Gookin noted harvest feasts in which “all their neighbours, kindred, and friends, meet together.” At those times, “much impiety is committed,” not least because “They use great vehemency in the motion of their bodies, in their dances.”15 The assembling of large groups of people enabled humans to connect more easily with each other and with other animate beings.
Throughout the Northeast, particularly significant dreams could prompt an individual to call for a communal ritual. Williams recounted one man’s “vision or dream of the sun . . . darting a beam into his breast; which he conceived to be the messenger of his death.” The man gathered his “friends and neighbours” in a nickómmo that went on for “ten days and nights.” While his friends and neighbors feasted on “some little refreshing” the man had prepared, he “was kept waking and fasting, in great humiliations and invocations.” Invoked in response to the intimacy of a dream, the event strengthened a community through the sharing of food and ritual.16
Other occasions for ritual dancing and feasting, which could include the destruction of goods, happened around illness. When a powwow cured a sick person’s illness, the happy patient or friends and relatives gave “corn and other gifts” to the powwow at a specific time which became the occasion for a nickómmo. Ritual destruction might also take place to ward away sickness, as Wampanoags told Edward Winslow that Narragansetts had done successfully to avoid the smallpox epidemic that hit the area from 1616 to 1620. At such events, community members contributed “almost all the riches they have to their gods, as kettles, skinnes, hatchets, beads, knives, &c. all which are cast by the Priests into a great fire that they make in the midst of the house, and there consumed to ashes.”17 The more an individual could contribute, the higher a status he or she could attain as a result of the manitou accrued through such destruction.
The performances of ritual feasting and dancing facilitated the connections that linked seasonally dispersed bands into more broadly constructed groups. Roger Williams disparaged this traveling, which to him seemed to be merely a search for dispensations of food and goods: “By this Feasting and Gifts, the Divell drives on their worships pleasantly . . . so that they run farre and neere and aske Awaun. Nikommit? | Who makes a Feast? Nkekinneawaûmen. | I goe to the Feast. Kekineawaúi. | He is gone to the Feast.”18 This perception of disorganization carried through into scholarship by nineteenth-century historians and early archaeologists about apparently marginal areas of southern New England such as the middle Connecticut River Valley. Paying attention to the layered significance and consequences of seasonal intertribal feasting that drew a wide population together recasts such apparent disorganization as social and political flexibility that allowed small concentrations of extended families with multiple leaders to respond to seasonal shifts in available resources, as well as to political crises. In the spring, different tribes “from severall places” gathered at key fishing sites such as the natural falls a few miles north of Deerfield at Peskeompskut, where, in addition to fishing, “they exercise themselves in gaminge, and playing of juglinge trickes, and all manner of Revelles, which they are delighted in.”19
Archaeological research and oral traditions corroborate the accuracy for Pocumtuck country of Thomas Morton’s description of more coastal groups. Near the dam at Peskeompskut, the soil contains high levels of calcium from fish bones discarded along with artifacts with multiple origins. These intertribal gatherings at Peskeompskut were one example of how peoples shared important resources that lay within a particular village’s territory, enacting one aspect of the common pot.20 When they were not fishing or processing the catch of shad and salmon, Natives performed other aspects of the seasonal rituals. In addition to the feasts and dances, sacred games of chance such as hubbub and puim were important activities for men in which the more successful players were able to invoke the help of other-than-human persons. Participation not only enabled men to display their spiritual accomplishments, but it also reinforced the gamers’ sense of connection to each other and to a particular space in the landscape. Later retellings of particularly spectacular wins and losses enhanced and extended such events far beyond the cast of stones or shuffling of reeds.21
The emphasis on networks of relations can also be seen in word construction that made meaning dependent on the specific context. For instance, southern Algonquian languages contained classes of nouns that did not make sense without a reference to what Kathleen Bragdon terms “intimate ownership.” In Massachusett, the term for “the house,” wétu, was not generally used without saying whose house it was. Neek was “my house”; keek was “your house”; and week was “his or her house.” In addition to living space, kin terms and body parts were in the same class of nouns. More than minor linguistic detail, these words conveyed a concept of things and beings as inextricably linked and they influenced individuals at the very level of thought, shaping not only what people saw as “normal” or “natural,” but also what it was possible to think.22 Roger Williams recorded a similar list for Narragansett: Wetu was “An House,” while Nékick was “My house,” and Kékick and Wekick were “Your house” and “At his house” respectively.23 People were linked by kin relationships as surely as body parts belonged to a body.
“They make their neighbours partakers with them”
Early English observers of Natives in southern New England noted a strong obligation to share resources among all members but sometimes missed the required reciprocity that was the other side of the exchange. William Wood described the manner in which the Massachusetts and others “all meete friends at the kettle,” a practice that held true “the lesse abundance they have.” Whether the available food was an entire deer or “but a piece of bread,” an individual would distribute it “equally betweene himselfe and his comerades and eates it lovingly.” Thomas Morton noted a similar practice among the Massachusetts that he linked to classical precedents: “A bisket cake given to one; that one breakes it equally into so many parts, as there be persons in his company, and distributes it.” He commented approvingly, “Platoes Commonwealth is so much practiced by these people.” About the Narragansetts, Roger Williams wrote: “Whomsoever commeth in when they are eating, they offer them to eat of that which they have, though but little enough prepared for themselves. If any provision of fish or flesh come in, they make their neighbours partakers with them.”24 For readers familiar with the Christian Bible, Roger Williams’s words would have recalled a passage in 1 Corinthians, “for we are all partakers of that one bread,” about the unity of Christians in one body through participation in a ritual meal.25 A tone of amazement that Algonquians shared so readily with each other and with strangers—even when they did not begin with an abundance—pervades all of these descriptions. Wood, Morton, and Williams each aimed their words at English readers who, they assumed, would share similar surprise that no one went without even if it meant that the elite also suffered privation. The English concept of the common kettle, explored in more detail in the next chapter, did not go quite so far in its demands on those who controlled resources. Focused on the acts of giving that they saw, the English did not articulate or always understand the power inherent in creating an unrequited obligation by being able to give away more than one received.26
Partaking with one’s neighbors did not imply equality among all members of a corporate body, nor was participation optional. The redistribution rituals at which people feasted reinforced social inequality and the concentration of twined spiritual and temporal power in the bodies of the elites. When a nickómmo was held at the ripening of the green corn or at other harvests, then the distribution of goods underscored that the food was to feed all and that the leaders were the ones with the right and responsibility to distribute it. The “poore” or common people “must particularly beg and say, Cowequetúmmous, that is, I beseech you.” Common people did not have the option to refuse the gifts, and once they accepted them, they owed allegiance to the giver. The sachem “danceth in the sight of all the rest and is prepared with money, coats, small breeches, knifes, or what hee is able to reach to, and gives these things away.”27 This ritual asking and giving reinforced the bonds among members—human and other-than-human—of the community even as it highlighted unequal control over communal resources.
These