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Wampanoag

Indians Loaned Their Words to English. Now They Want Their Languages Back.

New England Indians loaned many words and place names to the American English language. Now some of them are getting their own language back.

When colonists first arrived in what is now the United States, indigenous people spoke more than 300 languages. Some were so closely related that scholars consider them dialects of the same language. Narragansett, for example, resembled Massachusett, and speakers of one could understand speakers of another.

Indians loaned the word for this guy

Sometimes it’s hard to say which loan words came from where. An early 17^th century explorer named James Rosier identified the Abenaki word for moose as moosur. But there’s another Abenaki word for the giant animal, mos. Or did it come from the Natick word moos? Or was it Narragansett, moosu, from “he strips,” alluding to the animal’s habit of stripping bark from trees?

Today, there are only about 175 native languages left, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. But the descendants of those who spoke them are still here.

Here are cases of five native people – the Wampanoag, the Narragansett, the Mi’qmaq, the Mohegan and the Penobscot – trying to reclaim their language. Some have pored over antique texts, centuries-old deeds and old notes and diaries from the last speakers of the language. And in the hopes of inspiring fluency among younger generations, they’re using Facebook and websites and podcasts as teaching tools.

It isn’t a task for sissies. The languages, all Algonquian, were all oral and they changed over time. They’ve borrowed words from English, French and each other. It is also very, very hard to figure out how people spoke a language when no one speaks it fluently anymore.

Indians Loaned These Place Names

Along New England’s coast the Wampanoag people spoke the ancient Massachusett language. Other indigenous people also spoke Massachusett, from southern Maine to Rhode Island, though most Wampanoag lived in Massachusetts.

The Wampanoag presence manifests itself in place names like Scituate, towns in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. It means “cold brook” or “cold stream.” Other Wampanoag names in Massachusetts include Cotuit, “long planting field”; Cuttyhunk, “thing that lies out in the sea”; Mashpee, “place near great cove”; and Tuckernuck Island, “round loaf of bread.”

Cuttyhunk Island

The Narragansett were a leading tribe of southern New England when the colonists arrived in 1620. Their language is closely related to Massachusett and sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. Nantucket, for example, could come from the Massachusett meaning “in the midst of waters” or the Narragansett meaning “far off among the waves,” linguists say. And the onomatapoeiac word honk for geese is attributed to both languages.

The Narragansett Indians loaned many place names, especially in Rhode Island. Aquidneck, “at the island”; Pawtucket, “at the falls in the river”; Sakonnet River, “home of the black goose.”

Massachusett

Not only did the Wampanoag speak Massachusett, but many native people throughout New England used it as a second or third language, according to Dr. Frank Waabu O’Brien, of the Aquidneck Indian Council.

But by the early 1800s, the Massachusett language had gone to sleep, though the people survive.

“It seems that the parents and grandparents just refused to teach their children the old language, maybe because they saw the pain involved in being Indian in a world no longer theirs,” O’Brien wrote.

Disease, war, murder, slavery and blood mixing reduced the indigenous population in New England. Many indigenous languages disappeared because of government policy — and the practice of beating Indian schoolchildren who spoke their own language.

Massachusett Pidgin

In 1636, Roger Williams and his party stepped onto the banks of the Seekonk River. A group of Narragansett people greeted them with a phrase every Rhode Island schoolchild knows: “What cheer, Netop?”

“What cheer, Netop.”

“Netop” derives from “netomp,” which means “my friend” in Narragansett. Most everyone in New England would have known it in 1636, according to Ives Goddard, in his essay The Use of Pidgins and Jargons on the East Coast of North America.

“Netop” was Massachusett Pidgin, a lingua franca that evolved throughout the region for trade and talks. The very first Plymouth Colony settlers used Massachusett Pidgin almost from the beginning.

Plymouth Colony Gov. Edward Winslow described how certain Wampanoag people “daily converse with us” in his 1624 book, Good Newes From New England. He also described how the Wampanoag then spoke among themselves in true Massachusett – a language Winslow couldn’t understand.

But as the colonists multiplied and began to dominate New England, they had less interest in learning Massachusett Pidgin. A new jargon emerged, one more heavily weighted toward English: Massachusett Pidgin English.

Indians loaned a number of words to these pidgin language,s which became common English words.

Massachusett Indians Loaned These Words

The Wampanoag sachem Massasoit would have spoken Massachusett, which gave the word sachem to the English language. Massachusett also contributed squaw, which evolved into such a slur that people are trying to get rid of it.

forefathers-day-massasoit-statue-plymouth

Statue of Massasoit in Plymouth

Loan words from Massachusetts and/or Narragansett that inspire more affection than squaw include quahog, squash, pumpkin and succotash. Lobster fishermen use menhaden, also called pogy, as bait. The Wampanoag also loaned English skunk and muskrat.

Reclaiming Massachusett

The Wampanoag are still here, living around Boston, Bermuda, Rhode Island and Cape Cod and the islands.

Around 1994, a 30-something social worker named Jessie Lee Baird began having disturbing dreams. In them, familiar looking people in antique clothing spoke to her in an incomprehensible language. Baird, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe realized her ancestors were telling her to reclaim her long-silent language.

Using a modern spelling for Wampanoag, Wôpanâak, she started the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project with the Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanoag tribes.

