Lorén Spears, Executive Director of the Tomaquag Museum led a small group of NRPA Board Members, volunteers and staff on a kayak tour on July 12, 2019. Along the way, Lorén shared stories and history of Indigenous people historically through today in and around the Narrow (Pettaquamscutt) River and throughout the watershed.
Below is a transcript of the first part of Lorén’s remarks.
Lorén Spears, Oral History on Narrow River Kayak Tour
Lorén:
So, first thing: Asco Wequasin. Nutussawese Mukhasunee Pashau ut Nahaiganseck. Nutussawese Lorén Spears ut Englishut. Neen Nahiganseck Nehantic. Kunoopeam ut ahkee ut Nahiganseck. So I just said to you “hello” – [Asco weequasin], which is the most common way to say hello in the Narragansett language – and that my traditional name is [Mukhasunee Pashau], which is the moccasin flower or the lady slipper, and I am Narragansett-Niantic. If you ask me what tribal nation I’m from, I’m just going to say Narragansett. But if you ask me who I am, I’m going to tell you I’m Narragansett-Niantic. And I said “welcome to the homelands of the Narragansett people.” And so I wanted to just say a few words before we actually get in the kayaks. And what we’re going to do is stop in a couple spots where we can talk about some of the things that we’re seeing, but then also just in general about the culture and the life ways on on the river. And so first, I feel really compelled – some of you know I’ve had a couple of deaths in the family this week and one of our last chiefs of the 20th century Chief Strong Horse passed away last week, and the funeral was yesterday. So I want to have him in our hearts and our minds today because he did remarkable things in bringing us forth. He was born in 1920. And so did a lot for our community over the years and was just instrumental in my life. And particularly, he was very involved in continuing traditional ceremonies along with people like Princess Red Wing, my grandparents, and many other elders and leaders in our community. So I thought I would start with an opening blessing in our language. (To learn more about him visit our museum or website tomaquagmuseum.org)
I learned the language through Ella Sekatau, who you might remember, who was the ethnohistorian for the tribe, and also through my mom (Dawn Dove), who has been the language teacher for quite a few years. And I suppose I’m a language teacher too, because I teach it to youth in programs that we do with museum plus (in the past) through the Nuweetooun School. A lot of the work that we do today is to reclaim or continue culture that’s been interrupted through colonization, and so some of the things that we’ll talk about will also be connected to that on the river as well. So, [blessing in Narragansett-not transcribed]. And so what I said to you is I asked the Creator or I said, we come here today all in a circle together with quiet hearts, giving thanks for the beauty that surrounds us. And that we give thanks for the fish and the birds and the animals, and for the sun, and the wind, and for all our beloved relations, which is literally, in our way of thinking, all living things. We don’t differentiate between the grass that’s over there, the animals, and the humans. To us, they’re all the relations, because if you live in harmony with the land and the earth, they all have equal balance to make our existence in balance and sacred. And so those are the things that I said, and of course giving thanks for the river. I don’t think I said that out loud. The word for the river is [seep]; it’s really literally “water or neep,” but they use it often in ponds, rivers, lakes. Sometimes they’ll have a specific name for a particular river – I believe this was the Pettaquamscutt River to begin with – but sometimes they’ll just call it “the water” or “the great waters.” Like Mashapaug, the pond in Providence; that means just “the large body of water.”
Eventgoer:
Does Pettaquamscutt mean anything in the Narragansett language?
Lorén:
Oh, I should have known that question was going to come! It does mean something, and whether I can dredge it up, I’ll have to let my brain think on it. If I can’t think of it today, because it’s not like instantly popping. I will double check with mom and see what it means. I actually did know – I literally did write it down at one point, but today with everything that’s been going on this week, I didn’t think to make sure I had it in the forefront of my brain.
Eventgoer:
Whether it’s accurate or not, I always heard “great round rock.”
