616 to 1620. At such events, community members contributed “almost all the riches they have to their gods, as kettles, skinnes, hatchets, beads, knives, &c. all which are cast by the Priests into a great fire that they make in the midst of the house, and there consumed to ashes.”¹⁷ The more an individual could contribute, the higher a status he or she could attain as a result of the manitou accrued through such destruction.

The performances of ritual feasting and dancing facilitated the connections that linked seasonally dispersed bands into more broadly constructed groups. Roger Williams disparaged this traveling, which to him seemed to be merely a search for dispensations of food and goods: “By this Feasting and Gifts, the Divell drives on their worships pleasantly . . . so that they run farre and neere and aske Awaun. Nikommit? | Who makes a Feast? Nkekinneawaûmen. | I goe to the Feast. Kekineawaúi. | He is gone to the Feast.”¹⁸ This perception of disorganization carried through into scholarship by nineteenth-century historians and early archaeologists about apparently marginal areas of southern New England such as the middle Connecticut River Valley. Paying attention to the layered significance and consequences of seasonal intertribal feasting that drew a wide population together recasts such apparent disorganization as social and political flexibility that allowed small concentrations of extended families with multiple leaders to respond to seasonal shifts in available resources, as well as to political crises. In the spring, different tribes “from severall places” gathered at key fishing sites such as the natural falls a few miles north of Deerfield at Peskeompskut, where, in addition to fishing, “they exercise themselves in gaminge, and playing of juglinge trickes, and all manner of Revelles, which they are delighted in.”¹⁹

Archaeological research and oral traditions corroborate the accuracy for Pocumtuck country of Thomas Morton’s description of more coastal groups. Near the dam at Peskeompskut, the soil contains high levels of calcium from fish bones discarded along with artifacts with multiple origins. These intertribal gatherings at Peskeompskut were one example of how peoples shared important resources that lay within a particular village’s territory, enacting one aspect of the common pot.²⁰ When they were not fishing or processing the catch of shad and salmon, Natives performed other aspects of the seasonal rituals. In addition to the feasts and dances, sacred games of chance such as hubbub and puim were important activities for men in which the more successful players were able to invoke the help of other-than-human persons. Participation not only enabled men to display their spiritual accomplishments, but it also reinforced the gamers’ sense of connection to each other and to a particular space in the landscape. Later retellings of particularly spectacular wins and losses enhanced and extended such events far beyond the cast of stones or shuffling of reeds.²¹

The emphasis on networks of relations can also be seen in word construction that made meaning dependent on the specific context. For instance, southern Algonquian languages contained classes of nouns that did not make sense without a reference to what Kathleen Bragdon terms “intimate ownership.” In Massachusett, the term for “the house,” wétu, was not generally used without saying whose house it was. Neek was “my house”; keek was “your house”; and week was “his or her house.” In addition to living space, kin terms and body parts were in the same class of nouns. More than minor linguistic detail, these words conveyed a concept of things and beings as inextricably linked and they influenced individuals at the very level of thought, shaping not only what people saw as “normal” or “natural,” but also what it was possible to think.²² Roger Williams recorded a similar list for Narragansett: Wetu was “An House,” while Nékick was “My house,” and Kékick and Wekick were “Your house” and “At his house” respectively.²³ People were linked by kin relationships as surely as body parts belonged to a body.

“They make their neighbours partakers with them”