She later said if she knew how hard it was she wouldn’t have done it. But she did get help from a couple of Puritan ministers.

Eliot and Williams

John Eliot came to New England to convert Native Americans to Christianity. Job Nesutan, his servant, taught Eliot the Massachusett language. With the help of John Sassamon, Cochenoe and James Printer, he translated the English Bible into the Natick dialect of Massachusett. Harvard College published the Indian Bible in 1663. Eliot, by the way, founded the first community of praying Indians in Natick, Mass.

John Eliot

Roger Williams recorded the very similar Narragansett language. He did a better job of getting the way Indians really spoke than the Indian Bible, according to Frank Waabu O’Brien. In 1643, Williams wrote A Key into the Language of America, a phrase book to help newcomers speak with native people.

In addition to those resources, many legal documents, mostly deeds and wills, written in Massachusett still existed. So Jessie Little Doe Baird and[others began poring over those documents. In 1996, MIT got involved when she went to work with the university’s linguists and graduate students. They compiled a dictionary of more than 9,100 words. She returned to Mashpee to teach the language.

Now, Wampanoag people on Cape Cod and the Islands—the Aquinnah, Mashpee, Assonet, and Herring Pond tribes—speak a revived form of the language.

A woman in Wampanoag Village at Plimoth PLantation.

Narragansett

In Rhode Island, the Aquidneck Indian Council worked simultaneously on revitalizing Narragansett, which means “people of the small point of land.” Some member of the tribe live on or near the Narragansett Reservation in Charlestown, R.I.

Frank Waabu O’Brien, a volunteer with the Aquidneck Indian Council, worked ardently for decades to bring back Narragansett. The council had the help of Roger Williams’ phrase book, as well as The Narragansett Dawn, a newsletter published by the Narragansett Tribe in 1935 and 1936. Written by Princess Red Wing and Ernest Hazard, it includes lessons in the Narragansett language.

Sculpture of Enishkeetompauog Narragansett, located at the Narragansett Indian Monument, Sprague Park, Narragansett,, R.I.

In 1996, the council published Understanding Algonquian Indian Words, which covers basic grammar and words for the beginner. The council followed it up with classroom teaching materials on pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Then in 2010 O’Brien published Understanding Indian Place Names in Southern New England, which corrects and explains the origins of words the Indians loaned to the region. He showed, for example, how Musquompskut became Swampscott.

There’s even have a Facebook page, Speaking Our Narragansett Language. A typical post explains “NU NA HONCK-OCK” means “I see geese” under a video of geese swimming.

Abenaki

The border between New Hampshire and Maine is the Piscataqua River, an Abenaki name meaning “river branch.” Abenaki is a language subgroup of Algonquian, the group to which all New England languages belong.

Symbol of the Wabanaki Union of Tribes

The Abenaki people call Maine “Dawnland,” and they call themselves the “People of the Dawn.” The eastern Abenaki people belong to the Wabanaki confederacy, formed sometime around 1680 or earlier. Today the confederacy includes the Maliseet, the Passamaquoddy, the Mi’qmaq, the Penobscot and the Abenaki.

Wabanaki Indians loaned many words that appear on Maine maps, including Ogunquit, Androscoggin, Kennebunk, Machias and the Penobscot River.

Mi’qmaq

The Mi’qmaq named many places in Canada and Maine – Quebec and Aroostook County – for example. They still live there, and they still speak the language.

Mi’qmaq people, 1865

About 7,000 people speak Mi’qmaq, about four percent of the the nation’s population in Canada, according to the 2016 Canadian census. The Mi’qmaq live in Canada’s Atlantic Provinces and the Gaspe Peninsula of Quebec.

They also live in Maine, where they’re known as the Mi’qmaq Aroostook Band. Many live in Presque Isle. By the 21st century, their language had pretty much disappeared in the United States. Then the Aroostook Band, which numbers about 1,500, decided to revive it.

In 2009, they chose John Dennis, a fluent Mi’qmaq speaker from Cape Breton, to teach their language.

Dennis and others went to Canada to decide which dialect to teach. With 26 different Mi’qmaq reserves, they chose the easiest to read and write. Dennis now teaches basic conversational words and skills to children in Head Start, after school and in adult classes.

Mi’qmaq Indians Loaned These Words

Mi’qmaq Indians loaned some some very common words to the English language.

The Mi’qmaq named the Maine city Caribou, which of course took its name from the reindeer. The word comes from the Mi’qmaq kaleboo, which means “pawer” or “scratcher.” That refers to how the animal kicks away snow to eat grass or moss. Marc Lescarbot, a French writer, heard the word on his 1606-07 expedition to Acadia in 1610 and included it in his book, Histoire de la Nouvelle France.

Me’qmaq Indians loaned the word caribou

Another loan word, toboggan, comes from the Mi’qmaq topaghan. The indigenous people used them primarily to slide supplies or people across snow or tundra, and hunters carried big game home on them.

The Mi’qmaq, by the way, made the world’s best-selling hockey stick in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The word hockey, though, comes from the French word hoquet, or “shepherd’s stick,” according to one theory. Some credit the Mi’qmaq with inventing the game. They at least played a version of it.

