Wampanoag
The Wampanoag, also rendered Wôpanâak, are a Native American people of the Northeastern Woodlands currently based in southeastern Massachusetts and formerly parts of eastern Rhode Island. Their historical territory includes the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
Today, two Wampanoag tribes are federally recognized:
The Wampanoag language, also known as Massachusett, is a Southern New England Algonquian language.
Prior to English contact in the 17th century, the Wampanoag numbered as many as 40,000 people living across 67 villages composing the Wampanoag Nation. These villages covered the territory along the east coast as far as Wessagusset, all of what is now Cape Cod and the islands of Natocket and Noepe, and southeast as far as Pokanocket. The Wampanoag lived on this land for over 12,000 years.
From 1615 to 1619, a leptospirosis epidemic carried by rodents arriving in European ships dramatically reduced the population of the Wampanoag and neighboring tribes. The drastic depopulation facilitated the colonization of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. More than 50 years later, Wampanoag Chief Sachem Metacom and his allies waged King Philip's War against the colonists. The war resulted in the death of 40 percent of the surviving Wampanoag. New England colonists sold many Wampanoag men into slavery in Bermuda, the West Indies, or on plantations and farms in North America.
Wampanoag people continue to live in historical homelands and maintain central aspects of their culture. Oral traditions, ceremonies, song and dance, social gatherings, and hunting and fishing remain important traditional ways of life to the Wampanoag. In 2015, the federal government declared 150 acres of land in Mashpee and 170 acres of land in Taunton as the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s initial reservation, on which the Tribe can exercise its full tribal sovereignty rights. The Mashpee tribe currently has approximately 3,200 enrolled citizens. The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head currently has 901 enrolled citizens. Early 21st-century population estimates indicated a total of 4,500 Wampanoag descendants. Wampanoag activists have been reviving the Wampanoag language; Mashpee High School began a course teaching the language in 2018.
Name
Wampanoag probably derives from Wapanoos, first documented on Adriaen Block's 1614 map, which was the earliest European representation of the Wampanoag territory. The Wampanoag translate this word to "People of the First Light." Increase Mather first recorded it in 1676 to describe the alliance of tribes who fought against the English in King Philip's War.In 1616, John Smith referred to one of the Wampanoag tribes as the Pokanoket. The earliest colonial records and reports used Pokanoket as the name of the tribe whose leaders led the Wampanoag confederation at the time the English began settling southeastern New England. The Pokanoket were based at Sowams, near where Warren, Rhode Island, developed and on the peninsula where Bristol, Rhode Island, arose after King Philip's War. The Seat of Metacomet, or King Philip's seat, at Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, Rhode Island became the political center from which Metacomet began King Philip's War, the first intertribal war of Native American resistance to English settlement in North America.
Wampanoag groups and locations
List
| Group | Area inhabited |
| Assawompsett Nemasket | Lakeville, Middleborough and Taunton, Massachusetts |
| Assonet | Assonet Neck, Assonet-Freetown, Greater New Bedford |
| Gay Head or Aquinnah | Western point of Martha's Vineyard |
| Chappaquiddick | Chappaquiddick Island |
| Nantucket | Nantucket Island |
| Nauset | Cape Cod |
| Mashpee | Cape Cod |
| Patuxet | Eastern Massachusetts, on Plymouth Bay |
| Pokanoket | East Bay of Rhode Island including Warren, Rhode Island, and parts of Seekonk, Massachusetts |
| Pocasset | Fall River, Massachusetts, Tiverton, Rhode Island |
| Herring Pond | Plymouth & Cape Cod |
Culture
The Wampanoag people were semi-sedentary, with seasonal movements between sites in southern New England. The men often traveled far north and south along the Eastern seaboard for seasonal fishing expeditions, and sometimes stayed in those distant locations for weeks and months at a time. The women cultivated varieties of the "three sisters" as the staples of their diet, supplemented by fish and game caught by the men. Each community had authority over a well-defined territory from which the people derived their livelihood through a seasonal round of fishing, planting, harvesting, and hunting. Southern New England was populated by various tribes, so hunting grounds had strictly defined boundaries.The Wampanoag had a matrilineal system, like other Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands, in which women owned property, and hereditary status was passed through the maternal line. They were also matrifocal; when a young couple married, they lived with the woman's family. Women elders could approve selection of chiefs or sachems. Men acted in most of the political roles for relations with other bands and tribes, as well as warfare. Women passed plots of land to their female descendants, regardless of their marital status.