Lorén:
Great round rock… Yeah, that doesn’t sound right. Um, I’m going to double check it. It could be… the “utt” means “the place of.” …I have to break the word apart. I can’t remember. Yeah, I will have to double check that. I feel like it’s not the rock, but it could be “the place of the river near a rock,” but not “the rock” if there’s a rock connected to it. Sometimes that gets misinterpreted over time and becomes what it is. But usually it’s about the water. Like the name is usually about the water, like Woonasquatucket, which I happen to know off the top of my head, is “the place of the bend just before the mouth of the river.” That’s literally what Woonasquatucket means, which is why when they were asking me if they could call it Woony I suggested they call it Tucket, because Tucket still means “river,” “the place of the river,” whereas when you say Woony it means “the bend.” But they went with Woony because it’s cute, whether it makes sense or not. (note-there are a variety of words or word phases that mean river)
Added later: Pettaquamscutt could mean round rock, or place near round rock. It is not definitive. I looked up lots of research and there are lots of questions around the term Pettaquamscutt. However, round is petukqui or puttukqui in our language and rock is qussuk or chippipsqut. So it is possible, however the modern version of the word is close to lots of other words such as pētukau which means he (she or it) goes into and saunkopaugot means cool water. So, it could be the place that goes into the cool water. Which would make more sense as the salt waters enter the fresh waters. Usually the name describes the river in some way. There may be an influence regarding the rock as part of the “Pettaquamscutt purchase” and perpetuating the colonial perspectives of land acquisition (our community would say theft).
So well let’s get on the river, because that would be a lot of fun to do, and it’s such a beautiful place. As we’re here, (let’s point out that) a lot of the grasses are woven into mats, the eel grass, and we’ll see probably rushes and maybe cattails, it depends on how far in the coves we get. It depends, some places will have them and some places won’t. I’m sort of thinking some of those things would be in your upper ponds, because they’re just a little bit more pond-like, and some of those things grow better in the pond in areas than in the open river areas. So it depends on how much cove we get.
Eventgoer:
The best ones are really, when you’re driving up the road here, just about a hundred yards up on the left, you’ll see a bunch of cattails.
*Do not try or use unless guided by an expert
Lorén:
Yeah, so cattails would be used for lots of things – woven into mats for our traditional homes, (also bags & baskets) you actually can eat the stalk as a food, the roots were used; there’s some medicinal properties to the roots as well. The actual cattail pod was lined in baby diapers, because there weren’t Pampers, you had to use something else absorbent. That and moss were used, probably equally well. But if you think about it, in your summer home, there wasn’t a lot of moss. So in the summertime it was probably the cattails, and in the winter time it was probably the moss, because that was what was available. And I suppose in the way winter, they may have woven some things to absorb if they were not able to have those things preserved long enough during the dead of winter. So you know, what do they say, necessity is the mother of invention? And Indigenous people were very creative in finding what they need in this environment, and so pretty much everything is is useful. And even today with invasives – I think that’s autumn olive behind us flickering there, that sort of silvery, when it’s on the underside kind of looks silvery – it’s edible, but it’s an invasive, and a lot of things that we’re having problems with today are invasive plants taking over the habitats of the indigenous plants, and literally wiping them out in some places because they’re not getting any ability to take root because the environment is being taken over so much by them.
Eventgoer:
And the native birds and insects don’t know how to use them.
Lorén:
Right. And there’s some of those animals that are also invasive as well that are taking over areas of other indigenous birds and indigenous insects, and taking over those habitats and things like that as well. To me it seems like we’re really having a big bloom of invasive plants. I noticed even at the museum, we’ve got to get on top of it, because there’s some invasive something that’s taking over like all our garden beds, like they’re just a few flowers, and all of a sudden we just woke up one day and it’s just like everything, everywhere. So we got to get them out of there, it’s a problem. Bamboo’s a problem. Phragmites is a problem. So there’s a lot of invasives, and it seems like there’s more and more of them, like, it feels like 10 or 15 years ago, there weren’t so many, and now they’re just everywhere, these different kinds of invasive plants that, you know, disrupt the ecosystem that we have here.