Early English observers of Natives in southern New England noted a strong obligation to share resources among all members but sometimes missed the required reciprocity that was the other side of the exchange. William Wood described the manner in which the Massachusetts and others “all meete friends at the kettle,” a practice that held true “the lesse abundance they have.” Whether the available food was an entire deer or “but a piece of bread,” an individual would distribute it “equally betweene himselfe and his comerades and eates it lovingly.” Thomas Morton noted a similar practice among the Massachusetts that he linked to classical precedents: “A bisket cake given to one; that one breakes it equally into so many parts, as there be persons in his company, and distributes it.” He commented approvingly, “Platoes Commonwealth is so much practiced by these people.” About the Narragansetts, Roger Williams wrote: “Whomsoever commeth in when they are eating, they offer them to eat of that which they have, though but little enough prepared for themselves. If any provision of fish or flesh come in, they make their neighbours partakers with them.”²⁴ For readers familiar with the Christian Bible, Roger Williams’s words would have recalled a passage in 1 Corinthians, “for we are all partakers of that one bread,” about the unity of Christians in one body through participation in a ritual meal.²⁵ A tone of amazement that Algonquians shared so readily with each other and with strangers—even when they did not begin with an abundance—pervades all of these descriptions. Wood, Morton, and Williams each aimed their words at English readers who, they assumed, would share similar surprise that no one went without even if it meant that the elite also suffered privation. The English concept of the common kettle, explored in more detail in the next chapter, did not go quite so far in its demands on those who controlled resources. Focused on the acts of giving that they saw, the English did not articulate or always understand the power inherent in creating an unrequited obligation by being able to give away more than one received.²⁶

Partaking with one’s neighbors did not imply equality among all members of a corporate body, nor was participation optional. The redistribution rituals at which people feasted reinforced social inequality and the concentration of twined spiritual and temporal power in the bodies of the elites. When a nickómmo was held at the ripening of the green corn or at other harvests, then the distribution of goods underscored that the food was to feed all and that the leaders were the ones with the right and responsibility to distribute it. The “poore” or common people “must particularly beg and say, Cowequetúmmous, that is, I beseech you.” Common people did not have the option to refuse the gifts, and once they accepted them, they owed allegiance to the giver. The sachem “danceth in the sight of all the rest and is prepared with money, coats, small breeches, knifes, or what hee is able to reach to, and gives these things away.”²⁷ This ritual asking and giving reinforced the bonds among members—human and other-than-human—of the community even as it highlighted unequal control over communal resources.

These feasts allowed elites an opportunity to display their generosity by granting the requests of the common people for assistance. Edward Winslow described a yearly redistribution among the Wampanoags in which “the Pnieses use to provoke the people to bestow much corne on the Sachim. To that end they appoint a certain time and place neere the Sachims dwelling, where the people bring many baskets of corne, and make a great stack thereof.” Although this event was seasonal, pniesok (warriors with proven control of significant amounts of manitou) directed the offerings and the formal interchanges between sachem and people, suggesting that the ritual had other-than-human resonances. Once the stacks of baskets were assembled, “the Pnieses stand ready to give thankes to the people on the Sachims behalfe.” Upon receiving the tribute, the sachem “is no lesse thankefull, bestowing many gifts” in return.²⁸ Refusing to accept a proffered gift or express gratitude was an asocial attitude that, as William Wood recounted, made “an ungratefull person a double robber of a man” as doing so not only withheld courtesy but denied “his thankes which he might receive of another for the same proffered, or received kindnesse.”²⁹ While a captive during King Philip’s War with an intertribal group of Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and Wampanoags, Mary Rowlandson did not understand this hierarchical reciprocity, and so did not see consistency in her captors’ punishments during her captivity when she tried to hoard food as well as when she begged food from individuals who were lower-ranking than Weetamoe, to whose household she belonged.³⁰

“Most of the body remains to this day”

Although the parts of the nickómmo and other feasts most concretely detailed in English observers’ accounts were those in which humans interacted with each other, they also connected human participants to the crowded animate world around them, linking dancers and feastgoers to places with much manitou and to other-than-human persons. English observers feared the potency of these connections and communications because they viewed them as commerce with the devil. The combination of their fear, lack of understanding, and outsider status means that these narratives contain only hints of the full sense and consequence of the movement of bodies and the ritual ingestion of food performed at these rituals. However, a broader view of some general principles that ordered Algonquian perceptions of their bodies and their relation to the environment permits a clearer outline of these meanings.

