Spirit of the New England Tribes

Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984

William S. Simmons

• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780874513721, 9780874513707
• eBook ISBN: 9781512603170
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Spanning three centuries, this collection traces the historical evolution of legends, folktales, and traditions of four major native American groups from their earliest encounters with European settlers to the present. The book is based on some 240 folklore texts gathered from early colonial writings, newspapers, magazines, diaries, local histories, anthropology and folklore publications, a variety of unpublished manuscript sources, and field research with living Indians.

1

Introduction

I

When Europeans colonized the coastal areas of southern New England they encountered a number of small principalities with names such as Massachusett, Pokanoket, Narragansett, Niantic, Pequot, and Mohegan. These groups played an active part in the early political and military dramas of North Atlantic colonization and imprinted themselves on the imaginations and memories of the early generations of English settlers. These dramas reached an abrupt and early ending, for by 1676, less than sixty years after the first settlement at Plymouth and long before most North American Indians had laid eyes on Europeans, English colonists had overrun all tribes within the areas of what is now Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Those Indians who survived became an almost invisible minority around the edges of the American farming villages, seaports, mill towns, and commercial centers that sprang up in the Indians’ original territories. To most contemporary New Englanders, these Indians are known vaguely through legends such as that of the first Thanksgiving and by curious place names, such as Aquidneck, Ponkapoag, Naugatuck, and Nantucket, which survived from prehistoric time.¹ The theme of the extinction of New England Indians has appealed to writers since the colonial period, and Squanto, King Philip, Uncas, and many others since have been portrayed as the last of their people.² New England town historians often reserve a nostalgic paragraph for the last Indian to have lived in that vicinity and characteristically mention how he or she earned a humble living by making and peddling brooms, splint baskets, and home remedies among whites. Despite their traumatic defeats in the seventeenth century and the pronouncements of their death, found in history as well as fiction, some Indian communities survived the stressful colonial years and today define themselves as Indian. After three centuries of submersion in American society, they resemble neighboring non-Indian Americans more than they do their seventeenth-century ancestors. In fact they resemble their ancestors hardly at all. If one looks at their economic and political activities, their language, churches, homes, and appearances, one sees in most cases little that can be attributed to the indigenous sources of New England Indian culture. The major exception is folklore, for a continuous tradition of beliefs and legends has lived in their imaginations, and much of it has been recorded over the years. This is not to say that the oral traditions of twentieth-century persons of Indian descent are identical with those of their prehistoric ancestors, for most of their aboriginal folklore has died out, changed, or been infused with borrowings from the majority culture. Nevertheless, their oral narratives show stronger connections with autochthonous traditions than is evident in any other aspect of their society and culture.

II

The raw materials of this study consist of some 240 texts culled from early colonial writings, newspapers, magazines, diaries, local histories, anthropology and folklore publications, a variety of manuscript sources, and from field research with living people. In most cases, whites recorded the texts, particularly in the earlier years. Whites may have heard the narratives directly from Indians or from other whites who heard them from Indians, but when they retold the narratives or wrote them down they often introduced unconscious bias and conscious embellishments that interfered with the Indian voice. A few white collectors, such as Frank Speck, who worked with the Massachusett, Wampanoag, and Mohegan in the early part of the twentieth century, and Mabel Knight, who gathered some important Wampanoag texts in the 1920s, presented Indian narrative materials in a way that respected the words of Indian speakers. Too many others, including nineteenth-century folklorist James Athearn Jones and twentieth-century folklorist Elizabeth Reynard, buried the Indian contribution beneath their own literary improvisations. Jones, Reynard, and others also combined information from different individuals or mixed oral and written sources, which further weakened their anthropological value.³ I have incorporated a few such texts in this study, with cautionary introductions, either because I wanted to salvage the cultural information they contain or because later Indians read these texts and incorporated them into their traditions.

Fortunately, at least ten persons of New England Indian ancestry have recorded their own folklore. The most prominent of the Indian authors is an eighty-five-year-old Mohegan, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, who lives in a brown-shingled cottage atop Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, Connecticut, where she still bakes cornmeal muffins and drinks her afternoon tea. In her youth Tantaquidgeon studied anthropology with Speck at the University of Pennsylvania and conducted field research during several summers in Gay Head and Mashpee, Massachusetts, in the late 1920s and early 1930s; in addition she has done extensive work on Mohegan medical lore, beliefs, and legends. She published much of this material but generously gave me access to her Mashpee and Gay Head field notes, including many important and heretofore unpublished texts about culture heroes, buried treasure, witches, ghosts, and other legendary subjects that no one except a well-connected and traditional Indian would have been able to obtain. Nothing quite like these traditions has been recorded in this area before or since.⁴ The Narragansett, under the auspices of Princess Red Wing, began a journal in the 1930s, The Narragansett Dawn, that featured folklore contributions by Red Wing and other Narragansetts who, in keeping with the the Pan-Indian spirit that appeared about this time, also identified themselves by Indian names.⁵

