of the sick and “Spectators.” In the case of a man who took on the name of George after his cure, his kin “being met, and dancing round a great Fire” determined that a powwow had caused the illness and so must cure it. The second instance involved a woman whose relations called for renowed powwows from Martha’s Vineyard after the local ones were unable to cure her. Mayhew reported, “The Powwow’s, goe to dancing; who with the Spectators, used certain Ceremonies usual in such cases.” The powwows were able to extract and catch “the Spirit (as they said) which entered the Woman” in a deerskin. The individual abilities of powwows to have “immediate converse with the gods” were essential to the success of the cure, but the ritual could not function without group participation.40
“Setting themselves out with white and blew Beads of their own making”
Although no written record or archaeological deposit indicates Awashunkes’s clothing or anything specific about her appearance during the 1675 ritual with which this chapter opened, it is probable that she prepared herself for the important occasion in a similar way as did Weetamoo, a female leader of a nearby people, the Pocasset Wampanoags, several months later. Weetamoo placed belts and strings of wampum, as well as necklaces and pendants that probably included metal, stone, and glass or crystal in addition to shell, around her waist, neck, and arms and put “all sorts of Jewels in her ears.” Male leaders such as Weetamoo’s husband Quinnapin also wore “Girdles of Wampum,” often on the head and shoulders, and dressed in clothing with glass, shell, and metal embellishments that would shake and jingle as the wearer moved (figure 2.2). Just as Weetamoe had made the belts that covered her “from the Loins upward,” much of Awashunkes’s adornment was probably of her own manufacture.41 John Josselyn found this practice of “setting themselves out with white and blew Beads of their own making” to be evidence that “they are very proud,” but there was much more at stake than pride in personal appearance.42
Figure 2.3. Seventeenth-century potsherds excavated from several Native sites across New England incorporate representations of female genitalia and reference to women’s reproductive roles of caring for young children. The castellation shaped to resemble a woman’s head and shoulders includes, on the inside edge, a baby on her back. These sherds are of Mohegan manufacture from Fort Shantok, Connecticut. (Adapted from Nassaney, “Native American Gender and Material Culture”; Williams, “Fort Shantok and Fort Corchaug”; and Handsman, “Algonquian Women Resist Colonialism.” Drawing by Reiko Kopelson.)
Figure 2.4. Zoomorphic effigy pestle in the form of a bear, a powerful clan symbol, uncovered in the Burr’s Hill burial ground, Rhode Island. (Drawing after Susan Gibson, ed. Burr’s Hill: A Seventeenth-Century Wampanoag Burial Ground. Bristol, Rhode Island, The Haffenreffer Museum, 1980. Drawing by Reiko Kopelson.)
The patterns of the adornment would have been neither random nor merely attractive, but a means to display and attract further spiritual power.43 The wampum beads made from the purple and white shells of quahogs and whelks, respectively, had more than monetary value among northeastern Native peoples. Although Natives in southern New England did not use the beads as extensively to record diplomatic meetings and agreements as did their Haudenosaunee and Abenaki neighbors, they still regarded wampum as a substance of concentrated manitou with great symbolic and spiritual weight.44 Native women and old men gathered the shellfish from which the different colors of wampum were made, while the gendered nature of finished bead production seems to have shifted over time. As iron implements enabled expanded production of wampum and Haudenosaunee and other inland groups increased their demand over the first half of the seventeenth century, making the finished beads seems to have become something women joined men in doing. The RI-1000 burial ground in Wickford, Rhode Island, contained the implements necessary for bead production and unfinished bead blanks in adult men’s and women’s graves, whereas at the earlier West Ferry site, dating from the first half of the seventeenth century, only men’s graves contained those items.45 In the early seventeenth century and before, women had already participated in wampum production by creating necklaces and belts of the beads. The addition of carving the beads broadened that participation and added another mode for women’s access to the spiritual power held in such objects and in their exchange. Wampum belts were diplomatic relationships made tangible and recorded; their patterning was a kind of “spatialized writing” that reflected a microcosm of Native space, a material representation of generosity and exchange. Women’s role in the creation of this physical form of the relationships that defined a community and connections among communities meant that women were intimately involved in the regeneration and recording of the communal body.46
Crystal and naturally occurring copper, as well as the cognate forms of European manufacture, glass and smelted copper or brass, were also objects whose light-reflecting properties indicated a high level of manitou.47 Moreover, the sounds these substances made as they clinked against each other served a purpose in warding off other-than-human persons who might cause disease or other negative events. The significance of the sounds these objects made is suggested by the Wampanoag and Narragansett practice that restricted the interment of bells to the graves of young children. Old enough to be named and recognized by the community but young enough to need special assistance on the path to the afterworld, bells would have jingled more clearly than other items.48 Awashunkes and other dancers would have felt the weight of those spiritually charged objects and heard them clink as they moved their bodies. The wampum, metal, and glass would have helped her gather herself to travel outside her body, catapulted by their potency and directed by the pounding of her legs and the singing tones from her mouth. Then, in that other-place, she might have learned of the intentions of the other-than-human persons who formed an essential part of the Saconet community, accessing and marshalling their power to assist her in the decision she faced. Her fellow dancers and others who looked to Awashunkes for leadership in such uncertain times may have looked forward to the feasting from heaped baskets of food that would follow the dancing, and seeing in all the activities the connection among animate beings as well as the opportunity to fill their stomachs.
Although not part of the moment relayed in Benjamin Church’s account of Awashunkes’s dance, the feasting that would have followed was an integral part of the ritual’s efficacy. Women’s work was centrally on display in that part of the performance as well. Some of the containers holding the food may have been similar to the ones recovered at several sites throughout southern New England. Castellations that referenced women’s genitalia, depicted a woman’s head and shoulders with a baby on her back shown on the inside of the pot, or represented maize emphasized women’s roles in cultural and social fertility (figure 2.3).49 The motifs linked women’s bodies and their reproductive work to the evidence of their productive work since the contents of those pots and other containers at Awashunkes’s dance were also largely the result of women’s work. Although June was almost definitely too early for the green corn to have ripened, any corn a community still had in storage would have been brought forth for such a ritual.
Corn had particular spiritual power for Algonquian women in southern New England in similar ways that cassava did for Taínoan and other indigenous women of the Caribbean. Planting, weeding, hilling, harvesting, drying, grinding, and storing corn was labor that they knew was also religious work because their elders had taught them about corn’s spiritual importance.50 Corn and beans were specific gifts from the southwest and creator deity Cautantowwit, granting them a greater spiritual significance than the wild plants that Native women gathered. Patricia Rubertone has argued that women had a higher place in the hierarchy of Narragansett society than Roger Williams knew or acknowledged. According to her analysis of grave goods and oral traditions, women held substantial spiritual power through their connection to and responsibility for corn. The grain was continued proof that Cautantowwit had not abandoned them and so provided spiritual as well as bodily sustenance. The various forms of physical labor involved