Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

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.