Miꞌkmaq making hockey sticks from hornbeam trees (Ostrya virginiana) in Nova Scotia about 1890.

Bringing Back Penobscot

The Penobscot language was fading in the 1960s when an eccentric self-taught linquist named Frank Siebert bought a house across the Penobscot River from Indian Island in Maine.

The mile-wide island is home to about 600 of the 2,400 Penobscot people in the world today. The reservation, about 90 miles south of Mount Katahdin (another Penobscot name) extends along the Penobscot River to include 15 towns and several unincorporated territories.

When Siebert arrived, only a handful, mostly elderly, Penobscot people spoke their native language. One of the last fluent Penobscot speakers, Madeline Shay, died in 1993.

Charles Shay, the Penobscot Nation’s ambassador to France, on Omaha Beach where he saved lives as a medic on D-Day.

So Siebert went to work trying to preserve the Penobscot language. In 1980, he won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a Penobscot dictionary. The purpose: “to provide scholars with a better understanding of the language and culture.”

For years, Siebert worked on a Penobscot dictionary. He completed a 1284-page draft (including 49 pages of introduction) in 1984. But he hadn’t made it user-friendly. He made up his own alphabet and didn’t write an English-to-Penobscot section.

Siebert died in 1998. Four years later, the Penobscot Nation designated Carol Dana, one of Siebert’s assistants, as language master. She continues his work, not for the benefit of scholars but so the Penobscot people will speak their language again.

Penobscot moccasins

Frank Speck

Today, the Penobscot Nation and the University of Maine Folklife Center are working on publishing a Penobscot dictionary based in part on the work of Frank Siebert.

Dana has also published a collection of Penobscot stories, the Glubaska tales, that came to her through anthropologist Frank Speck. Speck, a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist, transcribed the stories from a Penobscot storyteller, Newell Lyon. Speck had published the book in English in 1918, but Dana’s work includes a Penobscot version and a new English translation. The book, Still They Remember Me, 1: Penobscot Transformer Tales, Volume 1, was published by the University of Maine Press.

The University of Maine is located Orono, named after Joseph Orono, the 18th-century Penobscot leader who aided the American revolutionary cause. UMaine in 2019 put up bilingual building and road signs on campus – in English and Penobscot.

Mohegan

None of the 8,000 people who work at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Conn., speaks the Mohegan language fluently.

Fidelia Fielding

In 1908, the last fluent Mohegan speaker died. Her names were Fidelia Fielding and Dji’ts Bud dnaca, or Flying Bird. When most of New England’s native people spoke English, she insisted on speaking Mohegan. She kept four diaries in the language, which enabled the Mohegan people to reconstruct the language.

She mentored Gladys Tantaquidgeon, a Mohegan woman who studied anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania with Frank Speck — the man who gave Frank Siebert the Glubaska tales.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Speck had met Fidelia Fielding on a camping trip to Connecticut, and he published several scholarly articles about the Mohegan language and traditions.

After Fidelia Fielding died, a relative gave her diaries to Frank Speck. Speck deposited them in an archive, but ultimately her papers returned to the Mohegan in 2020.

The Mohegan people now seek to reclaim their language through the Mohegan Language Project. The project recognizes that fluency isn’t likely for adults, but hopes the next generation will learn the language. The website features podcasts to hear the language.

With thanks to Alice Gregory, How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come To Own and Indigenous Language?, The New Yorker magazine, April 12, 2021. Also to The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492-1800, edited by Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering.

Caribou By Peupleloup – Own work, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19224934. Woman at Wampanoag Village By Yuri Long – road_trip-0041.jpg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80016166.

Enishkeetompauog Narragansett, By Sculptor: Peter Wolf Toth / Photo: Niranjan Arminius – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48193312. Gladys Tantaquidgeon By Department of Historic Preservation/The Mohegan Tribe, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37390510. Charles Shay By Romain Bréget – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95721834.

This story updated in 2023.

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Myles Standish and the Lost Colony of Massachusetts

In March 1623, leaders of the struggling Plymouth Plantation dispatched their paid military leader Myles Standish to a coastal settlement 25 miles north. They gave him a savage mandate: return with the head of a troublesome warrior named Wituwamat.

Wituwamat was the perceived leader of a rumored multi-tribal strike against a failed English trading post and possibly Plymouth itself.

Supposedly a portrait of Myles Standish painted in 1625, but first published in 1885 and of questionable authenticity.

With a handful of men and a Native ally named Hobbamock, Myles Standish ambushed Wituwamat, a powerful brave named Pecksuot and two other Natives in a locked room. He then engaged in a running battle with another group of warriors in present-day Weymouth, Mass. A few others joined them–members of the trading colony established a year earlier by London investor Thomas Weston. Weston and his Merchant Adventurer partners wanted to capitalize on the profitable beaver trade with the Massachusetts tribe.

A few days later, Standish proudly impaled Wituwamat’s head on the stockade at the entrance to Plymouth Plantation—a stark warning to the local Native populations.

It was an important moment in American history–although largely forgotten. The attack clearly established the primacy of the Pilgrims. Today, the event—and the actual physical reminders of it—are being examined and reinterpreted by historians, archaeologists and descendants of the original actors.