The production of food among the Wampanoag was similar to that of many American Indian societies, and food habits were divided along gender lines. Men and women had specific tasks. Women played an active role in many of the stages of food production and processing, so they had important socio-political, economic, and spiritual roles in their communities. Wampanoag men were mainly responsible for hunting and fishing, while women took care of farming and gathering wild fruits, nuts, berries, and shellfish. Women were responsible for up to 75 percent of all food production in Wampanoag societies.
The Wampanoag were organized into a confederation in which a head sachem presided over a number of other sachems. The colonists often referred to him as "king", but the position of a sachem differed in many ways from a king. They were selected by women elders and were bound to consult their own councilors within their tribe, as well as any of the "petty sachems" in the region. They were also responsible for arranging trade privileges, as well as protecting their allies in exchange for material tribute. Both women and men could hold the position of sachem, and women were sometimes chosen over close male relatives.
Pre-marital sexual experimentation was accepted, although the Wampanoag expected fidelity within unions after marriage. Roger Williams said that "single fornication they count no sin, but after Marriage... they count it heinous for either of them to be false." Polygamy was practiced among the Wampanoag, although monogamy was the norm. Some elite men could take several wives for political or social reasons, and multiple wives were a symbol of wealth. Women were the producers and distributors of corn and other food products. Marriage and conjugal unions were not as important as ties of clan and kinship.
Language and revival
The Wampanoag originally spoke Wôpanâak, a dialect of the Massachusett language, which belongs to the Algonquian languages family. The first Bible published in America was a 1663 translation into Wampanoag by missionary John Eliot. He created an orthography, which he taught to the Wampanoag. Many became literate, using Wampanoag for letters, deeds, and historic documents.The rapid decline of Wampanoag speakers began after the American Revolution. Neal Salisbury and Colin G. Calloway suggest that New England Indian communities suffered from gender imbalances at this time due to premature male deaths, especially due to warfare and their work in the hazardous trades of whaling and shipping. They posit that many Wampanoag women married outside their linguistic groups, making it difficult for them to maintain the various Wampanoag dialects.
Jessie Little Doe Baird, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project in 1993. They have taught some children, who have become the first speakers of Wôpanâak in more than a century. The project is training teachers to reach more children and to develop a curriculum for a Wôpanâak-based school. Baird has developed a 10,000-word Wôpanâak-English dictionary by consulting archival Wôpanâak documents and using linguistic methods to reconstruct unattested words. For this project she was awarded a $500,000.00 grant from the Macarthur Fellows in 2010. She has also produced a grammar, collections of stories, and other books. Mashpee High School began a course in 2018 teaching the language.
History
Contacts between the Wampanoag and colonists began in the 16th century when European merchant vessels and fishing boats traveled along the coast of New England. In 1524, Giovanni de Verrazano contacted various tribes such as the Wampanoag and the Narragansett in modern day Rhode Island. Captain Thomas Hunt captured several Wampanoag in 1614 and sold them in Spain as slaves. A Patuxet named Tisquantum was ransomed by Spanish monks who focused on education and evangelization before he escaped. He accompanied an expedition to Newfoundland as an interpreter, then made his way back to his homeland in 1619, only to discover that the entire Patuxet tribe had died in an epidemic.The Wampanoag suffered from an epidemic between 1616 and 1619, long thought to be smallpox introduced by contact with Europeans. However, a 2010 study suggests that the epidemic was leptospirosis, introduced by rat reservoirs on European ships. The groups most devastated by the illness were those who had traded heavily with the French and the disease was likely a virgin soil epidemic. Alfred Crosby has estimated population losses to be as high as 90 percent among the Massachusett and mainland Pokanoket.
In 1620, the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, and Tisquantum and other Wampanoag taught them how to cultivate the varieties of corn, squash, and beans that flourished in New England, as well as how to catch and process fish and collect seafood. They enabled the Pilgrims to survive their first winters, and Squanto lived with them and acted as a middleman between them and Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem. In Mourt's Relation, initial contact between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag was recorded as beginning in the spring of 1621.
The Wampanoag are commonly depicted in pop culture as attending the First Thanksgiving. However many American Indians and historians argue against the romanticized story of the Wampanoag celebrating together with the colonists. One primary account of the 1621 event was written by a firsthand observer states that there were Indians at the celebration but nothing more.
Massasoit became gravely ill in the winter of 1623, but he was nursed back to health by the colonists. In 1632, the Narragansetts attacked Massasoit's village in Sowam, but the colonists helped the Wampanoag to drive them back.
After 1632, the Plymouth Colony was outnumbered by the growing Puritan settlements around Boston. The colonists expanded westward into the Connecticut River Valley. In 1638, they destroyed the powerful Pequot Confederation. In 1643, the Mohegans defeated the Narragansetts in a war with support from the colonists, and they became the dominant tribe in southern New England.