a less tangible part of the losses created by the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, but its marks would have been deep, even if invisible alongside physical scars on the bodies of the enslaved. If part of the violence of slavery was being ripped away from countless generations of ancestors, cords could provide some means to access those beings again, even when separated by hundreds and even thousands of miles in the apparent geography of the early modern map.
That collapsing of time and space could happen for vodun practitioners, who were already familiar with taking voduns with them after being uprooted from their natal lands in West Africa, long before being tangled in the transatlantic slave trade. But it could also occur for other peoples who did not have as strong a tradition of traveling shrines for ancestors. In Kongo, even though fixed shrines were the place for descendants to approach an ancestor, those were not the only locations that held power. Minkisi were smaller power objects associated with a specific problem and being who worked on that problem. They traveled more easily not only because they were often physically smaller, but also because they could be made from objects in one’s surroundings.83 Remaking the connections between all the generations who had crossed the threshold into the world of the dead and the currently living generations was not easy, but it was something enslaved individuals learned to do over and over as the demands and desires of their masters moved them throughout and around the Atlantic world.
At first glance, all it is possible to know about the first two enslaved people on Bermuda are the labels Europeans applied to them and something of the physical knowledge contained in their lungs, legs, arms, and hands that their new owners hoped to exploit. The pearl divers and the Africans and indigenous peoples of the Caribbean who joined them after 1616 certainly shaped early Bermudian society, as well as the very landscape and contours of the coast. But beyond their contributions to the colonial enterprise, they brought with them other-than-humans who populated their surroundings and made a particular place out of inchoate space. Attention to these less tangible layers of environment permits a deeper—even if necessarily conjectural—sense of the process of defining bodies and making place in an early modern Atlantic colony. Although obscured in the imperial historical record, the propitiations and maintenance of the beings who made themselves known to humans were reproductive practices that in their seemingly ephemeral performance brought whole worlds into existence. Enslaved Africans and indigenous Caribbean peoples worked to transform Bermuda into a place that could be like home, where they gained familiarity with the local other-than-humans who inhabited the world of the dead that was just a threshold away.84 Although their efforts were perhaps unmappable in precise terms, they still began the formation of Bermuda’s sacred geography, at once intensely local, rooted to that particular sea- and landscape, and ocean-spanning; grounded in their here-and-now, as well as connected to the ancestors, to the first creation.
2. “Joyne interchangeably in a laborious bodily service”
In June 1675, Awashunkes, the saunks or female leader of the Saconets, an Algonquian people who lived on the coast of what the English called Narragansett Bay, had an important decision to make.1 It was not one she could make alone, so she called for all those within her influence to gather for a nickómmo, a ritual dance and feast. Two decades earlier, the colonist, trader, and sometime religious exile Roger Williams had noted that Narragansetts (as did other peoples in the region the English knew as New England) held the nickómmo in times of crisis—“in sicknesse, or Drouth, or Warre, or Famine”—as well as “After Harvest, after hunting, when they enjoy a caulme of Peace, Health, Plenty, Prosperity.” This 1675 occasion was definitely the former, and was possibly a divination ritual.2 Opposing sides in the military conflagration that later came to be known as King Philip’s War (1675–76) sought Awashunkes’s allegiance. Emissaries had come from the Wampanoag community at Mount Hope, Philip’s stronghold, as well as from the English settlements of Plymouth. Benjamin Church’s account of the war noted that Awashunkes had called her “subjects,” which included “hundreds of Indians gathered together from all parts of her dominion,” to “make a great dance.” When Church, the Plymouth military leader, arrived at the dance on her invitation, he saw that “Awashonks herself, in a foaming sweat, was leading the dance.” She and other Saconet leaders stopped dancing in order to conduct diplomatic discussions with Church.3
Figure 2.1. Map of selected Native and English places in seventeenth- century New England.
The political and military consequences of Awashunkes’s decision to ally with Philip against the English have been well explored elsewhere, as have the ways in which the outcome and aftermath of King Philip’s War fundamentally reshaped life in southern New England and contributed to racialized definitions of difference.4 Awashunkes’s recourse to a nickómmo in a time of crisis offers a different kind of opportunity to consider definitions of bodies among the Native peoples in present-day southern New England, one focused on practices that stretched across the divide of King Philip’s War and indeed continue today. These communal rituals both provided the means to move beyond the physical body to access spiritual power and served as the enactment of hierarchical community, of connection among human individuals. Long before English puritans brought ideas of the body of Christ to the land they would dub New England, Saconets and other Algonquian tribes in the region performed their own notions of the communal body, inscribing the land with their presence.
Roger Williams’s general description of a nickómmo in A Key into the Language of America, a phrasebook and collection of his observations on Narragansett life, emphasized the communal aspects of the event as well as the participants’ perspiration. Williams wrote that after a powwow, or religious specialist, began “their service, and Invocation of their Gods,” then “all the people follow, and joyne interchangeably in a laborious bodily service, unto sweating.” The movement of “all the people” was so unified, intricate, and vigorous that all perspired, while the powwow’s “strange Antick Gestures, and Actions even unto fainting” suggest particular movements meant to cross boundaries between seen and unseen worlds, or between human and other-than-human worlds.5 The physically strenuous characteristics of ritual dances and feasts, often noted in English accounts, were a means for their participants to strengthen the corporate body of the gathered human community as well as reach out to other-than-human persons who held animating power, or manitou, that could be brought to bear on behalf of the human supplicants.
The “laborious bodily service” described to Roger Williams (he feared potential negative spiritual consequences from direct observation and so used informants) as well as other feasting rituals offer a vantage point onto the actions and experiences of seventeenth-century Algonquian peoples in a time of accelerated change, a means to look over their shoulders as they danced and feasted, moving as individual and corporate bodies reaching to access the powers of the unseen. In considering the clothes, jewelry, and food they wore, consumed, gave away, or destroyed, we can also learn something of their embodied environments and the objects Pocumtucks, Narragansetts, Massachusetts, Nipmucs, Pokanokets, and others used to create and strengthen relations with other persons, whether human or other-than-human.6 A focus on ritually significant feasts locates specific people in a specific place, even if their names have often not made their way into the documentary record, places that continued to exist and change as English and other colonists enacted their own constructions of community, place, and body. The religious theorist Thomas Tweed has argued for “excavating the landscape’s moral history,” of knowing the contours of the inequalities of previous as well as current inscriptions of power. Partnerships of non-Native and Native scholars and current Native communities are doing just that, examining the resonances between the past and present and making rites of commemoration visible beyond the immediate participants.7
Landscapes also have an experiential history of people moving through and around them with purpose, creating enduring meaning through their performances even when the feeling of contracting and relaxing muscles and the sounds of tinkling and jangling beads, metal
