finished bead production seems to have shifted over time. As iron implements enabled expanded production of wampum and Haudenosaunee and other inland groups increased their demand over the first half of the seventeenth century, making the finished beads seems to have become something women joined men in doing. The RI-1000 burial ground in Wickford, Rhode Island, contained the implements necessary for bead production and unfinished bead blanks in adult men’s and women’s graves, whereas at the earlier West Ferry site, dating from the first half of the seventeenth century, only men’s graves contained those items.45 In the early seventeenth century and before, women had already participated in wampum production by creating necklaces and belts of the beads. The addition of carving the beads broadened that participation and added another mode for women’s access to the spiritual power held in such objects and in their exchange. Wampum belts were diplomatic relationships made tangible and recorded; their patterning was a kind of “spatialized writing” that reflected a microcosm of Native space, a material representation of generosity and exchange. Women’s role in the creation of this physical form of the relationships that defined a community and connections among communities meant that women were intimately involved in the regeneration and recording of the communal body.46
Crystal and naturally occurring copper, as well as the cognate forms of European manufacture, glass and smelted copper or brass, were also objects whose light-reflecting properties indicated a high level of manitou.47 Moreover, the sounds these substances made as they clinked against each other served a purpose in warding off other-than-human persons who might cause disease or other negative events. The significance of the sounds these objects made is suggested by the Wampanoag and Narragansett practice that restricted the interment of bells to the graves of young children. Old enough to be named and recognized by the community but young enough to need special assistance on the path to the afterworld, bells would have jingled more clearly than other items.48 Awashunkes and other dancers would have felt the weight of those spiritually charged objects and heard them clink as they moved their bodies. The wampum, metal, and glass would have helped her gather herself to travel outside her body, catapulted by their potency and directed by the pounding of her legs and the singing tones from her mouth. Then, in that other-place, she might have learned of the intentions of the other-than-human persons who formed an essential part of the Saconet community, accessing and marshalling their power to assist her in the decision she faced. Her fellow dancers and others who looked to Awashunkes for leadership in such uncertain times may have looked forward to the feasting from heaped baskets of food that would follow the dancing, and seeing in all the activities the connection among animate beings as well as the opportunity to fill their stomachs.
Although not part of the moment relayed in Benjamin Church’s account of Awashunkes’s dance, the feasting that would have followed was an integral part of the ritual’s efficacy. Women’s work was centrally on display in that part of the performance as well. Some of the containers holding the food may have been similar to the ones recovered at several sites throughout southern New England. Castellations that referenced women’s genitalia, depicted a woman’s head and shoulders with a baby on her back shown on the inside of the pot, or represented maize emphasized women’s roles in cultural and social fertility (figure 2.3).49 The motifs linked women’s bodies and their reproductive work to the evidence of their productive work since the contents of those pots and other containers at Awashunkes’s dance were also largely the result of women’s work. Although June was almost definitely too early for the green corn to have ripened, any corn a community still had in storage would have been brought forth for such a ritual.
Corn had particular spiritual power for Algonquian women in southern New England in similar ways that cassava did for Taínoan and other indigenous women of the Caribbean. Planting, weeding, hilling, harvesting, drying, grinding, and storing corn was labor that they knew was also religious work because their elders had taught them about corn’s spiritual importance.50 Corn and beans were specific gifts from the southwest and creator deity Cautantowwit, granting them a greater spiritual significance than the wild plants that Native women gathered. Patricia Rubertone has argued that women had a higher place in the hierarchy of Narragansett society than Roger Williams knew or acknowledged. According to her analysis of grave goods and oral traditions, women held substantial spiritual power through their connection to and responsibility for corn. The grain was continued proof that Cautantowwit had not abandoned them and so provided spiritual as well as bodily sustenance. The various forms of physical labor involved in caretaking corn was work that had spiritual ramifications, as indicated by the yellow and white bracelets on a few of the female children buried at the seventeenth-century cemetery near North Kingstown, Rhode Island. These bracelets linked the children, whom the community had named and fully recognized, to the work they would have done had they lived.51 Perhaps they also invoked the protection of Cautantowwit for these individuals by reminding him of his gift to the people that they still honored.
The evidence of women’s special connection with corn and thus to a specific access point to manitou extended beyond the foodstuffs consumed at a feast. The inclusion of pestles as women’s grave goods honored their everyday practices as they “constantly beat all their corn with hand: they plant it, dresse it, gather it, barne it, beat it, and take as much paines as any people in the world.”52 Women often used stone pestles with wooden mortars or depressions in naturally occurring rocks to grind corn and other seeds into meal before cooking it. By taking worn pestles as well as specifically produced effigy pestles with zoomorphic or anthromorphic designs out of circulation, kin of the deceased acknowledged and reinforced the spiritual import of such work. Effigy pestles, which only appear in periods after contact with Europeans, had an “obvious association with fertility” through their phallic shape and because they were used to grind seeds. Zoomorphic effigy pestles such as the one recovered from Burr’s Hill in Rhode Island depicting a bear gave concrete form to the connections of clan that could span the Native peoples of the Northeast (figure 2.4). In addition, the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures reached out to the manitou of other-than-human persons, including “Squauanit. The “Womans God” reported by Roger Williams.53
Although Williams’s and his male informants’ limited access to women’s activities and spiritual practices meant that A Key offered little more discussion on the topic, Matthew Mayhew’s account of a powerful Wampanoag powwow on Martha’s Vineyard and his wife, “a Godly Woman,” may also offer an example of women’s and men’s access to separate spiritual arenas. The powwow, who was so successful in marshaling manitou in divination rituals that at least one English colonist sought him out for assistance in locating stolen goods, offered “incouragement” to his wife in her “practice and possession of the Christian Religion,” which included praying “in the Family” and attending “the Publick Worship on the Lords Dayes.” As Mayhew reported his explanation, “he could not blame her, for that she served a God that was above his; but that as to himself, his gods continued kindness, obliged him not to forsake his service.” Whether the attribution of the Christian God’s greater strength was Mayhew’s or the powwow’s, the powwow clearly stated that individuals had particular relationships with other-than-human persons.54 Given the intricacies of human interactions, there is no way to know with certainty which one of the pair initiated the idea that the woman should practice Christianity, whether she did, or if it was her husband who did as an effort “to hedge his bets,” as one scholar has put it. Much spiritual power accrued to Algonquian individuals through dreams and visions, or as Mayhew labeled them in his Christian-inflected language, “immediate Revelation,” so the woman herself probably experienced something that propelled her to the new religion. Moreover, since gender strongly determined other realms of activity, it would make sense for that division to hold when accessing manitou.55
“Under a Pretence of Keeping a sort of a Faire”
Narragansetts, Nipmucs, Wampanoags, Pokanokets, and Pocassets did not define the body politic in the same way as did the English, who tied political participation to landholding and sometimes to membership in a specific religious community, but they did see connections between the spiritual and political realms, between
