For the Lesson titled “Queen Anne’s War And Its Impact On Deerfield”
My Name is Nuthatch
In my people’s language, I am known as Cigôlôdawasis, (SEEgolodawasees) “little upside down bird.” These birds are strong climbers who always know where to find food. The English call me “Nuthatch”. They mockingly say I remind them of the little birds in their home country that flit around, searching for scraps.
My people have lived in this place we call “Pocumtuck” for as long as anyone can remember. But now, the English seem to have moved in everywhere, and nothing we used to know is the same any more. Our people have long shared this beautiful valley, with our neighbors and relatives at Agawam, Nonotuck, Sokoki, and Woronoco. The elders tell me we were a powerful and respected people when the English first arrived. We traveled freely and camped all along the banks of the Qinneticook, (the English call it the “Connecticut River”), and our rich fields yielded plenty of corn, beans and squash for us to eat. When I was a child, some of the Awanigiak, (awaNEEgeeak) the white strangers living in their settlements to the south, were starving. They came north to buy corn for their people. My mother and the other Pocumtuck women agreed, and loaded 50 canoes with 10 bushels each of corn, 500 bushels in all from our storage pits, and paddled downriver to deliver it to the whites. We had plenty to share; the land provided enough for all.
For a while, trade with the strangers was good. The English at Agawam bought our furs—especially beaver—and supplied our people with cloth, copper pots, glass beads, and metal tools. The Dutch traders at Fort Orange sold us guns and ammunition. In earlier generations, we were allies of the Mohawk people to the west, and we carried their furs to the Montauk people on the coast to trade for wampum. But as more beaver were taken for trading, the animals became scarce, and tribes began to fight among themselves. Our people formed an alliance, an agreement, with the Niantic to attack the Mohegan in Connecticut, who were helping the English to build more settlements. Our neighbors the Sokoki went to war against the Mohawk, and some of our people joined them. Some of those Sokoki people came to us after their fort was destroyed, and we tried to make peace with them and the Mohawk. But it grew harder and harder to live at peace anymore.
The English settlers brought more than trade goods to our land. They and their animals brought diseases we had never had before. The spotted disease they called measles and the pox did not kill them, but in some places whole villages were struck and many people died—the deaths were worst to the south and east of us. It is hard to go on when the old people, the source of wisdom, and the little ones, the future, are gone.
And even though there were more wars and fewer beaver, more and more English came to our lands. Some of our neighbors, who had traded with the English in Springfield, could no longer find enough beaver to pay their debts there. The English urged them to draw up papers listing the names of the lands they lived on. They told our elders that those papers were promises to settle those debts. When people signed those papers, they agreed to let the English build their homes close to our central villages. We expected to be able to go on growing corn, hunting and fishing, and living as we always had. But the English built more fences and buildings and roads. Their fences seemed designed to prevent us from traveling freely, while their animals were set loose to ravage our corn fields and eat up all of the nut harvest. We were being pushed away. English men from a place called Dedham, from Nipmuc territory in the east, came and wanted to live here in our valley, saying the English king gave them this land. They never asked us if we were willing to share these places.
The English began forcing their laws on our relatives who went among them at their settlements in the south. Several of our men were made to pay the English 40 shillings each for traveling on the Sabbath. Someone else was fined for firing a gun on the Sabbath. What is this Sabbath? Their god has nothing to do with us, so why should we have to obey his laws? I heard that our suncksqua Mashalisk’s son Wattawaluncksin (wattawaLUNCKsin) was made to pay money to the English for getting drunk. The English themselves have laws against selling liquor to our people, and we had no need of it before they came to our land.
After the English pushed us out of Pocumtuck, a sachem named Metacom started a war to push the English back to the sea. He called the tribes together, but the Mohawk and Mohican refused to help us. We joined with the Sokoki in accepting refugees from Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuc communities whose homes were being burned by the English. Right north of here one spring night, a group of those women and children and old men were attacked by English soldiers at the old fishing place at Peskeompskut and the river and falls ran red with their blood. After that, many of us left our home places and went to join our allies and relations to the north and west, waiting for the fighting to die down. One of the white governors, a man named Andros, offered refuge to many of our people at Schagticoke, near the Hudson river, but only if we agreed to live under the protection of our former enemies, the Mohawk. My family chose to go further north. The Abenaki people, who had allied with a different group of Awanigiak, (awaNEEgeeak) the French, welcomed us to a place they called Odanak, in what the French people called “New France”.
Perhaps you know our people’s tradition of Amiskw, the giant beaver. Long ago this creature built a dam in the Quinneticook and flooded our whole valley. There was not enough room for the people to live. The Pocumtuck people asked Obbamakw, one of the earthshapers, to move this beaver so people could live there without flooding. When the beaver refused to move, they fought, and Obbamakw killed it with an oak tree, and broke his dam. His body still lies there along the river today, as a great hill we call Pemawatchuwatunck. (pemaWATCHuwatunck) When the French ask us who we are and where we came from, we tell them we are the Amiskwôlowôkoiak (aMISkwoloWOkiak) – “the people of the beaver-tail hill.” I wish there were some way to call on Obbamakw again to drive the English out of the valley.
Now my family lives at Odanak with other Native people. The French are from across the ocean too, like the English, but they are not trying to push us away. They trade with us, some have even adopted some of our clothing and ways, and some live with us. The Black Robes among them want us to accept their gods and pray alongside them. Perhaps I will do this—would you? But many of us hope someday to return to our homelands along the Quinneticook. The French say they are willing to help us drive the English out of Pocumtuck, but do not know if fighting will make things right again, when so many die every time the Awanigiak (awaNEEgeeak ) go to war. I wonder if there is another way.