And our ancestors really worked at trying to live in balance. I know that can sound kind of cliche, but literally when your life depends on it, you do. You know, when you’re on the river, and the salmon and the herring are going upstream, all the different fish that are spawning, we didn’t take them all. There’s actually a technique we would use using weirs, in the wider bodies of water. It’s kind of like fencing, kind of like a zigzag fencing. Sometimes it was curved, I’ve seen it both ways. And the goal was the running fish would go inside and it would slow them down. If it curved around, they’d then have to turn that way to get out. That would give you the chance – they would stand up on the pilings, with their spear and their nets to get the bigger fish, like when blues were running, for example, and they would use that(type of weir). And then in smaller streams, like maybe even as this one goes up, as it gets smaller and smaller – what’s the name of the historical place? Gilbert Stuart, that has a smaller stream, you would use what some people call a basket trap, but it’s really a misnomer, because it’s not a trap. If you envision a basket and the mouth of the basket, and then you weave, lay it down on its side it actually goes out here and you never close the back. So the goal is for the fish to go through the basket and then out the other side. It just slows them down in order for them to be able to capture them with nets and with spears. They’re not really doing fishing with like fishing poles at that kind of environment. This was more netting and spearing fish as they were going upstream. So that’s a really cool technique. We have a really beautiful basket weir – we actually loaned it to Rhode Island Historical Society for their waterways exhibit the last couple of months. And they (archeologists) found – I don’t know if you saw it, you can probably look it up online – in Boston, they archaeologically found a huge ocean weir that’s kind of like a fence that was underground. And they did a whole sort of show about it at one point, which was pretty cool. But if you think about it, even in a river like this, you couldn’t use the little basket weir. One, it would float away. So you need to create the fencing weir to slow the the salmon and the herring and the other fish that are spawning upstream, or any fish that were running in any kind of way that when they’re grouping along, that’s a goal to do. And, you know, pretty much if it’s edible, we ate it. Even today, we still eat a lot of things that are from the waterways.
And one of the things that we did, we’re working with the [Brown Super Fund & URI] project called the Namahs Fish Project, which is redundant because namahs means fish. But the waterways today are not as pure as they once were. And it turns out a lot of (the toxins) are actually coming from the air pollution, and not just from the water pollution, and there’s a lot of PCBs and mercury and other kinds of toxins that are in the waters. And so the study they were doing is about how much fishing and consuming of fish our community is still doing. And believe it or not, we still do quite a bit of it. There’s a lot of shelf fishing and freshwater fishing – which is what they were specifically targeting, the two ponds on our reservation – and hunting, and the problem is – I happen to be part of the team that’s one of the educators for that project, and the problem is the deer we’re hunting are eating the grasses and drinking the water from the same thing that’s polluted. So it’s a compounded effect. And we’re starting to really wonder, because it’s been a really big bloom of cancer in the Native community, we’re wondering, you know, particularly those people that live fairly close to those waterways, were wondering if that has an effect, because we’re eating the food, we’re swimming in the water. You know, we’re recreating on the water, we’re ice fishing in the dead of winter, we’re, you know, eating the deer and other game that’s around that are utilizing those same waterways. And so there’s been a lot of talk about, like now that they found out how toxic… I mean, it doesn’t appear toxic, but it’s in the sediment, and it’s the compounding of eating multiple things. And I’m sure that’s the problem even in rivers like this. In South County, we have much cleaner rivers than the northern part of the state, but we still have a lot of pollutants in our waters that we’re still consuming. So that’s a problem. And so hopefully all of us can keep helping. Of course, us in kayaks is a good thing. But those of us, you know, doing time with other kinds of recreational vehicles are adding to that. So any thoughts or questions before we hop in our kayaks? Cause we can stand here and talk all night, but we want to get in the kayaks.
Eventgoer:
Let me know if this is just a bad time for this, but what’s the practice that used graphite, the mourning practice?
Lorén:
It was for funerary practices. Well, I mean, and they may have used it in what people in archaeology might call a cave drawing as well. But petroglyphs and things of that nature. Because we have quite a few in Rhode Island. Yeah, around the state. But when he was talking about on the body, it was for ceremonial funerary practices. So even today, people will black their face if someone’s super close to them, to show that they are in mourning. Historically, we didn’t use any kind of mirror; in fact, at first, mirrors and photography were very, like (negative or thought to be capturing your spirit) because you didn’t even speak the name of the dead when when someone passed, and they often didn’t use the name. Today, we sometimes honor people by naming people after someone but it’s usually – not always, but usually – a generation or two later. So now you hear people being named Canonicus and Canonchet and Miantonomi, but now after a couple hundred years have gone by, not to say that there aren’t any, because there are family members that have passed and other people have named them that.