Native space contained sacred places that linked to different parts of the cosmos, which for most southern Algonquians was divided into three: the upper or sky world; the earth or middle world; and the under domains, often associated with water. The common pot dealt with them all, as spiritual resources were part of what had to be shared among humans and other-than-humans. Because “spiritual” was not separated from “physical” or “material,” concrete actions taken to ensure survival aimed to be efficacious in what a Western perspective now splits into discrete realms. Acknowledging this intertwining and seamless flow between what Western cultures compartmentalize into separate concerns is not the same as relegating indigenous peoples to melt into the background of the landscape, communing in some intrinsic way with the plants and animals around them. For puritans and other Christians too, unseen influences and forces animated the world around them, but they were all oriented around an omnipotent God, either flowing from or acting against that entity. Religions in the Northeast and in the Caribbean lacked that singular central point of reference; it was relations between and among humans and other-than-human persons that were the focus, relations that crisscrossed boundaries between seen and unseen worlds.³¹

The act of propitiating other-than-humans was part of this naming of insider and outsider, as those relationships with spiritual force were key to a healthy community body. Living and eating together and all the activities that made them possible were what made the “lived space” of a Ninnimissinuok community.³² These exchanges maintained the health of the whole community as well as that of the individuals directly involved in the exchange. Activities necessary to physical survival such as hunting animals and collecting plants were imbued with spiritual meaning because manitou inhabited those living beings as well as the places where they might be caught or found.³³ Beings rich with manitou transformed the very landscape. Wampanoags believed the culture hero Maushop, whom Narragansetts knew by the name Wétucks, to have created Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts, as well as places like the Devil’s Bridge on Martha’s Vineyard. They knew that he created a rock formation on the Rhode Island coast when he discarded his wife Saconet or Squant and later turned her to stone. While still alive, she demanded a toll from all who passed by. After being turned to stone, her body became an important reference point. The English, either not understanding the significance of the rock formation—or precisely understanding it and wishing to destroy what they viewed as a focus for idolatry—broke off her arms and carried them away. Thomas Cooper, a Gay Head storykeeper who had learned the history from his predecessors, asserted the continuity of Squant’s existence since “most of the body remains to this day.” A white inhabitant of a nearby town recorded Cooper’s account in the early nineteenth century, creating a documentary presence to complement Squant’s topological one.³⁴ This knowledge about place helped link community identity to specific features of the land and sea through the centuries, while also reminding Natives that the English had little consideration for Indian bodies.

Figure 2.2. Seventeenth-century wampum beads placed as grave goods in a Native interment near what is now Revere Beach, Massachusetts. (President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 78–17–10/14204, digital file 60740371)

The boundaries of physical bodies shared in the permeability between categories of human and other-than-human persons and were little more than perception. This attitude shows up in hogk, the Massachusett word for “body,” which means “that which covers a man or animal.” Rather than being an absolute separation or finite end to identity, the body was a mere covering for the living power or manitou that animated the person or animal.³⁵ Crossing boundaries between spaces or states of being involved great power that could be dangerous, leading to proscriptions placed on menstruating and birthing women, as well as on warriors about to go into battle and the houses of the dead.³⁶ When Algonquians slept, their inner self—or soul, as the English translated the concept—traveled outside the physical body to interact more closely with other-than-human persons who might convey spiritually significant messages. That experience was not always a positive one for the traveling essence of the human individual. Frightening or powerful dreams prompted the dreamer to discern their meaning through further communication with the unseen world or, as Roger Williams described it, “When they have had a bad Dreame, . . . they fall to prayer at all times of the night, especially early before day,” during the transition from night to day and dark to light.³⁷

Healing practices were based in the ability to bring manitou to bear on the sickness at hand. To cure a sick patient, powwows worked to transcend the limits of their physical bodies as well as those of their patients to access spiritual power. William Wood recounted one cure he observed in which the powwow was “smiting his naked breast and thighs with such violence as if he were mad.” That violence may have served to weaken the bounds of the body in order to allow the powwow to cross that physical threshold and move into a trance state where he could more easily communicate with Hobbomock and lesser other-than-humans. Ministers and missionaries John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew disapprovingly noted, “The Pawwaws counted their Imps their Preservers, had them treasured up in their bodies, . . . who when they had done some notable Cure, would shew the Imp in the palm of his Hand to the Indians.”³⁸ While they meant to emphasize the trickery of the powwow and what they termed witchcraft or diabolically inspired manipulations of the unseen world, their description reflects the Algonquian belief that human bodies might also harbor manitou-holding agencies, and that displaying them was a sign of the powwow’s ability.

