Turn of the Century Theme: Native American Indians

The Connecticut River Valley, containing some of the richest agricultural lands in the northeast has been a vital crossroads for Native peoples for more than ten thousand years. Numerous trails and waterways connected settlements to each other, facilitating trade networks, kinship connections and political alliances. The weather, the seasons and the land itself have always determined how, when and where Native peoples hunted, gathered, planted, harvested, fished, and celebrated.

Sustained contact with Europeans beginning in the 15th century subjected these lifeways to severe stress. Euro-American explorations, wars, and settlement in Indigenous homelands forced Native peoples to respond, resist, and adapt to changing social and economic relations, rapidly shifting political alliances, population losses from disease and warfare, and loss of land and natural resources.

By the early 1800s, Algonquian peoples in New England and Canada, and Iroquoian peoples in New York and Pennsylvania were entering their third century of struggle and adaptation. Many had adopted Euro-American material goods, occupations, and lifestyles as they settled in towns, served in the military, farmed, and marketed handcrafted goods to their White neighbors. Meanwhile, New England was entering the industrial era, and Western European settlement was expanding across the continent. White observers in this period often ignored the persistence and adaptability of Native peoples, and relegated them to the past, as tragic “remnants of a dying race,” or romantic “last of the Indians.” New England politicians started the “Native American” political party, whose agenda was to deport Indigenous peoples, Africans, and the Irish so that America would be preserved for the “Native Americans,” meaning White descendants of the Puritan founders. Missionaries were sent to distant tribes to spread Christianity to the “Heathens.” These assumptions and attitudes obscured the continuous and ongoing presence of indigenous people in the region.

Although the dominant culture often rendered them invisible, innumerable legal documents, family histories, account books and other records reveal their presence. Many Algonquian people continued to move through their homelands, traveling ancient routes that enabled them to maintain kinship relations and respond to occupational and resource opportunities. Others settled permanently in small reserves or enclaves or worked, lived, and intermarried with Euro-Americans and African Americans. During the 1700s, the Connecticut River Valley and the Berkshires had been considered the “frontier.” In the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, Euro-Americans and goods moving westward, and wars of expansion took a terrible toll on Western Indigenous nations and economies. This was an era of deep prejudice against Native Americans and other people of color. White Americans exerted tremendous pressure on Native peoples to conform to western culture, as western tribes were forced onto reservations, and Native children were forcibly taken from their families to attend boarding schools to be indoctrinated.

As Indigenous lifeways seemed to wane, Euro-Ameicans sought romantic and exotic ways to interact with what they erroneously perceived to be dying cultures. Tourism became a thriving industry as many Indigenous people successfully marketed their ethnicity to an eager White audience. Some Northeastern Native Americans worked as New York models and Hollywood performers; others dressed in western Plains clothing to attract customers to purchase their basketry and beadwork; and still others created fraternal pan-Indigenous organizations. The Algonquians who founded “The Indian Council of New England” in the 1920s, initiated the inter-tribal Pow Wow that is so popular today. This limited, often stereotyped interaction did little to communicate the richness and autonomy of Native cultures to White consumers. Meanwhile, Native Americans in New England continued “hiding in plain sight” by practicing the strategies of integration and anonymity they had developed over the previous century, persisting in their original homelands despite historical reports of their disappearance.