Nipmuck
The Nipmuck are a group of Algonquin- speaking Indian tribes who inhabited the central plateau of present-day Massachusetts , particularly the southern portion of Worcester County , and present-day northern Rhode Island and Connecticut . They lived from hunting, fishing and growing corn, beans and squash, and seasonally migrated between certain places where their food sources were located. The Nipmuck were divided into territorial groups that consisted of several extended families and lived in one or more villages, each led by a sachem . Their villages were not politically united and in various areas they were allied with their powerful neighbors, such as the Massachusett , Wampanoag , Narraganset, and Mohegan .
Demographics
Estimates of the population before European contact are confusing because there is no consensus among ethnologists as to which tribes actually belonged to the Nipmuck. The numbers vary between 3,000 and 10,000 tribal members who lived in about 40 villages. Some of the Nipmuck tribes had been subjugated by the Pequot and were temporarily part of the Pequot Confederation. After they were liberated in 1637 after the Pequot's defeat in the Pequot War , they were re-classified as Nipmuck in later years. There are similar problems with the Narragansett, Massachusett, Pocumtuc and Penacook . The first really accurate estimate of the Nipmuck comes from 1680 after the end of King Philip's Wars . At that time, fewer than 1,000 surviving Nipmuck were counted who had gathered in prayer towns with the remains of other tribes. The number of Nipmuck who fled to the Abenaki and Mahican and those who were killed in the war can only be guessed at. Within a few years it became increasingly difficult to determine the tribal affiliation within the mixed population of the prayer cities.
Surname
The Nipmuck also appear as Neepmuck, Neepnet, Nipnet, Neipnett, Nipmug, Nipmuc and in other spellings. The name Nipnet is an Algonquin word and literally means place by the small pond or people by the fresh water .
Culture
The Nipmuck usually lived on the banks of rivers or small lakes and appear to have inhabited the area since time immemorial. Like the other Algonquians in southern New England, they practiced intensive farming on the floor of the fertile river valleys. They changed their place of residence depending on the season, but always stayed within the boundaries of their own territory. They also lived in part on hunting, fishing and wild plants, but they did not live in the abundance of seafood like the coastal tribes. Each group had its own things, but there was only a weak political organization at the village level. The lack of governance seems to indicate that the Nipmuck were not as developed as their neighbors, but that is a mistake. Only a few villages were fortified, which suggests little military activity. Apparently the Nipmuck lived in peace with one another and with their neighbors, so that they had little reason for an elaborate leadership system.
history
Early days
More than 10,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians came from the southwest to what is now New England , which at the time had a subarctic climate. During the archaic period of North America (8000 BC to 1000 BC), the climate slowly warmed up and brought forth new plants and animals that enabled the people there to develop a different culture and way of life. At that time, the ancestors of the Nipmuck made stone bowls, made containers from tree bark and developed a written language that survived into the historical period. Pesu-poncks were ceremonial stone sweat lodges and were used for cleansing rituals . These stone chambers can still be found today in the locations of earlier Nipmuck villages. The Nipmuck's wigwams were made from the saplings of deciduous trees covered with furs, tree bark, and woven mats.
In the Woodland period (1000 BC to 1000 AD) the land of the Chaubunagungamaug was the starting point of numerous trails to all parts of the American Northeast. The Nipmuck traded with the other Indian peoples and brought them the three siblings : corn, beans and squash. Bows and arrows and spears were used in both hunting and defense.