Communal participation was another key aspect of the cure, not only by the presence of others, but by their vocal performance. After the sick person was brought to the powwow, “the rest of the Indians giving attentive audience” to the “imprecations and invocations, and . . . the violent expression of many a hideous bellowing and groaning” of the powwow, “all the auditors with one voice utter a short Canto.”³⁹ The two cures that Matthew Mayhew saw fit to mention in his account of missionary success on Martha’s Vineyard both involved a number of “Friends” of the sick and “Spectators.” In the case of a man who took on the name of George after his cure, his kin “being met, and dancing round a great Fire” determined that a powwow had caused the illness and so must cure it. The second instance involved a woman whose relations called for renowed powwows from Martha’s Vineyard after the local ones were unable to cure her. Mayhew reported, “The Powwow’s, goe to dancing; who with the Spectators, used certain Ceremonies usual in such cases.” The powwows were able to extract and catch “the Spirit (as they said) which entered the Woman” in a deerskin. The individual abilities of powwows to have “immediate converse with the gods” were essential to the success of the cure, but the ritual could not function without group participation.⁴⁰

“Setting themselves out with white and blew Beads of their own making”

Although no written record or archaeological deposit indicates Awashunkes’s clothing or anything specific about her appearance during the 1675 ritual with which this chapter opened, it is probable that she prepared herself for the important occasion in a similar way as did Weetamoo, a female leader of a nearby people, the Pocasset Wampanoags, several months later. Weetamoo placed belts and strings of wampum, as well as necklaces and pendants that probably included metal, stone, and glass or crystal in addition to shell, around her waist, neck, and arms and put “all sorts of Jewels in her ears.” Male leaders such as Weetamoo’s husband Quinnapin also wore “Girdles of Wampum,” often on the head and shoulders, and dressed in clothing with glass, shell, and metal embellishments that would shake and jingle as the wearer moved (figure 2.2). Just as Weetamoe had made the belts that covered her “from the Loins upward,” much of Awashunkes’s adornment was probably of her own manufacture.⁴¹ John Josselyn found this practice of “setting themselves out with white and blew Beads of their own making” to be evidence that “they are very proud,” but there was much more at stake than pride in personal appearance.⁴²

Figure 2.3. Seventeenth-century potsherds excavated from several Native sites across New England incorporate representations of female genitalia and reference to women’s reproductive roles of caring for young children. The castellation shaped to resemble a woman’s head and shoulders includes, on the inside edge, a baby on her back. These sherds are of Mohegan manufacture from Fort Shantok, Connecticut. (Adapted from Nassaney, “Native American Gender and Material Culture”; Williams, “Fort Shantok and Fort Corchaug”; and Handsman, “Algonquian Women Resist Colonialism.” Drawing by Reiko Kopelson.)

Figure 2.4. Zoomorphic effigy pestle in the form of a bear, a powerful clan symbol, uncovered in the Burr’s Hill burial ground, Rhode Island. (Drawing after Susan Gibson, ed. Burr’s Hill: A Seventeenth-Century Wampanoag Burial Ground. Bristol, Rhode Island, The Haffenreffer Museum, 1980. Drawing by Reiko Kopelson.)

The patterns of the adornment would have been neither random nor merely attractive, but a means to display and attract further spiritual power.⁴³ The wampum beads made from the purple and white shells of quahogs and whelks, respectively, had more than monetary value among northeastern Native peoples. Although Natives in southern New England did not use the beads as extensively to record diplomatic meetings and agreements as did their Haudenosaunee and Abenaki neighbors, they still regarded wampum as a substance of concentrated manitou with great symbolic and spiritual weight.⁴⁴ Native women and old men gathered the shellfish from which the different colors of wampum were made, while the gendered nature of finished bead production seems to have shifted over time. As iron implements enabled expanded production of wampum and Haudenosaunee and other inland groups increased their demand over the first half of the seventeenth century, making the finished beads seems to have become something women joined men in doing. The RI-1000 burial ground in Wickford, Rhode Island, contained the implements necessary for bead production and unfinished bead blanks in adult men’s and women’s graves, whereas at the earlier West Ferry site, dating from the first half of the seventeenth century, only men’s graves contained those items.⁴⁵ In the early seventeenth century and before, women had already participated in wampum production by creating necklaces and belts of the beads. The addition of carving the beads broadened that participation and added another mode for women’s access to the spiritual power held in such objects and in their exchange. Wampum belts were diplomatic relationships made tangible and recorded; their patterning was a kind of “spatialized writing” that reflected a microcosm of Native space, a material representation of generosity and exchange. Women’s role in the creation of this physical form of the relationships that defined a community and connections among communities meant that women were intimately involved in the regeneration and recording of the communal body.⁴⁶

