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.”