Myles Standish, Condemned

The local tribes that had quarreled with the new English settlers quickly dissipated, clearing the way for a massive Puritan migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony anchored at Boston. The Natives feared the Pilgrims’ guns, their ruthlessness, and their rumored ability to unleash a deadly plague on command. Yet the violent preemptive strike was condemned even by the Pilgrims’ own spiritual leader, John Robinson, who had remained at their safe haven in Holland.

The first Thanksgiving — the preferred version for many.

The necessity of the strike is still debated. America prefers to remember the banquet between the Pilgrims and the local Natives, formally proclaimed as Thanksgiving by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. There was indeed a feast, albeit a strained affair, between the Pilgrims and a group of Natives, called the Pokanoket Wampanoags, who had sought a military alliance to stave off possible annihilation by the rival Narragansett tribe.

How It All Started

The story of how tensions escalated to the murder and decapitation of Wituwamat begins with the arrival of the first Europeans in present-day Massachusetts. Capt. John Smith of Jamestown fame explored the region in 1614 with several vessels. One of his commanders, Thomas Hunt, captured several Natives to sell as slaves. That action negatively impacted English and Native relations for years to come, in Smith’s view.

One of the captured natives, a brave named Squanto, later returned. The first Europeans spread infectious diseases that obliterated some coastal populations. Disease wiped out a village called Patuxet, once Squanto’s home.

In 1615, the Natives took revenge on a wrecked French ship, killing most of the sailors and keeping a few as slaves. One of the Natives participating in the butchery was Pecksuot. He later taunted Weston colonists and Standish with his gruesome account. Later, sailors of an English ship reportedly murdered several members of the Wampanoags. They then responded by attacking a party led by an explorer and gold prospector named Thomas Dermer.

Treaty

In his best-selling book titled Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote: “When the Mayflower arrived at Provincetown Harbor in November, it was generally assumed by the Indians that the ship had been sent to avenge the attack on Dermer. In the weeks ahead, the Pilgrims did little to change that assumption.”

A Pilgrim landing party raided a buried supply of corn seed, ripped through a gravesite and fled from the beach under a hail of arrows. The scouting party, sailing up the coast, found a spot with a harbor, fresh water and a hill for a fort. They then started to build homes.

The settlement at Plymouth had inadequate provisions, and 52 of the 102 who arrived on Cape Cod died by spring. Squanto, who had learned to speak English, befriended the Pilgrims. He then helped establish a treaty with Massasoit Ousamequin of the Pokanoket Wampanoags.

But Corbitant, sachem of the Pocasset tribe of the Wampanoag, challenged Massasoit’s treaty with the Pilgrims. The treaty seemed like a straightforward military alliance. However, it actually undercut long-standing tribal legal tradition, according to Paula Peters, a present-day activist for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

An 1873 lithograph depicting the expedition against Nemasket led by Standish and guided by Hobbamock.

The Pilgrims dispatched Myles Standish to a village called Nemasket with less than a dozen men. His mission: to kill and behead Corbitant, who escaped. Later, the Narragansetts, also unhappy with the Pilgrims, sent Plymouth Plantation a bundle of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin, a threat. Standish ordered construction of a palisade fence surrounding their homes, and beefed up other fortifications.

Unhappy Investor

Meanwhile, the Pilgrims were struggling to feed themselves, let alone return a profit to the London investment group that paid their way. The initial plan to farm communally failed completely. Only 26 acres were planted in 1621. In 1623, each family received permission to plant privately, with the amount of land determined by family size.

“The Pilgrims, in their quest to be stepping-stones for freedom, had almost everything go wrong as they attempted to plant a colony in the new world. By the time they reached the shores of New England, they were poor, had barely enough provisions for the first winter and began to die at an alarming rate,” wrote Dr. Paul Jehle, executive director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation.

The Mayflower

The Mayflower returned to London in 1621 empty of cargo. Weston was not happy. A return ship carried this message to Plymouth Gov. William Bradford: “The life of the business depends upon the lading of this ship, which if you do to any good purpose, that I may be freed from the great sums I have disbursed for the former and must do for the latter (the Fortune), I promise you I will never quit the business.”

Wessagusset

Despite his commitment, Weston bailed on the Plymouth investment. Instead, he created another venture: a trading colony of some 60 men. No religious separatists this time. No women. And no children. Just men, albeit a rough group, who would engage in profitable beaver trade with the Massachusetts tribe.

His traders arrived at Plymouth in the fall of 1622 poorly provisioned and not prepared to establish a settlement. They left for an area on the coast that the Natives called Wessaguscus, and they called Wessagusset.

They were greeted by the local sachem Aberdikes, who welcomed the idea of trade. But the situation soon deteriorated. The alert of an emerging crisis came from a man named Phineas Pratt, a member of the Weston Colony at Wessagusset. He chronicled his story in 1664, when he petitioned the colonial government for the financial benefits accorded “First Comers.”

He was the only first-person witness to make a written record. But he was not present for the battle. That account comes from Edward Winslow of Plymouth Plantation in a detailed report to London titled Good Newes From New England. Details were also provided in accounts from Bradford (Of Plymouth Plantation) and Thomas Morton (New English Canaan). Winslow was the de facto agent with Massasoit as well as with the investors who had funded the Pilgrims trip.

