the leverage to force the English to acknowledge their forms of political organization. The significance of the chieftaincies endured, however, even after Native leaders’ primary control over land declined. The creation and affirmation of reciprocal obligations through performances of ritual exchange were central to the continuing importance of Algonquian forms of leadership, as well as to the maintenance of relationships with other-than-human persons.56
These gatherings, dances, and festivities helped Natives respond to the significant upheavals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Death from battle and famine devastated many communities, which were further weakened as refugees sought survival elsewhere. Natives who stayed or returned to southern New England were far from powerless, but often they attempted to work within the English system. In their continuing conflicts with colonists, Indians appealed directly to the king as his subjects when they could not find satisfaction from colonial governments. The English were largely inclined to make fewer distinctions among tribes and tended to see all Indians as enemies, actual or potential. Narragansetts, who stayed out of the first stages of King Philip’s War, suffered the effects of this generalizing mentality when English militia surrounded a winter camp near South Kingstown, Rhode Island, and killed hundreds of people, including noncombatants, in what soon became known as the Great Swamp Massacre. Refugee flight and English-controlled resettlement of Natives meant that Narragansetts had few Native allies close at hand on whom to rely. Inland and farther to the northeast, eastern Abenakis and Haudenosaunee continued to determine many of the terms of interaction with Europeans.57
After King Philip’s War, Native people had to find new ways to maintain their identities as particular peoples and communities in a southern New England where the English increasingly controlled land. For many, strategies for subsistence involved greater interaction with English colonists, whether through factors who held financial interest in whale hunting from Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket; labor either in or around English households; tending English-owned livestock; or weaving baskets, cane chair seats, and brooms. Especially in Narragansett country, indentured servitude came to be inherited in many families. Parents enmeshed in debt relationships pledged their children’s labor as well, or town officials pledged it for them. In addition to the captives the English made slaves as a result of King Philip’s War, the English continued to enslave growing numbers of Narragansetts, Pequots, and some Wampanoags during the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, despite laws prohibiting such action.58 Many generations of Indians had to find employment in white households, even in communities that were able to maintain more autonomy such as the Aquinnah Wampanoags. But that employment did not prevent Wampanoags and other Indians in southern New England from maintaining oral histories of their people’s origins and culture heroes. For instance, at the beginning of the twentieth century, despite the fact that many lived in white households, Gay Head children continued to learn accounts of Maushop, a giant who had created parts of the physical landscape.59 The emphasis among most Natives and scholars today is that creative adaptations of techniques do not necessarily signal assimilation or loss of culture, but rather resiliency.60
Even in the altered landscape after King Philip’s War, Natives continued to hold dances and feasts, performing the community actions that maintained the network of relations with each other and with the other-than-human persons who populated the places around them. These occasions continued to be both individually motivated and seasonal. In 1690, Samuel Sewall recorded an event relayed to him by an unnamed individual “At N[arra]ganset (formely ye chief place of Indians in N E).” That informant told him “an account [of] a Dance held by a great woman who had met with many Adversities in [the] Loss of near Relations &c.” The woman called for “persons far [& near]” and made “Considerable Provision . . . for Entertainment of the[m a]f[ter] their fashion.” She recounted her experiences to those who had gathered, making “several Speeches to them importing her former Calamity, and hopes of future Prosperity.” To confirm the desires of her hopeful words, attempt to garner manitou and the attention of powerful other-than-human persons, and initiate another stage in the continuous cycle of destruction and regeneration, she “now and then danc’d a considerable time, gave many Gifts, and had a new Name given to herself.”61 Her ability to provide “Considerable . . . Entertainment” for those who gathered was a demonstration of her control over material resources. It also obliged her guests to reciprocate in some way. Both of these aspects confirmed and strengthened her position as a “great woman” within her own tribe (the English recognized her leadership position only tangentially) who might yet be able to overcome her recent “Adversities.” Taking a new name to commemorate the new person she had become, she would have based her “hopes of future Prosperity” on the relationships initiated and renewed by her dancing and her gifting.
In the more constricted arena that developed after King Philip’s War, seasonal rituals continued to be significant and required additional defending against colonial officials who feared such gatherings as “Prejedicall” to social order. In 1726, South Kingstown town officials objected to a gathering of “Indians and Negro’s Servants and Others” who met “the Third Weak in June Annually In This Town Under a Pretence of Keeping a sort of a Faire.” Justices could sentence “any Indian or Negro” who met “under this pretence” with up to twenty lashes. The timing as well as the meeting’s acknowledgment that it “hath been A Custom for severall Years Past” suggests that it could well have been Keesakùnnamun, rather than “a special local festival,” as suggested by one historian.62 The record of the repressive act also indicates the changing composition of Narrangansett and other Algonquian tribes in the early eighteenth century. Many men of African descent had married into these groups whose male populations had been decimated by war and whaling.63 Narragansetts near South Kingstown were not the only ones to continue to perform an embodiment of community that defined the corporate body through physical connection and movement. Mohegans in nearby New London asserted their right to choose their own leader when they held what colonial observers called a “black dance” in September 1736.64
In addition to the continuation of ritual dances and feasts, other kinds of bodily performance developed in response to English colonists’ demands on Native lands and communities. Attention to the “ritualized legal performances” of Wampanoag sachem Wunnatuckquannum as encoded in Native-to-Native land deeds between 1683 and 1700 recasts a staple of the colonial archive as a playbill that details the connections between a leader and the people who constituted a sachemship as well as the leader’s actions to nourish and maintain that corporate body. Wunnatuckquannum embodied the sachemship as she conducted a ritual bargaining and transmission of land within the Nunepog community. The Massachusett words recorded in the first 1683 deed, “I Wunnatuckquannum have bargained with David Oakes,” were meant as a prompt to more specific recall of the details of the agreement. The signature line of the deed also recorded words spoken as part of a ritual performance: “I Wunnatuckquannum, witness; my hand (X).” Other documents from the same period echoed this Massachussett form “Neen Wunnatuckquannum.” Wunnatuckquannum’s construction of her body as the conduit for the manitou expressed in such rituals conveying land was even more apparent in the 1686 deed. The signature line of that document, “I am Wunnatuckquannum, this is my hand (X),” linked the sachem’s hand to her person and to the larger community.65
Even as the performance was collective, it demonstrated a hierarchy of body and bodies: the group had to reach consensus on the land sale, but it was the sachem who conveyed the land. Wunnatuckquannum’s actions linked her body to a specific place, at the same time that her body was the connection between the written encoding of a performance and the oral performance itself. The significance of performance surrounding written documents was something that the English also understood, and Wunnatuckquannum’s final surviving deed shows the imprint of her adoption of the English rite of pressing a seal into hot wax as an affirmation of the document’s authenticity and authority.66 The original ritual that conveyed the land from Wunnatuckquannum to David Oakes required assembling additional community members who were witnesses as well as participants. Some of those gathered had the responsibility to remember the details of the transaction for later recall.
