Collection 1: "Coming of Age in the Dawnland" by Charles C. Mann

In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs.

When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.

Tisquantum was trying to project something.

As Tisquantum’s later history made clear, he regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet, a shoreline settlement halfway between what is now Boston and the beginning of Cape Cod.

Among them is “glottochronology,” the attempt to estimate how long ago two
languages separated from a common ancestor by evaluating their degree of divergence on a list of key words.

However tentatively, the results indicated that the various Algonquian languages in New England all date back to a common ancestor that appeared in the Northeast a few centuries before Christ.

Hopewell villages, unlike their more egalitarian neighbors, were stratified, with powerful, priestly rulers commanding a mass of commoners.

Hopewell villages, unlike their more egalitarian neighbors, were stratified, with powerful, priestly rulers commanding a mass of commoners.

If so, the adoption of Algonquian in the Northeast would mark an era of spiritual ferment and heady conversion, much like the time when Islam rose and spread Arabic throughout the Middle East.

If so, the adoption of Algonquian in the Northeast would mark an era of spiritual ferment and heady conversion, much like the time when Islam rose and spread Arabic throughout the Middle East.

By the end of the first millennium A.D., agriculture was spreading rapidly and the region was becoming an unusual patchwork of communities, each with its preferred terrain, way of subsistence, and cultural style.

Unlike the upland hunters, the Indians on the rivers and coastline did not roam the land; instead, most seem to have moved between a summer place and a winter place, like affluent snowbirds alternating between Manhattan and Miami.

Although these settlements were permanent, winter and summer alike, they often were not tightly knit entities, with houses and fields in carefully demarcated clusters.

Outside the wetu he would hear the cheerful thuds of the large mortars and pestles in which women crushed dried maize into nokake, a flour-like powder “so sweet, toothsome, and hearty,” colonist Gookin wrote, “that an Indian will travel many days with no other but this meal.”

Tisquantum’s regimen was probably tougher than that of his friends, according to Salisbury, the Smith College historian, for it seems that he was selected to become a pniese, a kind of counselor-bodyguard to the sachem.

Most of the time, the Patuxet sachem owed fealty to the great sachem in the Wampanoag village to the southwest, and through him to the sachems of the allied confederations of the Nauset in Cape Cod and the Massachusett around Boston.

Analogously, the great sachems had to please or bully the lesser, lest by the defection of small communities they lose stature.

Most battles consisted of lightning guerrilla raids by ad hoc companies in the forest: flash of black-and-yellow-striped bows behind trees, hiss and whip of stone-tipped arrows through the air, eruption of angry cries.

Captured men were often tortured (they were admired, though not necessarily spared, if they endured the pain stoically).

Nevertheless, by Tisquantum’s time defensive palisades were increasingly common, especially in the river valleys.