Phineas Pratt’s Account

The account of Phineas Pratt went like this: When the Weston party of 60 men arrived at Wessagusset in 1622 “there was a great plague among the savages &, as themselves told us, half their people died thereof…The savages seemed to be good friends with us while they feared us, but when they saw famine prevail, they began to insult.”

Gravestone of Phineas Pratt in Charlestown, Mass.

Pecksuot sought to intimidate the newcomers with boasts of how the tribe had subdued the shipwrecked French crew. “We made them our servants. They wept much…We took away their clothes. They lived but a little while.”

Aberdikes, the local sachem, later approached the colony with several armed braves and accused one of the men of stealing corn. They retreated when they saw men armed with muskets behind a fence palisade surrounding the fort and houses.

According to legend, the Weston colonists hanged a proxy for the crime, an older man who was deathly ill.

The colonists then buttoned up the palisade and consumed what food they had left while braves watched.

‘Tomorrow I will go’

Pratt continued: “When we understood that their plot was to kill all English people in one day when the snow was gone, I would have sent a man to Plymouth, but none were willing to go. Then I said if Plymouth men know not of this treacherous plot, they & we are all dead men; therefore, if God willing, tomorrow I will go.”

Pratt made a successful escape to Plymouth, where he found preparations already under way for a military expedition to Wessagusset.

Edward Winslow

Edward Winslow had just arrived after a healing mission to Massasoit, who told of a multi-tribal plan to attack Plymouth and the Weston Colony. Spurred by the warning of Massasoit and later confirmed by Pratt, the Pilgrims sent Myles Standish to ambush the tribal leaders.

Myles Standish Battles the Natives

Standish and his men took a small vessel called a shallop and arrived at Wessagusset where the colonist ship, the Swan, lay anchored. No one was on board, and Standish fired a musket. Several men suddenly appeared.

Surprised to find Myles Standish, they said there was no imminent threat from the tribe. In fact, many of the colonists were cohabitating with them.

Standish collected colonists in a hilltop stockade and told them of his plan to lure Natives inside and then kill them. The Natives perceived the threat and only Wituwamat, Pecksuot and two other men ventured into the fort.

Myles Standish promised them a feast and invited them into a house. He then locked the door, grabbed Pecksuot’s knife and killed him. Then his other soldiers killed and decapitated Wituwamat. They hanged a third brave.

The George Soule house at Plimoth Patuxet, probably similar to the house where Myles Standish killed Wituwamat and three other Natives.

Aberdikes approached with warriors, and the conflict debouched into a running battle in the surrounding area. The Natives, outgunned, disappeared into the tall cattails of a marsh. At the end of the day, seven Natives were killed. No English died in combat.

The settlement was evacuated, with most colonists sailing the Swan to a fishing outpost in Maine. Most of the local tribes pulled up stakes and fled the area, fearing another attack.

Aftermath

Bradford lamented the lost ability to profit from further beaver fur trade— at least for a while. The events were later mythologized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1858 narrative poem, “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

Samuel Butler recalled the proxy hanging in his satirical poem titled “Hudibras” published in the mid-17th century.

The peace that prevailed in the area was short lived. Massasoit’s son Metacom planned to continue friendly relations with the English and took the name of Philip. But tensions over land use and diminished game erupted in the 1670s, leading to an armed conflict called King Philip’s War. Colonial militia overwhelmed the tribal coalition, and there was slaughter on both sides. Metacom was killed by militia in 1676.

King Philip’s War (illustration)

Today

The tribes have a modest presence in Massachusetts today. The Wampanoags, led in part by Paula Peters, made a (so far) failed bid for a federal casino license.

The Massachusetts tribe is greatly diminished, but one group still holds tribal meetings at Ponkapoag near their ancestral home in the Blue Hills area south of Boston. Many were segregated in areas such as “Indian Row” in Brockton, Mass. In the 2010 census, just 85 people identified as Ponkapoag Massachusetts.

Tensions between the tribal groups continue to this day. Ren Green, one of the sachems, or leaders, of the Ponkapoag Massachusetts, confronted Paula Peters of the Wampanoags in a standing room only meeting at the Weymouth Public Library in 2017. There, Peters claimed the Wampanoags’ territory had included the Blue Hills area of Boston. Green called it an attempt to claim the Boston area site for a casino. Peters called it a misunderstanding.

Today, on some days, you can talk to an historical actor portraying Phineas Pratt at Plimoth Patuxet, the name of the well-done tourist site recreating the Plymouth Colony and a nearby Wampanoag site.

Wigwam and Wampanoag guide at Plimoth Patuxet

The Reincarnation of Phineas Pratt

On a sunny spring day, I found a youthful Pratt working a field at the bottom of a hill. He was surprised and excited that someone wanted to speak with him. He was particularly surprised that I lived in Wessagusset, which is still dealing with its odd place in history.

Yes, he told me, he had arrived at Plymouth from Wessagusset. Yes, Standish had spiked Wituwamat’s head and stank in the sun. And yes, he had escaped the troubles and alerted the colonists.

The Plymouth settlement is commemorated at Plymouth Patuxet and at historical sites in the town of Plymouth. A recent high-tech archaeological dig by faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Boston campus identified the site of a palisade wall near the fort that protected the settlement.