Colonial times
Before the English came, the Nipmuck were committed to the Confederations of Pequot, Narragansett and Pennacook. Since their residential area began only about 50 km west of the port of Boston , soon after the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Plymouth in 1620 they had contacts with the English, which increased significantly when the Puritans settled on Massachusetts Bay in 1630 . Boston traders reached the Connecticut River around 1633, and the first settlements and Puritan missionaries soon followed . As the English settlements expanded westward, the Confederations' power over the Nipmuck waned, especially after the Pequot's defeat in the Pequot War in 1637. The Quinebaug and Massomuck were suddenly freed from the Pequot and had no claims from other tribes to expect. Although the English were cautious about buying land in the early colonial period, what would have happened if the Nipmuck had refused to sell their land? The Lancaster Purchase (1643), the Tantiusque Deed (1644) and the Eliot and Brookfield Purchases (1655) let the Nipmuck land shrink steadily, but through the uncontrolled settlements of the Squatters (Ger. Occupiers) they lost even more land. Worst of all, the Whites took away the best farmland in the river valleys, causing the Nipmuck serious feeding problems. In exchange for this, the Nipmuck received Christianity from John Eliot and other Puritan missionaries from 1640 . Around 1674 there were eight prayer cities for converted Nipmuck, for example Chabanakongkomun, Hassanamesit, Magunkaquog, Marchaug, Pakachoog, Quabaug, Weshakim and Wacuntug . They were so grateful to the English for the new faith that almost all of them joined the King Philip's War against the colonists in 1675.
Under the leadership of Sachem Sam , the Nipmuck moved to King Philip's War in the summer of 1675. Nipmuck warriors raided Brookfield twice and in September they attacked Deerfield together with the Pocumtuck . In the same month they also took part in the Battle of Bloody Brook near Hardley , where the command of Captain Thomas Lothrop was destroyed. The allegiance of the Nipmuck to King Philip, however, is questionable, because it was customary among Philips warriors to smash the skulls of those Indians who did not follow them or wanted to support them in other ways. The few neutral Nipmuck were rounded up and taken to prison camps in Nashoba. After a series of raids in southeastern Massachusetts, Philip retreated west to Nipmuck Land in the summer of 1675 and attacked English settlements in the Connecticut River valley. In the spring of 1676, Philip raided other settlements in southern New England from Nipmuck Land, until he was finally captured and killed in August 1776.
After King Philip's death, the Indian resistance ended. However, the war was not over with that, for the English pursued and fought the members of the Nipmuck and other groups of Philips' former followers wherever they could find them. Some colonists did not take prisoners, others sold them as slaves. Some Nipmuck therefore fled north, moving up the Connecticut River to Québec , where they went to Odanak , also known as Saint Francis, and continued the war as allies of the French. The Christian name Saint Francis is misleading, because one can hardly imagine more bitter enemies of the colonists than the Saint Francis Indians in the following 50 years. In both King William's War (1689–1697) and Queen Anne's War (1701–1713) they carried out countless raids across New England. Other Nipmuck and New England Algonquians preferred to go west and settle with the Mahican on the Housatonic and Hudson Rivers . Some of them also crossed the Hudson River and took refuge in the Munsee-Delaware in New Jersey . These refugees from the King Philip's Wars eventually became members of their guest tribes and their descendants moved further west as part of the Lenni Lenape and Mahican, first into the valley of the Susquehanna River and later to Ohio .
Epidemics in southern New England
| epidemic | year |
|---|---|
| smallpox | 1631, 1633, 1639 |
| flu | 1647 |
| smallpox | 1649 |
| diphtheria | 1659 |
| smallpox | 1670 |
| flu | 1675 |
| smallpox | 1677, 1679 |
| Smallpox and measles | 1687 |
| smallpox | 1691, 1729, 1733, 1755, 1758, 1776 |
After heavy losses from an uninterrupted series of epidemics between 1614 and 1676, there were around 15,000 indigenous people in southern New England at the beginning of the King Philip's Wars. In less than two years, 2,000 Native Americans lost their lives fighting - 1,000 of them in a single battle in Rhode Island alone. Another 1,000 were captured and sold as slaves to the West Indies . After the war, harsh peace conditions were imposed on the Nipmuck and other New England Algonquians by the colonial government. They were sent to a number of prayer cities overseen by Puritan missionaries, or given small reservations in remote areas. This fact, however, allowed the first reliable census of Indians in southern New England, which was carried out in 1680 and found only 4,000 Native Americans surviving. Even cautious estimates of the indigenous population of 1614 show around 100,000 indigenous people, so that a population loss of at least 96 percent can be assumed - almost exclusively caused by contact with Europeans.
