Status Updates From Squanto: A Native Odyssey

“No new political history was made” on the day of the first Thanksgiving. Rather, the event reflected treaty relations/obligations previously developed between the Massasoit and pilgrims, coming after the latter had grown into a stronger, regional force, as illustrated by their strong defense of Squanto, leading the native sachem to reaffirm their relationship.

Cool! Plymouth was “not an isolated settlement,” but rather “more like the English neighborhood in the recently revived indigenous village of Pawtuxet.”

Pawtuxet settlements were itinerant, moving between different sites in summer and winter. This seasonality incentivized/made practice the gifting of meals to visitors. They practiced a similar reciprocity with the pilgrims, so that teaching them to better farm (once allied, post-treaty) served to grow the “common pot”. In effect, Thanksgiving appears not as exceptional, but regular, sustaining both communities.

Fascinating point that it was likely women who taught the pilgrims to fertilize their crops with fish/eels, not Squanto, as crop rearing was primarily in the women’s knowledge domain. Instead, Squanto was present as translator and recorded in colonists’ accounts of native encounters. This native participation in colonists’ planting served as a means of social integration, common between native groups.

Jamestown in the 1610s: a “site of colliding worlds…mixed up, messy settlement” that merged English and Native Americans’ (and a plethora of different, distinct, and not necessarily mutually intelligible East Coast peoples) structures, styles of farming and land management, and even people.

Interesting that Lipman uses the term “hot Protestants” to describe the brand of non-conformism practiced by the pilgrims, as opposed to the more performative “puritan,” which even at the time was somewhat derogatory. The former is both how these groups - many of which sprang up after the 1580s - characterized themselves, and captures a long overlooked dynamism of thought/levity. They weren’t all dour.

Cool point on early 17th century Spain as characterized by a “multicultural ethnoscape,” including Jews, Berbers, Turks, sub-Saharan Africans, and Native Americans, alongside a host of European peoples. This meant a variety of forms of indenture and freedom/unfreedom regulated by the state. On several occasions, Magrebi “faith slaves” presented themselves as Native Americans to gain freedom in court.

We should therefore “never see the meetings between ships and canoes as flat, two-sided affairs. There were always hidden dimensions. Just as Christian nations jousted among each other for access to America’s coastal market in furs and goods, so did native powers.”

Super interesting, the Wampanoag welcomed English shops peacefully, because they saw them as a means to directly access European weapons (and iron supplies) and cut out native middlemen. This was particularly a response to the Mi’kmaq’s “creative approach to new technologies.” They adopted European sailing ships and violently raided the northern Dawn Lands.

By the 1560s, the combined tonnage of European ships traveling to the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland to fish equaled that of those going to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South and Central America.

“Indigenous people regularly made overland voyages of 1000 miles or more, propelled by just their feet and canoes. Lakota from the Plains turned up at treaties held at Montreal. Shawnees from the Ohio Valley followed the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico,” etc.

There is extensive evidence of “sprawling and weblike trade networks and migrations that connected indigenous communities across the Americas from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Tropics to the Arctic.”

Squanto and other “Dawn Lands” natives may have had some knowledge, perhaps incorporated into myth, of the massive, maize-based indigenous town in the Mississippi Valley, or even farther south-west in Central America. Their myth of corn’s introduction to New England accurately spoke of it coming from the southwest.

Interesting point about speaking of the coast as the “Dawn Lands,” reflecting the natives of the regions’ understanding of themselves as inhabiting the regions where dawn first arose, without imposing a non-existent political homogeneity or later geographic classifications inapplicable to the pre-colonial (though post-contact) native populations.

Interesting point on the centrality of reciprocity to Wampanoag culture and language. The word for brother - one of a plethora of relational terms that far exceeds English’s ability to delineate familial relations - bore a meaning closer to “I am my brother’s keeper.” Recognizing an individual as “brother” was “in essence…to take a mutual oath.”

“For Wampanoags, it wasn’t just that family mattered, but that most matters - political, spiritual, agricultural, environmental - could be understood through the lens of family.” Kinship ties were “so capacious that they extended far beyond…his extended family, beyond Pawtuxet, across species, and even beyond the visible world into the afterlife and the spirit realm.”

“Contrary to the Mayflower legend,” the Plymouth settlement was neither “born from a single ship,” nor “a stand-alone band of dissidents,” but rather “best understood as one node among many in an emerging network of English plantations, fishing stations, and trading ventures” that connected “Mediterranean ports, Atlantic islands, and indigenous harbors on North America and Caribbean shores”.

After an AGE, I’m finally reading this book again and loving it. It’s so interesting and god I am in love with their culture and their history and their lives and ways. It’s all so absorbing and humbling and beautiful. But my lord this man truly wanted to write a linguistic book because why am I being taught ther abcs for ten pages when you promised me the story of a man’s life? 🤔 he needs to prioritize