Finding the Lost Weston Colony

The Weston Colony site is another matter. It had rapidly disintegrated after Myles Standish and his soldiers departed on their shallop. Per local tradition in the mid-19th century, the site was located near a freshwater creek feeding into a cove on what today is called the Fore River.

John Winthrop commissioned this map showing three structures near Hunt’s Hill with the word “Wessaguscus.” Henry F. Waters “discovered” the map in the British Museum and sent photos to the Boston Public Library.

In 1884, a map created in 1633 or 1634 by Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony came to light in the British Museum. It showed three structures next to a cove where the Fore River opens to a large bay today called Hingham Bay.

Historian Charles Francis Adams did a deep dive into the subject in the 1880s. He armed himself with the Winthrop map, a few descriptions of the topography in the Phineas Pratt account and a dollop of common sense.

Hunt’s Hill

Adams figured the Weston fort was best located on a hill that offered views of the bay and the mouth of the river. It also needed a freshwater source. There was a hill on a hook of land jutting into a cove next to the houses on the Winthrop map. And there was a spring and a swamp nearby that could have been the one mentioned by Pratt.

Adams was convinced this site, called Hunt’s Hill, was the location of the Weston Colony. His logic remains to this day the generally accepted wisdom.

The most widely accepted location for the Weston Colony: a hilly peninsula that extended into a cove near the mouth of the Fore River. The hill was removed in the 1890s for fill used to create the South Boston Marine Terminal. A private dock is on the site today. This photo was taken from King’s Cove Park, adjacent to the controversial Weymouth compressor station.

But Wait…

In the early 1890s, a salvage company needed fill for a large marine park under construction in South Boston. The hill on the cove was for sale. Adams strenuously objected, but the hill was sold with no effort at archaeological excavation.

Today a group called the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project is having second thoughts about the Hunt’s Hill site. Its director, an archaeologist named Craig Chartier, says the Winthrop map could have identified buildings put up after the Weston Colony was abandoned. He identifies four other sites in the immediate area that are possibilities. One is particularly interesting. Two sets of bodies were dug up in graves either in or adjacent to that site. It meets the key criteria: hilltop, ocean frontage, freshwater access and a nearby swamp, as described by Phineas Pratt.

A Weymouth historian named G. Stinson Lord reported in a commemorative book in 1972 on the discovery of seven bodies at one gravesite and two decapitated bodies in another.

Stories That Need To Be Told or Retold

Today, there is a strong feeling that the stories of Native Americans in the area need to be better represented. For example, the living history exhibit at Plymouth dropped the word “Plantation” in 2020 and replaced it with the word “Patuxet.” And it made plans to improve the adjacent Wampanoag site.

The Massachusetts state seal depicts the arm of Myles Standish brandishing a saber above the head of a Native American standing at peace. Courtesy Doug Smock.

The Massachusetts state seal incorporates an image of Myles Standish’s arm brandishing a sword. It hovers above a Native American with arrows pointed downward. In January an appointed commission set about developing a new state seal. In 1999, Weymouth Town Meeting voted to purchase a tract of land in Wessagusset for conservation and historical purposes. A memorial garden built with private funds raised by local resident Jodi Purdy, a descendent of Myles Standish, commemorates Massachusetts Natives killed or displaced by the colonists.

Descendants of John Saunders, the second governor of the Weston Colony, then installed another memorial.

Descendants of John Saunders, second governor of the Weston Colony, received permission from the Weymouth Historical Commission to place a commemorative marker in Wessagusset Park in 2004.

Peace, Finally?

I started an effort two years ago to place a town historical marker at the park. The town approved the proposal, but then shelved it due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Weymouth Town Meeting approved purchase of Wessagusset land in 1999 to create a park that would recognize the nearby site of the Weston Colony. Myles Standish descendent Jodi Purdy led efforts to buy the land and build a memorial garden in hopes the Weston colonists and Massachusetts tribe “have reconciled their differences and found peace.”

One of the Native American memorials in the park reads: “On Oct. 21, 2001, these puddingstone memorials were dedicated as symbols of hope that the souls of the first inhabitants of Wessagusset, the Massachusett Indians, and the first settlers of Weymouth, the Weston colonists, have reconciled their differences and found peace.”

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

The author of this story, Doug Smock, is a retired newspaper reporter and magazine editor who has always loved history, particularly forgotten yet important events. His next project is “Young George Washington and the Battle of Braddock”. He is the coauthor of two business books, including “Straight to the Bottom Line”. Smock has lived in the Wessagusset neighborhood of Weymouth for the past eight years. He will present his Myles Standish story to a class at UMass Boston’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Images: Wampanoag wigwam and guide By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002766; Edward Soule house By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002664. Phineas Pratt gravestone By Darcyjae – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74569178. Wessagusset map: Lauren Chen, reference librarian, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Images of park, Hunt’s Hill, Saunders memorial and state seal courtesy Doug Smock.

This story updated in 2023.

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Benjamin Roberts Fights To Integrate Massachusetts Schools—and Wins in 1855

Before the Civil War, Benjamin Roberts lost, and then won, his fight to integrate Boston’s schools.

And then after he died, he lost again.