So why don’t we get across the way together, and then we’ll find a spot to have another little chat, and then we’ll go a little farther and have another little chat. As we were leaving that water edge, it looked like there was quite a lot of clay sediment in the soil, and of course our ancestors did a lot of clay making. And you have to temper the clay with shell or other broken pots or sand. Gravel, not sand, gravel. Without the tempering the pot would just fall apart when we tried to fire it.
Lorén
As we think of Pettaquamscutt (Narrow) River, we must think of all the gifts of the land surrounding the river as well as the gifts within. The Narragansett community has given thanks to the Creator for these gifts throughout our history on these lands.
[Note: a guest asked about the use of feathers.]
Yeah, we used feathers in lots of things. A perfect example – something that you can even look up online and see a great picture of – we used to make turkey feather capes; it was actually a coat, if you will, out of turkey feathers.
Eventgoer
Yeah, it actually has insulating properties.
Lorén
Yeah, and water resistant properties as well. But we used all different kinds of feathers. Turkey was probably the most common. But we used feathers for all kinds of things and artists today still do so – red winged blackbirds, ducks, geese, you know. A lot of things are used in sacred ways; eagles and birds of prey, often used in that way. Owls even to this day are still considered an omen. Even though they’re beautiful, if you see one in the daytime, it’s considered an omen of death, because they’re a nocturnal bird and shouldn’t be seen in the daytime. Unfortunately, for myself, and my lifetime, every time I’ve seen an owl in the daytime, we’ve had someone who has passed. And so whether that’s coincidence, or reality, culturally, I can’t say. But for us, that’s often what we believe.
Eventgoer
Kind of a bad rap for an otherwise beautiful bird.
Lorén
You know, they don’t have a bad rap at night, when they’re supposed to be out. But when they’re out in the middle of the daytime randomly, they get a bit of a bad rap.
Eventgoer
What has a bad rap?
Lorén
The owl, because when you see an owl during the day, in our culture it’s considered an omen of death. And unfortunately, it has proved itself true repeatedly. Including just recently my niece saw two owls in the daytime on the same day, and we had two deaths the very next week. And you know, that’s hard to undo that kind of belief (when proven time and again). I mean, you don’t see them very often, so when you do see them and that happens, it feels very, very truthful. It kind of seems like we see them randomly, it’s not like you’re out in the woods. They just fly across the road or (are seen in unlikely places,) in her case they landed on her deck, which was for her very freaky.
Eventgoer
[unclear]
Lorén
So, you have to understand it depends on which Connecticut tribes because most tribes in New England are Algonquin-based, but not all, and some came from other areas and moved into this area. So they may have a different language base. If it’s an Algonquin language base, like Narragansett, Niantic, Wampanoag and Shinnecock – Ojibwe is an Algonquin-based language – they’re very similar. They’re dialectally different, kind of like how Italian, French, Italian, Spanish are Romance Languages. Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are dialectically different but similar, kind of in that same way.
Eventgoer
I think I had heard somewhere that the word Connecticut means “long river.”
Lorén
It is! I think that’s true! I mean, Connecticut, like almost 50% of the states are named after Indigenous words in this country, but they’re different Indigenous communities. Obviously, Mississippi is an Indigenous word, but it’s probably Choctaw or Chickasaw, some tribal nation from that area.
In our language, [neep] is water and [seepuash] is river.
So over in this cove here, obviously people fish in coves like this which is beautiful. But also, it reminds you that you’re close to the land even though you’re on the river and you need to remember that nothing’s in isolation. You’re not thinking about just what’s in the water, but the animals that are adjacent to the water, and the village life that is happening nearby.
In a place like this, if our village was near this (salt water or brackish river), it’s a summer village versus a winter village. You’re doing summer things, not so much hunting (unless seals, and other ocean going mammals), but fishing and gathering. We were cooking and doing our daily tasks for our lives, our work.
Gardening, which includes the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. Melons, gourds, and other crops were also in our gardens. We are gathering wild edibles. There’s so many different kinds of wild edibles. There’s the obvious things like wild onions, and when the seasons are wet there’s mushrooms, there are different plant life, like berries. In wetlands like this, there are cranberries.