Crystal and naturally occurring copper, as well as the cognate forms of European manufacture, glass and smelted copper or brass, were also objects whose light-reflecting properties indicated a high level of manitou.⁴⁷ Moreover, the sounds these substances made as they clinked against each other served a purpose in warding off other-than-human persons who might cause disease or other negative events. The significance of the sounds these objects made is suggested by the Wampanoag and Narragansett practice that restricted the interment of bells to the graves of young children. Old enough to be named and recognized by the community but young enough to need special assistance on the path to the afterworld, bells would have jingled more clearly than other items.⁴⁸ Awashunkes and other dancers would have felt the weight of those spiritually charged objects and heard them clink as they moved their bodies. The wampum, metal, and glass would have helped her gather herself to travel outside her body, catapulted by their potency and directed by the pounding of her legs and the singing tones from her mouth. Then, in that other-place, she might have learned of the intentions of the other-than-human persons who formed an essential part of the Saconet community, accessing and marshalling their power to assist her in the decision she faced. Her fellow dancers and others who looked to Awashunkes for leadership in such uncertain times may have looked forward to the feasting from heaped baskets of food that would follow the dancing, and seeing in all the activities the connection among animate beings as well as the opportunity to fill their stomachs.

Although not part of the moment relayed in Benjamin Church’s account of Awashunkes’s dance, the feasting that would have followed was an integral part of the ritual’s efficacy. Women’s work was centrally on display in that part of the performance as well. Some of the containers holding the food may have been similar to the ones recovered at several sites throughout southern New England. Castellations that referenced women’s genitalia, depicted a woman’s head and shoulders with a baby on her back shown on the inside of the pot, or represented maize emphasized women’s roles in cultural and social fertility (figure 2.3).⁴⁹ The motifs linked women’s bodies and their reproductive work to the evidence of their productive work since the contents of those pots and other containers at Awashunkes’s dance were also largely the result of women’s work. Although June was almost definitely too early for the green corn to have ripened, any corn a community still had in storage would have been brought forth for such a ritual.

Corn had particular spiritual power for Algonquian women in southern New England in similar ways that cassava did for Taínoan and other indigenous women of the Caribbean. Planting, weeding, hilling, harvesting, drying, grinding, and storing corn was labor that they knew was also religious work because their elders had taught them about corn’s spiritual importance.⁵⁰ Corn and beans were specific gifts from the southwest and creator deity Cautantowwit, granting them a greater spiritual significance than the wild plants that Native women gathered. Patricia Rubertone has argued that women had a higher place in the hierarchy of Narragansett society than Roger Williams knew or acknowledged. According to her analysis of grave goods and oral traditions, women held substantial spiritual power through their connection to and responsibility for corn. The grain was continued proof that Cautantowwit had not abandoned them and so provided spiritual as well as bodily sustenance. The various forms of physical labor involved in caretaking corn was work that had spiritual ramifications, as indicated by the yellow and white bracelets on a few of the female children buried at the seventeenth-century cemetery near North Kingstown, Rhode Island. These bracelets linked the children, whom the community had named and fully recognized, to the work they would have done had they lived.⁵¹ Perhaps they also invoked the protection of Cautantowwit for these individuals by reminding him of his gift to the people that they still honored.