In 1848, Benjamin Roberts filed a lawsuit to desegregate the Boston school system so his five-year-old daughter, Sarah, could attend a good school close to home. As a child of color, she had to attend the inferior Abiel Smith School in Boston’s black community on Beacon Hill.

The Roberts family had strived for equal treatment since Sarah’s great-grandfather fought in the American Revolution. They typically met with some success, then with bitter failure. Benjamin Roberts repeated that pattern. Though he won his campaign to integrate Boston’s schools, his lawsuit set a precedent that would enshrine Jim Crow into law for more than half a century.

The Abiel Smith School

Perhaps the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King wrote. But for Benjamin Roberts and his family it seemed just as likely to bend back toward injustice.

Benjamin Roberts

Benjamin Franklin Roberts was born Sept. 4, 1815, in Boston, one of Sarah and Robert Roberts’ 12 children. He viewed himself as a person of color – English, African and Indian, probably Wampanoag and Narragansett.

His family had long worked for social justice, and his father and uncle both published books. His grandfather, James Easton, was a free man of color born in Middleborough, Mass. James married another woman of color, Sarah Dunbar, and they had four sons. One son, Caleb, married a white woman, and three of their six children passed as white.

Historians George Rice and James Stewart argue that fact bears mentioning because it shows why separation of the races made no sense to the Easton family and to Benjamin Roberts. It also shows that racial categories hadn’t yet hardened in early America.

James Easton

James Easton fought for the rights of citizenship as a soldier in the American Revolution, digging breastworks on Dorchester Heights, occupying towns in the Hudson River Valley and fighting in the fall of Fort Ticonderoga. After mustering out he moved his family to North Bridgewater, now Brockton, where he set up an ironworks. Easton made edge tools, anchors and custom work like the grillwork for the Tremont Theater and the rails for the Boston Marine Railway. His clients in Boston viewed him as a man of integrity, according to historian William Nell.

Tremont Theater (right) by Philip Harry, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Easton and his family attended the Fourth Church of Christ, which created a “Negro gallery” for all people of color to sit. The Easton family refused to sit there, instead buying a pew from a white family. The congregation then had them physically removed.

Undaunted, the Eastons bought a pew in a Baptist Church in Stoughton Corner. According to Nell, that aroused a great deal of indignation. “Not succeeding in having the bargain canceled, the people tarred the pew,” wrote Nell. “The next week the family carried [their own] seats in the waggon. The pew was then pulled down: but the family sat in the aisle. These indignities were continued until the separation of the family [from the church].”

Around 1815, James Easton started a vocational school, with academics, for colored youth. The school enrolled 20 students and taught smithing, farming, cordwaining, academics and deportment. It survived for 14 years, but collapsed financially. James Easton died soon thereafter.

Hosea Easton

James’ son Hosea Easton became a minister and, for a while, preached from a church on Beacon Hill. Active in abolitionist circles, he got involved in a project to establish a manual labor school in New Haven with Yale College. That project, like his father’s school, failed.

By the 1820s, racism began to intensify as New England gradually emancipated slaves. Free men and woman of color began to form their own communities, which white New England harassed.

As rising racism led to attacks on colored people on the street, Hosea preached against racial violence from his pulpit in Hartford. Whites attacked him and his parishioners, and ultimately burned down his church.

Hosea wrote an essay denouncing racism called To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice. It’s still in print.

He had a sister, Sarah Easton, who married Robert Roberts, a butler, but no ordinary butler. Roberts worked for two prominent, wealthy men: Christopher Gore and Nathaniel Appleton. He also wrote a book: The House Servants’ Directory, which became a standard for household management. That book, too, is still in print.

Roberts v. Boston

Robert Roberts named his second son, Benjamin Franklin Roberts, after the founding father. Like his namesake, Benjamin worked as a printer.

As a boy, Benjamin Roberts had to pass white schools to attend a segregated school, and he would never forget feeling as an “inferior and outcast.” But at least he went to school. Only 2 percent of African Americans attended school in the decade before the Civil War.

As an adult, he started an abolitionist newspaper in the United States, the Anti-Slavery Herald, but it didn’t last long.

In 1848, his five-year-old daughter Sarah attended the segregated Abiel Smith School. It had peeling paint, a tiny play space and a library with exactly one book. She had to walk a long way past five whites-only schools to get to it. Roberts filed a lawsuit demanding the integration of all Boston public schools and $600 in damages.

Robert Morris

He hired a 26-year-old black attorney, Robert Morris, to argue the case before the Suffolk County Court of Common Pleas. Morris, active in abolitionist causes, may have been the first lawyer of color to win a lawsuit. He did not win Roberts v. Boston.

Charles Sumner

Roberts planned all along to appeal. But to argue the case before Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court, he enlisted co-counsel Charles Sumner. Sumner, who grew up in Beacon Hill’s black community, would win election to the U.S. Senate in just a few years as well as a place in history as an outspoken opponent of slavery.

Charles Sumner

The Boston Post editorialized against their case. “Our citizens of the West End will not suffer the infusion of forty to fifty colored boys and girls among their own children,” wrote the editors.

Sumner argued that separate schools could never be equal, and that Sarah suffered psychological harm by attending an inferior, segregated school.

