Niantic Erotic

The Niantic were an Algonquian-speaking people of the southern New England coast. When Europeans arrived in the early 1600s, they held shoreline country in what is now eastern Connecticut and southwestern Rhode Island. Their descendants live on mainly within today's Narragansett Indian Tribe, with smaller lines running into the Mohegan and the Brothertown Indians. The Niantic name covered two separate communities. The Western Niantic lived between the lower Connecticut River and the Niantic River, and the Eastern Niantic lived along the Rhode Island shore beside the Narragansett. The usual account holds that the two had once been a single people, and that Pequot power on the coast split them apart. The name is commonly read as referring to a point of land on a tidal river, which suits a people who lived facing salt water.

Their speech belonged to the Southern New England Algonquian group and was closely tied to Narragansett and Mohegan-Pequot, but it was barely written down on its own. Life followed the coastal round of the region: maize, beans and squash in cleared fields, fish and shellfish from the estuaries, and hunting in the woods behind the shore. Religious life turned on manitou, the power present in people, animals and places, and on powwaws, the healers and ritual specialists who worked with it.

The seventeenth century pulled the two branches further apart. The Western Niantic had long lived under Pequot dominance. They were caught up in the Pequot War of 1636 to 1638, then came under Uncas and the Mohegan, and kept a small reserved tract at Lyme into the eighteenth century. Some of their descendants later joined the Christian Indian migration that founded Brothertown in Oneida country. The Eastern Niantic followed Ninigret, a shrewd and stubborn sachem the colonies never fully trusted. He received a share of Pequot captives under the 1638 Treaty of Hartford, fought the Montaukett of Long Island in the 1650s, and kept his people out of King Philip's War. That war shattered the Narragansett. Their survivors gathered with the Niantic under the leadership of Ninigret's family, and the merged community carried the Narragansett name forward.

That merger is why the Niantic are easy to overlook. Their legacy lives on in Charlestown, Rhode Island, where the Narragansett Indian Tribe keeps its land base, and on the map at Niantic, Connecticut, and Ninigret Pond. They are remembered less as a lost nation than as a people who merged into their neighbors and endured.