actions come through even in imperfect, only partially comprehending contemporary English accounts of these events.8 When joined with the evocative objects recovered through archaeological research, the textual remains of this and other ritual performances expand the available archive for tracing Native definitions and imagining the experiences of faithful bodies, both individual and corporate. Those experiences were different from individual to individual and from one culture to another, even as all took part in a process of humans working to define the limits of their physical bodies, to understand and cultivate their relationships to the beings and forces with spiritual power, and to enact a balance between divergence and overlap, equality and hierarchy.
“All their neighbors, kindred, and friends, meet together”
A nickómmo such as the one Awashunkes initiated enacted an underlying approach that guided relations among human and other-than-human persons. In redistributing wealth, some of which was displayed while dancing, these rituals kept the resources of the “one dish” or “common pot” in balance.9 Although the “one dish, one spoon” language comes from a later period and more northern location, the concept of connection among all members of a community held true among the Ninnimissinuok, Wabanakis, and other Northeast Native cultures and is reflected in contemporary English descriptions.10 While the southern Algonquian common pot emphasized shared resources among humans and other-than-humans as it mandated particular sets of relationships between parts (individuals or specific communities) and the whole (the space of the Northeast), communities allocated those resources in stratified ways. Leaders controlled access to valuable types of goods and displayed their power through the redistribution of those goods rather than through their accumulation, as was more common among Europeans. A shared common pot did not create an egalitarian paradise among Natives. Rather, its maintenance was the means by which peoples realized inequalities in economic, social, and political arenas.11 They also fought over who might get to share a particular space and who was an outsider to be kept away. These contested embodiments of the concept offer a rich starting point from which to consider the Native bodies, Native communities, and Native space that underlay the puritan English body of Christ as a way of structuring the Northeast.
There were significant ritual variations within groups and also across groups, but the related iterations pointed to the fundamental concepts of connection, reciprocity, the cycle between destruction and regeneration, and the permeability of bodies. Kathleen Bragdon has argued that rituals sponsored by leaders or other individuals for more personal reasons were more centered on accessing manitou than those public events that occurred on a calendrical or seasonal cycle.12 While calendrical rituals might have been less focused on an individual’s access to the specific power of a particular other-than-human person, they were part of the corporate quest for spiritual health that required interaction with other-than-human persons. In both cases, the gathering of individuals into a community that acted in concert was key to the performance of the ritual. According to Edward Winslow, Pokanokets would “meete together, and cry unto” the creator god Kiehtan “when they would obtaine any great matter.” Participants would “sing, daunce, feast, give thankes, and hang up Garlandes and other thinges in memorie of” or hope for “plentie, victorie, &c.”13 In rituals such as the Keesakùnnamun, Roger Williams observed “a kind of solemne publicke meeting, wherin they lie under the trees, in a kind of Religious observation, and have a mixture of Devotions and sports.” Various Algonquian peoples held “great dances” annually on the ripening of green corn, which happened in August or September. In August 1637, Conanicus and Miantonomi, Narragansett leaders, sponsored a “strange kind of solemnity” that lasted for nearly two weeks during which “all the Natives round the country were feasted,” while “the sachims eat nothing but at night.” An Eastern Niantic green corn dance in 1669 was the supposed occasion for a conspiracy led by Ninigret, a plot that members of several Native tribes had hatched at an earlier dance hosted by the Mashantucket Pequots. Regardless of any plans to assault the English, the dances were occasions to reconnect with kin and assert community autonomy.14 Among the Nipmuc, the missionary Daniel Gookin noted harvest feasts in which “all their neighbours, kindred, and friends, meet together.” At those times, “much impiety is committed,” not least because “They use great vehemency in the motion of their bodies, in their dances.”15 The assembling of large groups of people enabled humans to connect more easily with each other and with other animate beings.
Throughout the Northeast, particularly significant dreams could prompt an individual to call for a communal ritual. Williams recounted one man’s “vision or dream of the sun . . . darting a beam into his breast; which he conceived to be the messenger of his death.” The man gathered his “friends and neighbours” in a nickómmo that went on for “ten days and nights.” While his friends and neighbors feasted on “some little refreshing” the man had prepared, he “was kept waking and fasting, in great humiliations and invocations.” Invoked in response to the intimacy of a dream, the event strengthened a community through the sharing of food and ritual.16
Other occasions for ritual dancing and feasting, which could include the destruction of goods, happened around illness. When a powwow cured a sick person’s illness, the happy patient or friends and relatives gave “corn and other gifts” to the powwow at a specific time which became the occasion for a nickómmo. Ritual destruction might also take place to ward away sickness, as Wampanoags told Edward Winslow that Narragansetts had done successfully to avoid the smallpox epidemic that hit the area from 1616 to 1620. At such events, community members contributed “almost all the riches they have to their gods, as kettles, skinnes, hatchets, beads, knives, &c. all which are cast by the Priests into a great fire that they make in the midst of the house, and there consumed to ashes.”17 The more an individual could contribute, the higher a status he or she could attain as a result of the manitou accrued through such destruction.
The performances of ritual feasting and dancing facilitated the connections that linked seasonally dispersed bands into more broadly constructed groups. Roger Williams disparaged this traveling, which to him seemed to be merely a search for dispensations of food and goods: “By this Feasting and Gifts, the Divell drives on their worships pleasantly . . . so that they run farre and neere and aske Awaun. Nikommit? | Who makes a Feast? Nkekinneawaûmen. | I goe to the Feast. Kekineawaúi. | He is gone to the Feast.”18 This perception of disorganization carried through into scholarship by nineteenth-century historians and early archaeologists about apparently marginal areas of southern New England such as the middle Connecticut River Valley. Paying attention to the layered significance and consequences of seasonal intertribal feasting that drew a wide population together recasts such apparent disorganization as social and political flexibility that allowed small concentrations of extended families with multiple leaders to respond to seasonal shifts in available resources, as well as to political crises. In the spring, different tribes “from severall places” gathered at key fishing sites such as the natural falls a few miles north of Deerfield at Peskeompskut, where, in addition to fishing, “they exercise themselves in gaminge, and playing of juglinge trickes, and all manner of Revelles, which they are delighted in.”19
Archaeological research and oral traditions corroborate the accuracy for Pocumtuck country of Thomas Morton’s description of more coastal groups. Near the dam at Peskeompskut, the soil contains high levels of calcium from fish bones discarded along with artifacts with multiple origins. These intertribal gatherings at Peskeompskut were one example of how peoples shared important resources that lay within a particular village’s territory, enacting one aspect of the common pot.20 When they were not fishing or processing the catch of shad and salmon, Natives performed other aspects of the seasonal rituals. In addition to the feasts and dances, sacred games of chance such as hubbub and puim were important activities for men in which the more successful players were able to invoke the help of other-than-human persons. Participation not only enabled men to display their spiritual accomplishments, but it also reinforced the gamers’ sense of connection to each other and to a particular space in the landscape. Later retellings of particularly spectacular wins and losses
