Machapunga

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Residential area of ​​the Machapunga and neighboring tribes from 1657 to 1795

The machapunga even Mattamuskeet called, were a tribe of Indians whose tribal area on the east coast of present-day state of North Carolina in the United States was. Linguistically they can be assigned to the small group of the North Carolina Algonquin .

Name and area of ​​residence

Machapunga means bad dust or a lot of dirt in the Algonquian language , probably related to the partly dusty marshland of their residential area. In the 17th century they settled on the Pungo River , which has its source in the Great Dismal Swamp and flows southwards into Lake Mattamuskeet . Mattamuskeet is the name of their village, which in 1733 was in the southeast of the lake named after it. The approximately 29 km long and 11 km wide lake is located in the southeast of the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula in Hyde County . Ethnologists suspect that the tribe separated from the Virginia Algonquin in prehistoric times and moved south, making it one of the last of all Algonquin migrations to move south along the Atlantic coast.

Way of life and culture

The Machapunga were known as excellent fishermen around 1713. They made their nets with meshes of various sizes from the fibers of the Asclepias syracia for catching herring , umber and allis shad . They hunted deer , bears , turkeys and other game in the vast swamps of eastern North Carolina. The fields where men and women grew maize , beans and pumpkins together were close to home . The annual growing season of around 240 days often allowed two harvests from the same field. The Yupon bush ( Ilex vomitoria ) covered large parts of the flat land and produced an abundance of evergreen foliage. The leaves, when dried and roasted, made a kind of tea that was infused into an excellent, medicinal drink. Indian craftsmanship included basket making, in which baskets were made from hickory and oak shavings in the predominant style that was common among the Iroquois and Algonquin tribes of the east. Some specific references to the Machapunga can be found in John Lawson's Notes . The English explorer reports from 1701 that the Machapunga lived in a town called Marmuskeet or Mattamuskeet and could provide 30 warriors. Special customs were discovered in some families that did not exist elsewhere. For example, two Machapunga families practiced the Jewish custom of circumcision , which apparently was not practiced by Indians anywhere else.

history

16th to 18th century

Warrior ceremony of the Secotan.

On April 9, 1585, several ships broke in Plymouth on behalf of Sir Walter Raleigh to Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, of which 107 people remained as settlers on Roanoke and founded the Roanoke colony on August 17 . On the mainland between Albemarle and Pamlico Sound , they met an Indian tribe they called Secotan . Members of this tribe were captured in numerous drawings and watercolors by an English artist named John White, and so passed on to posterity. After the fall of the first English colony in the New World , it was more than 120 years before reliable accounts of the local Indian tribes were compiled by an explorer named John Lawson around 1714 . Lawson named several local groups that John White referred to as Secotan , including the Hatteras who lived on the sandbars off the coast , the Bear River and the Machapunga on the mainland at Lake Mattamuskeet. Whether these are the descendants of the Secotan is obvious, but not scientifically clear. The tribal name Secotan no longer appeared in his records.

In the Tuscarora War (1712-1714), the Machapunga stood together with the neighboring Coree against the colonists, as can be seen from contemporary reports. De Graffenried's Manuscript Journal mentions the Marmusckits as participants in looting and robberies alongside Tuscarora warriors. In 1713 they killed and abducted about 20 people from Roanoke Island and Croatan. 50 warriors from the Mattamuskeet, Catechnee and Coree attacked colonists on the Alligator River . They then fled to the Great Dismal Swamp. With the help of friendly Indians, the English drove the Mattamuskeet out of the swamp and captured them. Apparently, the allied with the English Tuscarora under Chief Tom Blunt were mainly responsible for the fact that many warriors of the Mattamuskeet were killed. The peace treaty of February 11, 1715, which was finally concluded with the Coree and other defeated Indians, provided that they were allowed to settle in the Mattamuskeet area under colonial supervision. Around 1731, the Mattamuskeet and members of other tribes counted only 20 families who lived on the islands and sandbanks. From 1753 there is an estimate of 15 to 20 families from the same area.

19th to 20th century

With the decreasing number, interest in the North Carolina Indians has been lost and there is little information about Native Americans on the North Carolina coast from the second half of the 18th and the entire 19th centuries. During his research in 1916, the anthropologist Frank Speck found when interviewing settlers on the Albemarle and Pamlico Sound that some people were originally descended from Indians from the Pungo River near Lake Mattamuskeet. There is evidence that they were descendants of the Machapunga, after whom the Pungo River was named. These people traced their ancestry back to Israel Pierce , a Pungo River Indian. Such Christian names were common among the tribes of the region from 1718, as a list of chief names shows. This list comes from the neighboring Chowan tribe and is under the documents of the colonial authorities. Mrs. MHPugh was one of his descendants . She was his granddaughter, an old woman of around 80 at the time, and was born and raised in the Pungo River area. In later years she moved to Hatteras Island . She had four sons and daughters and numerous grandchildren. The Pugh, Daniels, and Berry families , all dark-skinned, lived in Roanoke, Hatteras, and the neighboring islands. These families had mixed up with African Americans while one Westcott family was lighter skin color. Outwardly, they differed significantly from the appearance of an Indian and more exhibited features of whites or African-Americans, with the latter dominating in the younger generation. Not a single one of these people knew a word from the Indian language and no one had a memory of Indian customs and traditions. They didn't even know the name of their tribe.

Speck's research yielded the last published report on the North Carolina Algonquin. His small collection of material on the Machapunga is in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

See also

List of North American Indian tribes

literature

Web links

Commons : North Carolina Algonquin  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Machapunga Indians of North Carolina , accessed February 15, 2011
  2. ↑ Bruce G. Trigger (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 15. Northeast. Christian F. Feest : North Carolina Algonquians , 272.
  3. ↑ Bruce G. Trigger (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 15. Northeast. Christian Feest: North Carolina Algonquians , 281.