Undoubtedly, European diseases were primarily responsible for the greatest population loss of the New England Indians. Taking into account the level of medical knowledge of the time, the colonists cannot be accused of deliberately infecting the indigenous people. Even so, rumor has it but no evidence that it might have been attempted around 1673. However, during the King Philip War, many English colonists left the boundaries of normal warfare and there is evidence that they attempted to exterminate New England's natives.
18th to 20th century
After 1680 the remnants of the Indians in southern New England were found huddled together in prayer towns and small reservations (e.g. Natick - 'place of hills', Hassanamesit - today Grafton, Wabaquasett - 'mats for covering the house', Chabankongkomun - today Webster, Ponkapoaq / Pakomit - today Canton-Stoughton), where they lost their tribal identity and the traditional customs of the New England Algonquin within a few years. Even the little remaining land of their own quickly changed hands to white. Nearly 250 years after the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in Plymouth, the Massachusetts government finally passed a law in 1869 guaranteeing civil rights for the Nipmuck. Only two groups of Nipmuck that have retained their identity to this day have been recognized by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and have approximately 1,400 members, 250 of whom are in Connecticut. The Nipmuc Nation (formerly known as Hassanamesite Nipmuc , now often called Grafton Nipmuc ) own the small, two- acre Hassanamesite ( Hassanamisco ) reservation near Grafton , Massachusetts. Today there are more than 500 tribe members living in central Massachusetts, northeast Connecticut and parts of Rhode Island. The Webster / Dudley Band of Chaubunagungamaug Nipmuck Indians (also Chaubunagungamaug Band of Nipmucks or Chabankongkomun Nipmuc , occasionally Pegan Indians ) live in the ten acres (40,470 m²) Chaubunagungamaug reservation near Lake Chaubunagungamaug in the northeastern cities of Webster and Webster the administrative seat) and Worcester in Worcester County , Massachusetts. Although both tribes competed for federal recognition, the Bureau of Indian Affairs denied this in 2004 because the statutes did not meet four of the seven necessary criteria for federal recognition as a tribe or nation .
There are also the Praying Indians of Natick and Ponkapoaq (also Natick Band of Nipmucs ) in Natick and Canton near Stoughton, who live in former prayer cities and adjacent areas, and the Historical Nipmuc Tribe , originally they lived on the Deer Island peninsula in what is now Boston Harbor , they left the Natick reservation in the late 1700s and settled in Wabaquasett, about 15 acres (60,702 m²). The Quinsigamond Band of the Nipmucs (also Pakachoag Tribe of the Nipmuc Nation ) in Worchester, Massachusetts, originally in the area around Lake Quinsigamond , had their main village on Pakachoeg Hill in what is now Auburn , called their tribal area Quinsigamond - 'fishing spot for pike'. Traditionally, they were closely related to the Nipmuc Nation and the Webster / Dudley Band of Chaubunagungamaug Nipmuck Indians.
See also
literature
- Bruce G. Trigger (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians . Vol. 15. Northeast . Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC 1978 ISBN 0-16-004575-4 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Acknowledgment Denied Petition # 069a (Nipmuc Nation, Hassanamisco Band, MA) January 28, 2008
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Denied Petition # 69b (Webster / Dudley Band of Chaubunagungamaug Nipmuck Indians) January 28, 2008
- ↑ http://www.natickprayingindians.org/index.html Praying Indians of Natick and Ponkapoaq
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Historical Nipmuc Tribe
- ↑ Are direct descendants of Wabaquasett-Nipmuck, were also the only Nipmuck, both in longhouses and in wigwams lived