Although the Christian Indians of Massachusetts had been literate in their own language from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, they limited their writing mainly to public records and did not record folklore. Only one Algonquian speaker from the whole southern New England region, Fidelia Fielding of Mohegan, wrote of religious experiences and folklore in her native language. Speck also collected from Fielding the only legend to have been narrated and recorded in a southern New England tongue. All others who reported Indian narratives did so in English. One prominent contributor to Gay Head folklore, Mary Cleggett Vanderhoop, was of partial Indian ancestry, but from Pennsylvania and not New England. Vanderhoop moved to Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard after marrying a man from that community and became an authority on their traditions around the turn of the twentieth century (Vanderhoop 1904). Her daughter, Nanetta Madison, also compiled a manuscript collection of Gay Head legends which I had the good fortune to be able to include in this research. In addition, I wrote down or tape-recorded a sizable collection of texts during field visits to Gay Head, Mashpee, Charlestown, Mohegan, and other nearby towns in southern New England in 1981, 1983, and 1984.

III

No author, English or Indian, provided an Indian folk-classification of oral narrative genres. Thus I have drawn upon categories, such as memorate, legend, myth, and folktale, from comparative folklore scholarship to refer to the Indian texts. The memorate is a concrete account of a personal encounter with the supernatural. Reverend Harold Mars of the Narragansett country told me one such memorate that he experienced in his youth: “The hour was rather late . . . as I came up what we call Belmont Avenue in Wakefield, when I was suddenly reminded that that headless horse was just ahead, and true enough I saw the headless horse, a white horse with no head” (H. Mars 1983). The memorate can be communicated in the first person or it can be retold by others who did not share the experience. Memorates told over and over again by second, third, and subsequent parties may lose their individual details and approximate the more impersonal and collective genre of legend. Folklorists have interpreted memorate experiences in ways that parallel functional and structural explanations in anthropology. Lauri Honko, for example, argued that Finnish spirit beliefs support social norms and that persons who violate such norms through negligence, drunkenness, quarreling, and so on are the ones most likely to encounter a supernatural figure that warns or punishes them for their behavior (Honko 1964:17–18). Folklorists also attribute such experiences to situations of great stress, anxiety, and change (Honko 1965:172; Lindow 1978:45–59; Ward 1977:220). Despite the spontaneous and authentic qualities of the experiences narrated in memorates, the genre is governed by custom, and the visions follow wellworn paths. New England Indians experience supernatural visits from their own storehouse of cultural creations and not from Finnish barn spirits.⁶

Legends are set in real places in the recent or more distant past and pertain to culture heroes, ghosts, witches, and fairies as well as to real people. Some legends and memorates, known as negative legends and memorates, end by explaining seemingly extraordinary experiences in commonsense terms. Harold Mars, for example, ended the memorate of the headless horse by disclosing that the horse had been grazing behind a stone wall that concealed its head. Scholars have attributed a number of functions to legend. The Grimm brothers and Bronislaw Malinowski commented on the ways in which legend animates the landscape and strengthens the bond between living people, their environment, and their past (Malinowski [1922] 1961:298; Ward 1981:3). Folklorists see the legend as an improvisational art that is loosely structured if structured at all. Like the memorate, and in contrast to myths and folktales, legend content is particularly sensitive to social and historical changes, and legends are constantly proliferating to the point that they are difficult to classify. With few exceptions, all the New England Indian folklore materials are memorates and legends.⁷

Myths generally are thought to be truthful accounts of what happened in the earliest possible time; they account for basic creation, are sacred, and provide the authority for existing social institutions, religious beliefs, and ritual (Bascom 1965:4). Anthropologists and folklorists have studied myth far more than any other narrative genre, and a large literature exists on the social and psychological functions of myth, its symbolism, and structure. One dominant interpretation is that myth reinforces the solidarity and identity of the group. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the preeminent figure in myth research, is less concerned with the functions that can be attributed to myth than with its meaning, which he locates in universal organizing principles of mythical thought and the relationships of these principles to the working of the human mind (Lévi-Strauss 1962). We know far less about New England Indian myths than we do about their legends and memorates, for although early Europeans recorded bits of indigenous mythology, Christianity swept this genre away, or rather, replaced it with Christianity’s own biblical equivalents. Myth forms a tiny part of the corpus of this study.

