(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Indians 101: American Indians in New England 350 years ago, 1674 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-04 American Indians had lived in what is now called New England for thousands of years before the invasion of English colonists began in the seventeenth century. The English colonists, totally ignorant of the Native history of the region, sought to recreate English towns: their housing, town layouts, and town names all mirrored English hamlets. Land management also mirrored English culture, and particularly the social stratification found in that culture. In his chapter in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Noriega, Edwin Churchill writes: “The distribution of land also reflected English social-economic hierarchies, and individuals holding more wealth, status, and education were systematically granted more, better, and more advantageously located properties.” The English, blind to the Native agricultural fields and Native land management practices, viewed the land as vacant, thus available to be sculpted into a new English countryside. In his book The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire, historian Frances Jennings writes: “Myth has it that Englishmen arrived in America to create colonies on ‘free land’ as though the land’s previous occupants and possessors had not existed, let alone had social and political institutions of property.” One of the rationales used by the English for taking Indian land, or seeing it as “vacant,” was the belief that the English could put the land to “higher use” using European-style agriculture and livestock. Anthropologist Samuel Wilson, in his book The Emperor’s Giraffe and Other Stories of Cultures in Contact, reports: “The idea that Europeans might put the land to higher use required downplaying how the native people were using it.” Since the Natives were already farming the land, particularly the best land, this meant that the English had to construct stereotypes of the Indians which portrayed them as nomadic hunters who did not modify or improve the land. The land which the English found was not, of course, unoccupied. In the English myth of the New World they had to explain the presence of the native peoples. They assumed that their version of creation was universal and thus they had to fit the Indians into this creation story. In noting that the Bible and Christianity limit the discussion about the origins of Indian people, David Lovejoy, in an article in the New England Quarterly, writes: “Indians must have originally migrated from the Old World, for it was impossible to believe that they were not descendants of the first Adam by way of Noah and the Ark. Any other theory, suggesting a second creation, was promptly labeled heresy, and in the early years proponents suffered death for spreading it.” Thus, Indians were viewed in biblical terms as a lost tribe, one of the dregs and refuse of the lost posterity of Adam. The English tended to view the Americas as a wilderness, a frightening concept with strong religious overtones. In his chapter in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Noriega, Edwin Churchill, the chief curator at the Maine Museum, writes: “They viewed the wilderness as a place where a person might lapse into disordered, confused, or ‘wild conditions’ and then succumb to the animal appetites latent in all men and restrained only by society.” The Reverend Michael Wigglesworth described the New World as: “…a waste and howling wilderness, where none inhabited But hellish fiends, and brutish men That Devils worshipped.” In their book Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, Charles Segal and David Stine write: “For the Puritans, they were primarily the villains in a sacred drama, counterpart of the heathen tribes that Joshua conquered, children of the Devil who tempted Christ in the desert, forerunners of the legions of darkness that would gather at Gog and Magog for a last furious but futile battle against the elect.” For the Puritan viewpoint, there were only two parties in the world: God’s and the Devil’s. From the Puritan perspective, God’s party was entrusted with a world-redeeming errand, while Satan’s party was heathen, doomed, and dark-skinned. The Puritans in particular set out to destroy the power of the Indian spiritual leaders whom they viewed as being in league with the devil. Consequently, the Puritans named many places in New England after the devil, indicating that these places were important to Indian spirituality. Praying Towns In Massachusetts, by 1674 the Puritans had established 14 mission villages—known as “praying towns”—in the Nipmuck and Massachusetts area. In these towns, the Indians were given daily instruction in Christianity and European trades. Ethnologist T.J.C. Brasser, in his chapter in North American Indians in Historical Perspective, reports: “Puritan ideas of ‘right walking’ were made understood by a series of prohibitions against idleness, fornication, women with loose hair or with uncovered breasts, the killing of lice between the teeth, and a range of other niceties.” Missionaries In Connecticut, Mohegan sachem Uncas saw Christian missionary work among his people as a political threat. Uncas and his sons began to interfere with Puritan preaching. Woman Leader In 1674 Awashonks (a woman) became the sachem of the Saconnet band of the Wampanoag in Massachusetts. Historically, American Indian women leaders have been ignored in most histories about Native Americans, and many scholars have implied that they didn’t exist. 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