The evidence of women’s special connection with corn and thus to a specific access point to manitou extended beyond the foodstuffs consumed at a feast. The inclusion of pestles as women’s grave goods honored their everyday practices as they “constantly beat all their corn with hand: they plant it, dresse it, gather it, barne it, beat it, and take as much paines as any people in the world.”⁵² Women often used stone pestles with wooden mortars or depressions in naturally occurring rocks to grind corn and other seeds into meal before cooking it. By taking worn pestles as well as specifically produced effigy pestles with zoomorphic or anthromorphic designs out of circulation, kin of the deceased acknowledged and reinforced the spiritual import of such work. Effigy pestles, which only appear in periods after contact with Europeans, had an “obvious association with fertility” through their phallic shape and because they were used to grind seeds. Zoomorphic effigy pestles such as the one recovered from Burr’s Hill in Rhode Island depicting a bear gave concrete form to the connections of clan that could span the Native peoples of the Northeast (figure 2.4). In addition, the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures reached out to the manitou of other-than-human persons, including “Squauanit. The “Womans God” reported by Roger Williams.⁵³

Although Williams’s and his male informants’ limited access to women’s activities and spiritual practices meant that A Key offered little more discussion on the topic, Matthew Mayhew’s account of a powerful Wampanoag powwow on Martha’s Vineyard and his wife, “a Godly Woman,” may also offer an example of women’s and men’s access to separate spiritual arenas. The powwow, who was so successful in marshaling manitou in divination rituals that at least one English colonist sought him out for assistance in locating stolen goods, offered “incouragement” to his wife in her “practice and possession of the Christian Religion,” which included praying “in the Family” and attending “the Publick Worship on the Lords Dayes.” As Mayhew reported his explanation, “he could not blame her, for that she served a God that was above his; but that as to himself, his gods continued kindness, obliged him not to forsake his service.” Whether the attribution of the Christian God’s greater strength was Mayhew’s or the powwow’s, the powwow clearly stated that individuals had particular relationships with other-than-human persons.⁵⁴ Given the intricacies of human interactions, there is no way to know with certainty which one of the pair initiated the idea that the woman should practice Christianity, whether she did, or if it was her husband who did as an effort “to hedge his bets,” as one scholar has put it. Much spiritual power accrued to Algonquian individuals through dreams and visions, or as Mayhew labeled them in his Christian-inflected language, “immediate Revelation,” so the woman herself probably experienced something that propelled her to the new religion. Moreover, since gender strongly determined other realms of activity, it would make sense for that division to hold when accessing manitou.⁵⁵

“Under a Pretence of Keeping a sort of a Faire”

Narragansetts, Nipmucs, Wampanoags, Pokanokets, and Pocassets did not define the body politic in the same way as did the English, who tied political participation to landholding and sometimes to membership in a specific religious community, but they did see connections between the spiritual and political realms, between a religious community and a political one. After King Philip’s War, southern Algonquians in coastal areas did not generally have the leverage to force the English to acknowledge their forms of political organization. The significance of the chieftaincies endured, however, even after Native leaders’ primary control over land declined. The creation and affirmation of reciprocal obligations through performances of ritual exchange were central to the continuing importance of Algonquian forms of leadership, as well as to the maintenance of relationships with other-than-human persons.⁵⁶

These gatherings, dances, and festivities helped Natives respond to the significant upheavals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Death from battle and famine devastated many communities, which were further weakened as refugees sought survival elsewhere. Natives who stayed or returned to southern New England were far from powerless, but often they attempted to work within the English system. In their continuing conflicts with colonists, Indians appealed directly to the king as his subjects when they could not find satisfaction from colonial governments. The English were largely inclined to make fewer distinctions among tribes and tended to see all Indians as enemies, actual or potential. Narragansetts, who stayed out of the first stages of King Philip’s War, suffered the effects of this generalizing mentality when English militia surrounded a winter camp near South Kingstown, Rhode Island, and killed hundreds of people, including noncombatants, in what soon became known as the Great Swamp Massacre. Refugee flight and English-controlled resettlement of Natives meant that Narragansetts had few Native allies close at hand on whom to rely. Inland and farther to the northeast, eastern Abenakis and Haudenosaunee continued to determine many of the terms of interaction with Europeans.⁵⁷

