WHALERS

Long before colonists arrived, some coastal Algonquians were harvesting right whales that strayed close to their shores in winter, when the species ventured south from Arctic waters. By 1650 Europeans were hiring Indians to pursue those whales near the coast in open boats, armed with iron harpoons. The native whalers—including Montauks and Shinnecocks from Long Island and Wampanoags from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket—towed their prey back to the shore for payment. Few earned much, however, because their employers deducted from their pay the value of goods extended to them on credit and

Of any lost or damaged gear. Many labored under debt from year to year.

Such exploitation only increased with the advent of deep-sea whaling in the early 1700s, Colonists were reluctant to embark on such long and dangerous voyages, and agents for whaling companies did all they could to procure able-bodied Algonquians by drawing them into debt. By 1730 three-fourths of the Indian whalers sailing from Nantucket were working to pay off their employers, A few Algonquians prospered in the whaling trade, but most had to content themselves with the intangible rewards of a hard job well done.

On November 15, 1670, Shinnecock Indians named Tow-sacom and Phillip put their mark on this three-year contract for the “killing and striking of whales" along the coast and the rendering of the blubber onshore. In return, the two whalers were allotted clothing, shot and powder, and com.

A 1722 map of Gardiners Island, off Long Island, shows six men hunting a whale in a craft of the sort companies provided toAlgon-quians who worked for them. Carved of cedar, each boat was 20 to 30feet long and eight feet wide and carried a crew of four oarsmen, a helmsman, and a harpooner.

Of the many Wam-panoags involved in deep-sea whaling, Amos Haskins of New Bedford, shown here in the mid-1800s, was one of the few who rose to become captain of a ship. In 1851, at the age of 35, he embarked on a whaling expedition in charge of a vessel named "Massasoit."

ARCHSiSHOH WITTY HIGH SCHOOL

Iroquois warriors, who pushed eastward across Lake Champlain and the Hudson River in the hope of controlling the fur trade along those waterways. Europeans encouraged such intertribal disputes for reasons of their own. The French, for example, urged Abenakis to resist the Iroquois because the Iroquois were allied with the rival English and were raiding tribes around the Great Lakes that provided the French with their best pelts. Often Europeans bolstered their Indian allies with firearms, which greatly increased the toll of intertribal warfare and the demands for retribution. Roger Williams had observed that traditional Indian warfare in New England was "far less bloody and devouring than the cruel war of Europe." But once European weapons and trade goods were added to the mix, tribal wars became deadlier, ravaging villages—and generations of young men on whom the future depended.

Europeans brought further devastation to coastal tribes by introducing them to alcohol. Drunkenness did not come naturally to Algonquians. Early European witnesses were impressed by their moderation and selfdiscipline. In Virginia, for example, there were few reports of drunkenness among Powhatans before the late 1600s, when they had suffered severe blows to their morale. Even then, they tried to drink in a way that accorded with their traditions. As Robert Beverley observed, they imbibed solemnly, "as if it were part of their religion," much as they smoked their strong native tobacco to reach a state of spiritual intoxication. To prevent those who got drunk from coming to harm, one or two in each party would refrain and watch over the others. Nonetheless, drinking brought trouble and distress to Powhatans and other Algonquians, particularly when traders or land speculators encouraged the habit. Families went hungry when hunters bartered away a season's bounty of furs for a few bf)ttles of rum, whiskey, or brandy. And communities were sometimes uprooted when tribal negotiators accepted the liquor that unscrupulous agents passed around to win concessions in treaty talks.

When colonists manipulated chiefs in this and other ways, they hurt Algonquians in spirit as well as substance by severing bonds of trust between the people and their leaders. In 1709 the colony of Rhode Island made the sachem of the Niantic—who served as chief over Narragansetts as well as members of his own tribe - the legal executor of their reservation. In practice, this meant that only the sachem himself, Ninigret II, and his family and heirs would benefit from the lease or sale of tribal lands. Other tribal members were permitted to lish, hunt, cut timber, and grow (. n ips there, but they did not own any of the property. Nor could they pre-

This pipe tomahawk was presen ted to a tribal leader by an American negotiator. One side portrays an Indian with a tomahawk raised against an enemy. The otherfeatures an American eagle, signaling the new authority that Algon-quians had to reckon with after the Revolutionary War.

Vent the sachem or his heirs from selling large parcels to colonists, which many did to pay off personal debts.

Over the years, the Ninigret heirs came to live as landed gentry, with the same rights as other colonial freemen, including the privilege of voting. While other tribal members struggled to subsist, the sachem enjoyed the comfortable life of a wealthy plantation owner. A European visitor described the estate of George Ninigret, who presided as sachem from 1735 until his death in 1746. His manor house, called "King George's house or palace," was surrounded by more than 20,000 acres of fine level land, "upon which he has many tenants and has, of his own, a good stock of horses and other cattle. This king lives after English mode. His subjects have lost their own government policy and laws and are servants or vassals to the English here. His queen goes in a high modish dress in her silks, hoops, stays, and dresses like an English woman." When George Ninigret's son, Thomas, sold more tribal land to support this lavish lifestyle, his angry "subjects" secured a lawyer with the help of Samuel Niles—a Narragansett who served as a Baptist minister on the reservation—and opposed their chief in court. The court refused to intervene, and many on the reservation later sought refuge with other groups among the Oneida Iroquois, founding a Christian community at Brothertown, New York.