There are of course raspberries, blackberries, huckleberries, to name just a couple. And wild grapes as well. But there’s lots of plants here that are also edible and medicinal.
The funny thing is we eat a lot of roots. Even today in our diet, we eat roots. It’s funny when I have a group of kids because I always ask them if they like roots, and they always tell me no. And then we name some roots (like carrots or beets) that they eat and they’re like, “oh, okay,” because you know, they think of Indigenous people and we eat roots and they think it’s very weird.
A lot of plant life has roots, berries, leaves, tubers, nuts and things that you can eat. The cattails have roots and tubers that you can eat. Along the waterways here, undoubtedly. You can see some of the berry trees here. There are also medicinals.
One of the things that I would want to tell you is that a river is a very spiritual place. And that a lot of ceremony happens near water. Even today, we do a lot of ceremony in or near the water. And it’s a type of cleansing, a spiritual cleansing. Sweat lodge ceremony would be held near water.
I would see this river as a place that if your village was nearby, you would do the ceremony somewhere close and then dip in the water. We do a lot of oceangoing ceremonies as well.
Still to this day, we do Wash Day. The powwow that’s August Meeting is the Green Corn Thanksgiving, one of our 13 traditional Thanksgivings and one of our ceremonies – we have many others, but the thanksgivings are 13 in particular that are every lunar month of the year.
But after August Meeting, it was traditional because before Europeans came, it wasn’t an open-to-the-public event that it’s been turned into today. But we still do the ceremony after, which we call today Wash Day. And it’s a spiritual renewal, cleansing and rebirth. And you go in the ocean because the ocean is like a woman with the tides and the moon’s cycles. And so it’s a renewal for everyone.
Water is very sacred. The phrase, “Water is Life” might be a catchphrase today for the environmental movement, but it’s literally true as well for all of us as humanity, we all need water. And so it’s always been considered sacred to us.
So waterways have many uses, they can be a place that you can have fun (swimming, boating, and other recreating). It’s also a place that you can just wash up, if you will – we often gather soapweed that’s around because it actually foams up like soap, and take a dip in and take a wash, if you will. So our community uses these waterways for getting food, for getting resources like clay and tool materials, depending on the area.
Sometimes waterways are a great place for certain kinds of stones, particularly the kind that you might want to use as a weight for fishing, because they’ve been tumbled a bit so they tend to be smoother in ways that are different than those stones that are on land. Also, sometimes they gather the stones that we use in a ceremonial fire as well that we often call the Grandfather’s in a sweat lodge and you’re putting them in, they can come from water spaces as well sometimes….
Sounds so pretty (referring to the sounds of the river). I always try to remind people that there’s, in our lifeways, historically as well as today, use of the, the waterways for trade, for travel – I mean, we’re traveling, if you will – for sustenance and resources, and for ceremony. So it was all so intricately woven together that nothing is separate from one another. It’s all woven together to be part of our life and our life cycle.
Anyone have a question or thought at this moment?
Eventgoer
I think you mentioned the staple crops as three sisters, is there like a personification of those, like Corn Woman?
Lorén
So we have different kinds of stories, and some of them overlap with different communities. But our corn story, if I start telling that will be out here at 11pm, but nonetheless, I will just say the short version.
So for us, you might have seen in Narragansett literature you see the crow represented, because the crow is, in most stories, very respected.
The crow every once in a while gets the bad rap in how he gets his song because he’s a little impatient. But nonetheless, crow literally brought us the corn and the bean. And so when you eat succotash today with corn and beans, corn and bean was not originally here in the same way that it is today in our agricultural ways. And in our stories, we were having a winter which was particularly rough and you know how New England is, you can have some rough winters, and then you can have two or three decent ones, and then you can have a really rough one again. I think we had a really rough one about three years ago.
As our story goes, our people worked hard all year, hunting, fishing, gathering to prepare for the winter. All the fish that we had dried, and all the meats like deer meat and things like that that we had dried into pemmican, and the cranberries that we had dried, and all the mushrooms and things, weren’t sustaining us, because we were having such a tough winter that the hunters weren’t able to go out and get more to replenish as we got into the deepest part of the winter.