After King Philip’s War, Native people had to find new ways to maintain their identities as particular peoples and communities in a southern New England where the English increasingly controlled land. For many, strategies for subsistence involved greater interaction with English colonists, whether through factors who held financial interest in whale hunting from Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket; labor either in or around English households; tending English-owned livestock; or weaving baskets, cane chair seats, and brooms. Especially in Narragansett country, indentured servitude came to be inherited in many families. Parents enmeshed in debt relationships pledged their children’s labor as well, or town officials pledged it for them. In addition to the captives the English made slaves as a result of King Philip’s War, the English continued to enslave growing numbers of Narragansetts, Pequots, and some Wampanoags during the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, despite laws prohibiting such action.⁵⁸ Many generations of Indians had to find employment in white households, even in communities that were able to maintain more autonomy such as the Aquinnah Wampanoags. But that employment did not prevent Wampanoags and other Indians in southern New England from maintaining oral histories of their people’s origins and culture heroes. For instance, at the beginning of the twentieth century, despite the fact that many lived in white households, Gay Head children continued to learn accounts of Maushop, a giant who had created parts of the physical landscape.⁵⁹ The emphasis among most Natives and scholars today is that creative adaptations of techniques do not necessarily signal assimilation or loss of culture, but rather resiliency.⁶⁰

Even in the altered landscape after King Philip’s War, Natives continued to hold dances and feasts, performing the community actions that maintained the network of relations with each other and with the other-than-human persons who populated the places around them. These occasions continued to be both individually motivated and seasonal. In 1690, Samuel Sewall recorded an event relayed to him by an unnamed individual “At N[arra]ganset (formely ye chief place of Indians in N E).” That informant told him “an account [of] a Dance held by a great woman who had met with many Adversities in [the] Loss of near Relations &c.” The woman called for “persons far [& near]” and made “Considerable Provision . . . for Entertainment of the[m a]f[ter] their fashion.” She recounted her experiences to those who had gathered, making “several Speeches to them importing her former Calamity, and hopes of future Prosperity.” To confirm the desires of her hopeful words, attempt to garner manitou and the attention of powerful other-than-human persons, and initiate another stage in the continuous cycle of destruction and regeneration, she “now and then danc’d a considerable time, gave many Gifts, and had a new Name given to herself.”⁶¹ Her ability to provide “Considerable . . . Entertainment” for those who gathered was a demonstration of her control over material resources. It also obliged her guests to reciprocate in some way. Both of these aspects confirmed and strengthened her position as a “great woman” within her own tribe (the English recognized her leadership position only tangentially) who might yet be able to overcome her recent “Adversities.” Taking a new name to commemorate the new person she had become, she would have based her “hopes of future Prosperity” on the relationships initiated and renewed by her dancing and her gifting.

In the more constricted arena that developed after King Philip’s War, seasonal rituals continued to be significant and required additional defending against colonial officials who feared such gatherings as “Prejedicall” to social order. In 1726, South Kingstown town officials objected to a gathering of “Indians and Negro’s Servants and Others” who met “the Third Weak in June Annually In This Town Under a Pretence of Keeping a sort of a Faire.” Justices could sentence “any Indian or Negro” who met “under this pretence” with up to twenty lashes. The timing as well as the meeting’s acknowledgment that it “hath been A Custom for severall Years Past” suggests that it could well have been Keesakùnnamun, rather than “a special local festival,” as suggested by one historian.⁶² The record of the repressive act also indicates the changing composition of Narrangansett and other Algonquian tribes in the early eighteenth century. Many men of African descent had married into these groups whose male populations had been decimated by war and whaling.⁶³ Narragansetts near South Kingstown were not the only ones to continue to perform an embodiment of community that defined the corporate body through physical connection and movement. Mohegans in nearby New London asserted their right to choose their own leader when they held what colonial observers called a “black dance” in September 1736.⁶⁴