Reverend Niles, or Father Sam as he was called by his followers, was a product of the religious revival known as the Great Awakening that swept the colonies beginning in the 1730s. Adherents of this Protestant movement

Became known as the New Lights because they claimed to have discovered a new and certain path to salvation. In New England, Algonquians such as Niles were caught up in the revival because it allowed them to worship in a spirited and emotional way that conformed with their traditions. Niles, who could not read but learned much of the Bible by heart, was criticized by a rival minister for being guided less by scripture than by "feelings, impressions, visions, appearances, and directions of angels and of Christ himself in a visionary way.” To Algonquians, however, visions were the essence of spirituality, and they expected as much from their holy men.

As revealed by their costume, this 18th-century Abenaki couple at a Catholic mission village along the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec absorbed elements of French culture there. A number ofAbena-kis with ties to the French sought refuge in Quebec when their homeland was threatened, first by Iroquois warriors in the mid-1600s and later by English troops.

Maliseets gather by their canoes with a Catholic priest on their reservation at Kingsclear, New Brunswick, in the late 19th century to celebrate a religious holiday. The Maliseet were among the first Algonquians to be converted to Christianity, in the early 1600s, and their attachment to the faith grew stronger over the years.

Niles, like most New Light preachers, respected tribal traditions that did not directly conflict with biblical teachings. With about 100 followers, he built a meeting house with an adjoining cemetery on the Rhode Island reservation and inaugurated an August Meeting there that harked back to the old Narragansett harvest ceremony. Even after the departure of many Christians on the reservation for Brothertown, the Freewill Baptist church Niles founded endured— as did the convivial August Meeting.

Other Algonquian groups responded to overtures from Christian preachers during this period or grew more committed to beliefs introduced by earlier missionaries. In the north, Catholicism was now an integral part of tribal culture. Many Wa-banakis attended morning and evening Mass, recited the catechism, and V. - re baptized, married, and buried by Catholic priests. Indeed, the oldest Catholic cemetery in New England was established in 1688 among Penobscots on Indian Island, Maine By the early 1700s, a Catholic priest could claim that the “whole Abenaki Nation is Christian and is very zeal ous in preserving its religion."

Missionary John Sergeant and settled the village of Stockbridge in western Massachusetts. There the church filled the traditional role of the chiefs longhouse as the ceremonial focus of the community. Sergeant preached to the residents in the Mahican language, and some English families settled at Stockbridge to instruct Mahicans in crafts and serve as examples in other ways. Sergeant did not prohibit Mahicans from pursuing traditional subsistence activities, however. In late winter, for example, many residents went off to maple groves in the forest to harvest sugar, as they had in the past, leaving their children behind in a boarding school Sergeant established. Stockbridge served for a time as the site of Mahican councils, or the "fireplace of the nation," before colonists came to dominate the town.

In the meantime, other Mahicans and neighboring Algonquians were rallying around preachers of the Moravian Church—a group that was devoted to missionary work among tribal peoples. Moravians learned the languages of the Indians they ministered to and lived much as they did. Moravian mission communities were regarded by some outsiders as a threat, because temperance was firmly established there and the Indians could not be induced through liquor or other means to part with their land. Nor could they be enlisted to fight in colonial wars, because Moravians were pacifists. In New York, Moravian mission work among Indians was outlawed, and converts there migrated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where they joined in a community with like-minded Lenapes.

Even Algonquians who did not formally convert reflected the influence of Christianity in their myths and legends. Powhatans, for example, no longer told of a single afterlife, where souls journeyed to the idyllic home of the Great Hare near

The rising sun. They now spoke of another destination for wicked people after death, a place much like the Christian hell. One man described it as a "filthy stinking lake," where flames burned eternally and souls were tormented day and night by "furies in the shape of old women."

Colonists, for their part, had been influenced by Algonquians in ways that were no less remarkable. Throughout the region, settlers in remote areas wore moccasins, buckskins, and other worthy articles of native design; planted Indian corn and prepared it in Indian ways; traveled roads that followed ancient Algonquian paths; and hunted and fought with a cunning that few Europeans exhibited before they came in contact with Indians and learned from their example. Colonists had absorbed something from the Algonquians in spirit as well, as evidenced by their proud defiance of alien authority, culminating in the American Revolution. It was fitting that angry Massachusetts colonists dressed as Indians before they dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 to protest English taxation, for King Philip and other native war leaders had given their ancestors cogent lessons in the meaning of resistance.

Unfortunately, few colonists recognized their debt to the indigenous people and cared whether their cultures survived. Most tribes lost far more than they gained from continued contact with Europeans. For staunch Algonquian traditionalists, the only solution was to spurn all whites, whether they came as enemies or as friends like the missionaries. In the 1760s, a Lenape prophet known as Neolin began preaching that all native peoples must return to the ways of their ancestors or face a sure and slow extinction. An impassioned and impressive speaker, Neolin said that the Great Spirit had warned him in a vision about the dangers of white culture. He urged Indians to give up European goods and live separately from the white man. "Can you not live without them?" he asked.

F you suffer the English among you, you are dead men. Sickness, smallpox, and their poison will destroy you entirely." Word of his warnings spread from one settlement to another.

But Neolin's message could not stem the tide of change sweeping over Algonquian lands. Nothing was as it had been. Now many Algonquians shared the dismay of a Wampanoag whose ancestral community on Martha's Vineyard had been devastated by smallpox. His people had once been led by wise men steeped in the lessons of the past, he lamented, "but they are dead, and their wisdom is buried with them, and now men live a giddy life, in ignorance, till they are white headed, and though ripe in years, yet then they go without wisdom to their graves."