So when spring was coming around, we were literally starving. And the community was praying to the Creator and the Creator answered our prayers and said that we had to send our most revered warrior on a journey for the people. And so they prepared, his wife prepared him and got him extra moccasins, and they packed the pouch with some of the pemmican and other dried foods. And they did ceremony and prayer and then sent him on his journey, and he was gone for many, many moons.
And what he did is he had to trek all the way to the southwest. When he got there, which of course is a long, long journey, he was really exhausted, and he gets up on the mesa and he prays to the Creator, and the Creator says he hears his prayers, and he sends the crow to him. And the crow tells him “the Creator has given a gift in your honor for your sacrifice for The People, the Creator is going to give them a gift of corn and beans.” The crow flies back to the east with a corn kernel in one ear and a bean kernel in the other. We even have a dance called the Crow Hop that mimics the movements of the crow.
That gift of that corn and those beans would sustain us literally for all eternity, because you no longer have to rely on just the dried foods and the things that you can hunt. Now the people have a sustainable crop that can be maintained in the wintertime. They have corn caches (a storage technique for keeping corn in the ground), which also had beans and other dried crops that could dry in that same manner. But the corn literally gave us the basis of our diet.
We have so many corn dish dishes that – I always thought it was absolutely hilarious that in the 60s 70s and 80s, the archaeologists were saying they didn’t know if we actually grew corn here because they couldn’t prove that we use corn and archaeology is a science, you know. So therefore, if they can’t prove it, it’s not true. If you’ve seen the show Woven in Time, about the great salt marsh, salt pond, that’s when they finally proved, like 20 years ago now, that we indeed had these huge corn caches that had huge volumes of corn.
During those times of tumultuousness in colonization, those corn caches were left abandoned after the war due to the land dispossession. And you know, they’re buried under the ground, so therefore they become something that they archaeologically can find today.
Part of the reason they didn’t find them earlier is because our villages are under cities. Cities of Providence, Warwick, Woonsocket and Pawtucket and others. So there were less visible spaces for archeological work.
The sites that were in the South County area as we were being pushed southward were being utilized by our community. So we were still eating those caches.
During King Philip’s War in 1675-76, they literally burned the caches as an act of war, to make us impoverished and starve. When early Puritans or pilgrims came, there’s often quotes of “God’s divine providence” that they found these corn caches and they looked at it as it was left behind and nobody cared about it. So therefore, it was there free for the taking.
But really what it was, is in our summer village, you grew the crop, and then you put a large amount of it in the cache, and then you left and you went to your winter village, inland, where it was protected from the winter weather, you’re near the game to hunt and you’re near the inland waterways, like ponds and lakes for ice fishing. They would take what they needed to that inland village for the winter months.
If it was a tough winter, they sent a runner or two to go get some more, but basically, they just went into their inland village.
In the springtime, think of late March, early April, they would head back after doing some of your spring fishing, to their summer village and start setting up. Well guess what? There’s nothing out there but some fiddle heads and a few spring greens. Not a lot of things to harvest.
So they’d go to their corn cache in their summer village. They’d feed their community, but also it’s there ready to plant for the next season. And next to a river like this would be villages.
This is a perfect place because you’ve got lots of resources. And you’re still, especially as you get close to the mouth of the river, you’re catching both types of waterways – probably in the fork would be a village. But there were villages up and down the coastline all the way from like, let’s say, Watch Hill Westerly area all the way over to Narragansett up the whole Narragansett Bay. And even archaeologists and anthropologists say that the historical record says there were about, you know, each village had about 500 people.
And so when you think of all those villages with all those people in, it was lots of people. I mean, there was some different quotes of sort of Verrazano’s time of 100,000 people living along Narragansett Bay. And so when early colonists came here, and brought pox and other kinds of diseases, it started to decimate the populations in southern New England. And then of course, warfare, enslavement and displacement did the damage on the next layers of numbers of people.
But the environment here, the land [Aukee], because the word Narragansett is the Anglicized version of it, but the Narragansett version is [Nahahiganseck] – we didn’t actually have ours formally written in our language, so that’s the European pronunciation – literally means “the people of this place,” and “the place,” all at the same time. So that’s why when you see the names of the places and you see the names of the people, they’re often one and the same, the people of that certain place.