“According to the spirit of American institutions, and especially o the Constitution of Massachusetts, all men, without distinction of color or race, are equal before the law,” he told the court.

Lemuel Shaw

In the end, Shaw upheld the legality of separate but equal schools. In his decision, he famously wrote, “This prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law, and probably cannot be changed by law.”

Persistence

Benjamin Roberts, though angry and disappointed, did not give up. At least one good thing came out of his lawsuit: a militant new partnership between black and white abolitionists in Boston.

Wrote Price and Stewart, “Together, Morris and Sumner embodied the emergence of a powerful new alliance between groups of “black” and “white” activists, not as philanthropists sponsoring projects of “uplift” but as a coalition of insurgents bent on ridding the “Old Bay State” of “southern influences” and legal oppression.”

Roberts took his cause to the Legislature. With help from abolitionist leaders, both colored and white, he collected signatures on petitions to ban segregated schools. Sumner helped make his argument to lawmakers. And then in 1855, the Massachusetts Legislature banned segregated schools in the only statewide desegregation law passed in the 19^th century.

“Who among us can refrain from giving vent to highest exultation over these remarkable events?” wrote an overjoyed Roberts. He called the ban ‘the greatest boon ever bestowed upon our people.’

Plessy v. Ferguson

Benjamin Roberts died on Sept. 6, 1881, at the age of 66. His family buried him in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Lemuel Shaw had died 20 years earlier, 12 days before the Civil War broke out. But his reasoning in the Roberts v. Boston case survived.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court used Shaw’s logic against letting Sarah into a white school. The high court applied his ‘separate but equal’ doctrine in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which justified Jim Crow laws. It would take another 58 years to roll back that decision, viewed as one of the worst in U.S. History. In 1954, school integration once again became the law of the land with the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

With thanks to The Roberts Case, the Easton Family, & the Dynamics of the Abolitionist Movement in Massachusetts, 1776-1870 by George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart and to Sarah’s Long Walk : The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick. This story was updated in 2022.

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In 1603 Martin Pring Escapes New England with His Tail between His Legs

Much of what the early European explorers learned of the New England coast they owe to Martin Pring. And Martin Pring owes his life to the two dogs that he brought on his explorations.

An Englishman, Pring explored the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In April of 1603, he led his most famous expedition to the region — searching for sassafras.

Pring was also a careful mapmaker and a diarist, and his writings, like those of John Smith, would help promote interest in exploring the New England region.

Martin Pring Arrives

After arriving in June, Pring first searched Great Bay in New Hampshire, but found nothing of value. Pring then took his two ships — the 26-ton Discoverer and the 50-ton Speedwell — south to Cape Cod. There they found the sassafras they sought. Sassafras, they believed, possessed medicinal qualities.

“As for trees,” Pring wrote in his diary, “the country yieldeth Sassafras, a plant of sovereign virtue for the French Pox, and as some of late have learnedly written, good against the Plague and many other maladies.”

Pring loaded the Discoverer with all the sassafras it could carry and sent it back to England in July to satisfy his backers. He wanted to convince them they’d receive a return on their investment, or, as he put it, “to give some specific contentment to the adventurers.”

With their mission largely accomplished, Pring’s crew continued cutting sassafras to maximize their profits.

Close Encounters

During their stay, the Pring expedition had several encounters with local American Indians, the Wampanoag.

The nature of these encounters varied. Some were friendly and others confrontational. In some cases, Pring reported, as many as 60 Wampanoag would visit his encampment and his company gave them different kinds of food to eat. In one instance, Pring reported a member of his crew entertained the crowd by playing a Gitterne, sort of a guitar.

“We had a youth in our company that could play upon a Gitterne, in whose homely music they took great delight, and would give him many things, such as tobacco; tobacco pipes; snake skins of six foot long, which they used for girdles; fawn skins and such like — and danced 20 in a ring, and the Gitterne in the midst of them, using many savage gestures, singing lo, la, lo, la, la, lo.”

However, relations were not universally cordial. Pring reported that the Wampanoag were frightened of the two mastiffs that accompanied the voyage. When the crew felt threatened they would release the dogs to clear the area. The Wampanoag, Pring reported, were more afraid of the two dogs than they were of 20 men.

Relations finally came to a head, Pring reported. The men of the expedition were in the forest cutting sassafras around Truro on Cape Cod. They were napping in the sun taking an afternoon break, which was their custom on the warm days.

Worn-out Welcome

“There came down about seven score savages armed with their bows and arrows and environed our house, or barricade,” wrote Pring. “Wherein were four of our men alone with their muskets to keep sentinel, whom they sought to have come down to them, which they utterly refused and stood upon their guard.”

“Our master likewise being very careful and circumspect having not past two with him in the ship put the same in the best defense he could, lest they should have invaded the same, and caused a piece of great ordinance to be shot off, to give terror to the Indians and warning our men which were asleep in the woods.”

After hearing the alarm, the men returned to the ship with the two mastiffs leading the way to keep the wary Wampanoag at bay. The Wampanoag succeeded in driving the Speedwell away, however. They set fire to an area of forest a mile wide and came up to the Speedwell in boats.

Pring didn’t record what he or his crew had done to wear out their welcome. But he quickly set the Speedwell on a return course to England, arriving in October.

This story was updated in 2022.

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