In addition to the continuation of ritual dances and feasts, other kinds of bodily performance developed in response to English colonists’ demands on Native lands and communities. Attention to the “ritualized legal performances” of Wampanoag sachem Wunnatuckquannum as encoded in Native-to-Native land deeds between 1683 and 1700 recasts a staple of the colonial archive as a playbill that details the connections between a leader and the people who constituted a sachemship as well as the leader’s actions to nourish and maintain that corporate body. Wunnatuckquannum embodied the sachemship as she conducted a ritual bargaining and transmission of land within the Nunepog community. The Massachusett words recorded in the first 1683 deed, “I Wunnatuckquannum have bargained with David Oakes,” were meant as a prompt to more specific recall of the details of the agreement. The signature line of the deed also recorded words spoken as part of a ritual performance: “I Wunnatuckquannum, witness; my hand (X).” Other documents from the same period echoed this Massachussett form “Neen Wunnatuckquannum.” Wunnatuckquannum’s construction of her body as the conduit for the manitou expressed in such rituals conveying land was even more apparent in the 1686 deed. The signature line of that document, “I am Wunnatuckquannum, this is my hand (X),” linked the sachem’s hand to her person and to the larger community.⁶⁵

Even as the performance was collective, it demonstrated a hierarchy of body and bodies: the group had to reach consensus on the land sale, but it was the sachem who conveyed the land. Wunnatuckquannum’s actions linked her body to a specific place, at the same time that her body was the connection between the written encoding of a performance and the oral performance itself. The significance of performance surrounding written documents was something that the English also understood, and Wunnatuckquannum’s final surviving deed shows the imprint of her adoption of the English rite of pressing a seal into hot wax as an affirmation of the document’s authenticity and authority.⁶⁶ The original ritual that conveyed the land from Wunnatuckquannum to David Oakes required assembling additional community members who were witnesses as well as participants. Some of those gathered had the responsibility to remember the details of the transaction for later recall. It was not only Wunnatuckquannum’s body that encompassed the sachemship, but the physical presence of her people that confirmed her power.⁶⁷ Their bodies became the archive that housed the record of the sachem’s power as expressed in the land transfer.

Southern Algonquian senses of place remained, sometimes a substratum under a Euroamerican dusting of topsoil, and often an active shaping of landscape and locality that denied the erasure attempted by whites, especially nineteenth-century historians and those who used their accounts as evidence of the vanishing of Indians.⁶⁸ Individuals and communities continued to assert their presence and ongoing interactions with each other, with their physical surroundings, and with the other-than-human persons who populated Native space. Poignant evidence of this continued interaction and re-creation of Native space exists in the charcoal and other objects Narragansetts buried at earlier gravesites in ceremonies of remembrance and communication long after they no longer lived in close proximity. In their journeys and visits, they interacted with the dead and reinscribed the land—although in ways undetectable to colonists like Roger Williams or others who came after him—with their own definitions of faithful bodies.⁶⁹

Nickómmo, and other feasts and dances were not the only aspect of Algonquian means to access the power of other-than-human persons, who were often sought on an individual basis, but the community events were especially significant in times of crisis. While the specifics of dancing and feasting rituals differed from culture to culture as well as having multiple variations for different purposes, together they provide grounded examples of the broad ways that the indigenous peoples of New England thought about their bodies in relation to the corporate body of the community. The movements of legs and feet, the sounds of voice and embellished clothing, and the redistribution or destruction of goods reaffirmed or created bonds among the participants, connections that could be strongly hierarchical. Whether a leader called an event to respond to a crisis or to follow a more calendrically based ritual, their actions distinguished them from common participants. Religious specialists might distinguish themselves by dancing in particular ways while the sponsors of a feast often held themselves apart from much of the feasting.⁷⁰ These events also provided the means for connections among communities, as individuals sometimes traveled to participate in a feast and dance held some distance away. Communal and relational did not mean equal or egalitarian—those with the power to command resources had to share their bounty, but those without were bound to accept it and express gratitude. The nickómmo and other meals of the common pot accentuated and reinforced the relational (and sometimes coercive) acts of giving and receiving.

The next chapter explores this question of the tension between equality and hierarchy of performing bodies in an overlapping context: English puritan iterations of the community body evoked in Williams’s statement that Narragansetts “make their neighbors partakers with them.” Partaking together lay at the heart of what it meant to be a Christian and the central ritual of communion, a common meal of bread and wine reaffirming the shared body of Christ. The meaning and significance of that common meal for the corporate body of the community of the faithful was the contested heart of puritan ideas about and enactments of faithful bodies.