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.
3. “Ye are of one Body and members one of another”
The metaphor of the body of Christ organized community life as a diagram for how Christians should live together. Passages throughout the New Testament referred to the church as Christ’s body and Christians as members of that body, while the central ritual revolved around consuming the body and blood of Christ as—depending on one’s theological emphasis—memorialized by or simultaneously present in the bread and wine of a meal that remembered or reenacted Christ’s last supper with his disciples.1 Body metaphors were ubiquitous and a point of common reference because the universal experience of being embodied grounded the relationship between the physical, human body and collective spiritual and social bodies. Yet that universality contained a nearly infinite multiplicity of individual experiences that made definitions of the body in general, and faithful bodies in particular, nodes of conflict. Exactly how corporate social and spiritual bodies should function and who should belong to them was a matter of much disagreement.
Christians of various kinds applied the terminology of the physical or “natural” body to the community of the faithful in their efforts to confront the difficulty of how to unify disparate parts into a harmonious whole.2 In “A Modell of Christian Charity,” an address John Winthrop delivered in 1630 with the hope that it would serve as a guide for the community to be founded in New England, Winthrop detailed how the disparate parts of a body might hold together: “The severall partes of this body . . . before they were united were as disproportionate and as much disordering as soe many contrary quallities or elements,” but after Christ “by his spirit and love knitts all these partes to himselfe and each to other,”