And so in our case, “the people of the small points” is the name Narragansett. And it literally referred to the coastline. When you think of where the salt pond is, and Rhode Island’s very stony and rocky, and it has all these different points, and it literally means that place, but it was really the whole place.
What we think of as Rhode Island today was Narragansett territory, the southwestern corner Niantic, most of the southeastern corner going up the bay into the islands as well as Aquidneck Island and Conimicut Island (Jamestown), [Manissee] which is Block Island, all the way to like Woonsocket, Pawtucket.
On the northwest corner, there was the Nipmuc people and on the northeast corner kind of thinking of Warren, Bristol sort of area today, East Bay, Northern East Bay, were some Wampanoag communities. But most of those people were allies with the Narragansett people.
In history books they like to call it “paying tribute to,” but I personally think it’s a very westernized concept that they superimpose on us. We had relationships, kinship relationships between communities. That’s how we survived here.
We went on rivers like this and met up and had ceremonial gatherings. You know, ceremonies get followed by social gatherings of feasting and fun. We did games of chance, which you might call gambling – moccasin game, hubbub, other kinds of more physical games. But that was a means of exchanging goods. It was a way to move things around the territory and a fun way where people are having some fun and getting together.
That’s how we ended up with copper and brass from Ohioan tribes is through these trade routes. We had relationships with many tribal nations.
You know, we alligator dance – I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen an alligator in Rhode Island, but yet, that’s in the documentation and we’ve done it for hundreds of years. How? People visiting other people on these trade routes, and exchanging during these social times.
And today, in historical records, sometimes it gets to be a lot of ownership for one community for something based on a book that’s written. But often, lots of communities did similar type dances.
One in particular that I think of is the Smoke Dance. If you lived in a longhouse, you did the Smoke Dance, because the smoke dance was meant to help you in a fun way, if the building got too smoky, to get it up and out the smoke hole.
The Narragansett people, there’s historical record that we’ve been doing that dance for hundreds if not thousands of years, but if you hear it today, only Iroquois people Smoke Dance, is the way it’s written in the historical record, in books, you know.
So sometimes in writing things down, it locks it in as someone’s vs a region’s of different kinds of things. There was lots of sharing and lots of relationships. And we really were allied together from, you know, New England over to like Long Island, Montauk area.
The other thing that you have to keep in mind: in the last 400 years, the landscape was far apart to those places, although we still traveled them. But over the thousands of years that we’ve been here, those places were not far and that they used to be land.
… David Robinson and some of the other people from the team from URI did the deep water archaeology out in the sound, I guess it is, and, you know, proved that our villages we’re out there, they’re just underwater today. And so that’s really remarkable to think about.
So any questions? Because if not, we’ll mosey, we’ve kind of sat here a little longer than expected.
Eventgoer
Were the corn caches in the ground?
Lorén
They were in the ground. They were in the ground because that was like refrigeration. In the wintertime the ground is cold, and you would line them with mats – mats of corn husk bull rush, cat tails, whatever, you know, you could weave cordage out of dogbane and milkweed and things like that. And those fibers would be woven into mats and those mats would line those caches. Also cedar was often used in that.
You can make cordage out of cedar and the cedar, just like your cedar closet today, keeps the bugs out. We use cedar in our homes for the same reason to help with that, and in the caches as well.
Eventgoer
[unclear]
Lorén
“Woven in Time” film by Marc Levitt that shares the history from both archeological and Narragansett perspectives regarding the Salt Pond site (also known as Site 110)…
[Note: NRPA featured Woven in Time and Marc Levitt as the presentation at our 2016 Annual Meeting. The trailer can be seen by clicking here.]
Yeah, it’s a really good film. You know, he interviewed a lot of people from our community, including several from Tomaquag Museum for it.
You know, there’s also Stories in Stone that he did that’s on Narragansett stonemasonry. You know, we had a lot of history with stone before stone walls in the modern sense were a thing. But we were using stone tools and stone outcroppings and ceremonial stone walls as well.