The folktale, in contrast to memorate, legend, and myth, is said not to have really happened. Folktales are, in William Bascom’s words, “prose narratives which are regarded as fiction” (Bascom 1965:4). They happened out of time or “once upon a time,” are told to amuse or to convey moral lessons, and possess well-defined narrative structures (Dundes 1964; Propp [1928] 1979). Although folktales are known throughout North America and even among Indian groups adjacent to southern New England, very few examples of this genre were recorded in the Wampanoag, Mohegan, Massachusett, and Narragansett areas, where presumably the folktales died out early in the historic period.

I have grouped the texts into chapters that reflect dominant or key subjects, such as the arrival of Europeans, Christianity, ghosts, treasures, witches, the giant Maushop, Little People, and dreams. These categories are not the only ones possible, and they are not mutually exclusive; most treasure narratives, for example, also involve ghosts, witches, or the devil. Nevertheless, these key subjects are the major symbolic representations that recur throughout the collection, and most memorates and legends are based upon one or more of them. Within each chapter I have arranged the texts and the accompanying interpretations in chronological order to show the complete course of each key subject as it passed through history by word of mouth.⁸

A smaller and more specific unit of analysis is needed to supplement the genre and key subject distinctions, for although an entire legend can diffuse from one historic and cultural milieu to another, smaller elements also diffuse across cultural boundaries, independent of the larger narrative in which they originally occurred. The Wampanoag of Martha’s Vineyard told many legends of how the giant Maushop built a causeway of stones from Gay Head to Cuttyhunk. At one point in the history of this legend, the giant carries his boulders in an apron. This small modification, which probably originated in New England Yankee or British folklore, thereafter became a permanent element in Wampanoag giant stories. Other examples of the cross-cultural transmission of specific narrative elements are abundant in the texts and require a smaller unit of analysis, the motif, that will enable us to recognize these specific innovations and trace their historical origins. Stith Thompson, in Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, defined motifs loosely as “those details out of which full-fledged narratives are composed,” including anything “worthy of note because of something out of the ordinary, something of sufficiently striking character to become part of a tradition, oral or literary” (Thompson 1955, 1:10, 19). Thompson’s motif index is a sensitive tool for identifying specific changes within the texts over time and for determining the possible historical sources for these changes.⁹

IV

The present collection is unusual. It represents one of the oldest continually recorded bodies of Indian folklore known in North America and is the longest-term historical study of oral narratives that I am aware of in the anthropological, historical, or folklore literature. I am interested in the relation between this stream of folklore and the historical events that affected these Indian communities: which symbols persist, which ones change, where innovations come from, and what can be said about the pattern and timing of change. Traditions about fabulous birds, giants, floating islands, ghosts, and things heard and seen in the air provide a window into the content, meaning, and functions of Indian symbolic life and a chronicle of how that symbolic life expressed, and in turn was changed by, historical events. We have recovered the voice of a people who lived through the whole of American history and now will listen to the private and indirect way in which they told their story.¹⁰

Abundant resources are available for reconstructing the historical context of the narratives. Many historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists have written about New England, and there are many historical societies, public archives, rare book libraries, church libraries, museum collections, and private collections where new discoveries reward the careful eye. With these resources I have been able to outline the social histories of the Indian communities where the folklore originated and to connect these local histories with the larger historical currents that affected the region and nation as a whole. I will add another dimension to the context of this Indian folklore—the folklore of non-Indian groups, mainly English and Afro-American, that lived near the Indian settlements. This context is important because new legends and motifs that enter the Indian narratives often originate from these nearby traditions. In addition, many of the Indians were whalers, so theoretically there was no limit to the folklore sources available to them since whaling brought men from faraway ports to settle in New England Indian villages. Hawaiians, Surinamers, West Africans, West Indians, Germans, Scots, and others turn up in the genealogies. The reader may recall from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick that the three harpooners, Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, were respectively from Oceania, West Africa, and an Indian village named Gay Head on “the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. From the Past to the Present
• 3. Worldview
• 4. The First Europeans
• 5. Christianity
• 6. Shamans and Witches
• 7. Ghosts and the Devil
• 8. Treasures
• 9. Giants: Maushop and Squant
• 10. Little People
• 11. Windows to the Past: Dreams and Shrines
• 12. Conclusion: “There is a Stream That Issues Forth”
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index of Folklore Motifs
• General Index