Eventgoer
So I live up the hill from here, and we have a stone gate on our property, and archeologists have looked at it and said that it’s a colonial cellar, but that doesn’t seem true to me because it’s so beautifully built into the outcropping and I’ve seen some of the other stone cellars that are really square-cut stones, just a wall with a hole in it, so I really want someone to take a look at it. I [want to speck to] …the tribal archeologist, Doug.
Lorén
Doug Harris is a tribal historic preservation officer.
… I’m not an expert on those things. I mean, I know I can recognize certain things. But I haven’t spent my life studying, you know, archaeological, ceremonial scapes, I’ve seen enough to kind of go “ehh I don’t think so,” or “ooh, maybe,” or “yes this is a cairn,” or “yes, this is a cup and saucer rock,” or “yes, this is in, you know, a ceremonial space” – there are council rocks and things like that and there’s lots of them around. And you have to think that there’s going to be some in every area that there’s kind of, like, villages, there’s going to be one space that’s going to be a space where all those villages can meet up to have, you know, a meeting if you will, and the leadership would get together, they’d send a runner and they would go and meet.
Eventgoer
Your assessment of stone features – is that just based on your visual observations or is it spiritual in some way?
Lorén
It can be both. Sometimes, you do feel something. There’s quite a lot of stone features in Hopkinton. And I do think that there are times that you do feel an emotional or spiritual connection to those spaces, even when you don’t know.
I will tell you the very first time we went to the place that we go cranberry picking very regularly, I mean, it’s a sacred space, when you think about the fact that, you know, the glacial moraine that took place thousands and thousands of years ago created this pond that creates this perfect space for wild cranberries and clay beds, and things like that, and you go in there to harvest those things just as our ancestors did. We know they walked this same space. It’s very, very sacred and spiritual in nature.
You know, Indigenous people, despite the colonial perspective of “heathen,” we happen to be very, very spiritual people, and look at this land and this landscape in a very spiritual way.
We had relationships, kinship relationships between communities. That’s how we survived here.
We went on rivers like this and met up and had ceremonial gatherings. You know, ceremonies get followed by social gatherings of feasting and fun. We did games of chance, which you might call gambling – moccasin game, hubbub, other kinds of more physical games. But that was a means of exchanging goods. It was a way to move things around the territory and a fun way where people are having some fun and getting together.
That’s how we ended up with copper and brass from Ohioan tribes is through these trade routes. We had relationships with many tribal nations.
You know, we alligator dance – I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen an alligator in Rhode Island, but yet, that’s in the documentation and we’ve done it for hundreds of years. How? People visiting other people on these trade routes, and exchanging during these social times.
And today, in historical records, sometimes it gets to be a lot of ownership for one community for something based on a book that’s written. But often, lots of communities did similar type dances.
One in particular that I think of is the Smoke Dance. If you lived in a longhouse, you did the Smoke Dance, because the smoke dance was meant to help you in a fun way, if the building got too smoky, to get it up and out the smoke hole.
The Narragansett people, there’s historical record that we’ve been doing that dance for hundreds if not thousands of years, but if you hear it today, only Iroquois people Smoke Dance, is the way it’s written in the historical record, in books, you know.
So sometimes in writing things down, it locks it in as someone’s vs a region’s of different kinds of things. There was lots of sharing and lots of relationships. And we really were allied together from, you know, New England over to like Long Island, Montauk area.
The other thing that you have to keep in mind: in the last 400 years, the landscape was far apart to those places, although we still traveled them. But over the thousands of years that we’ve been here, those places were not far and that they used to be land.
… David Robinson and some of the other people from the team from URI did the deep water archaeology out in the sound, I guess it is, and, you know, proved that our villages were out there, they’re just underwater today. And so that’s really remarkable to think about.
Passages in (parentheses) are added during editing process. Words in [brackets], were Narragansett words needing to be added during editing process, by Lorén Spears.
Funding for the partnership between NRPA and the Tomaquag Museum was provided by the New England Grassroots Environment Fund.
Support for the kayak tour was provided by Narrow River Kayaks.
Many thanks to Jonah Namzoff for his assistance converting Lorén’s remarks from audio to the written transcript.
The Mission of Tomaquag Museum is to educate the public and promote thoughtful dialogue regarding Indigenous history, culture, arts, and Mother Earth and connect to Native issues of today. More information at tomaquagmuseum.org
