Podunk Erotic

The Podunk were an Algonquian-speaking people who lived on the east bank of the Connecticut River, in what is now East Hartford, South Windsor and East Windsor, Connecticut, until the late 1600s, when epidemic, land loss and war broke them up as a nation and their survivors folded into neighboring Native communities. They were a small river people, and their year moved with the water. Summers were spent on the floodplain meadows, planting corn, beans and squash and fishing the spring runs of shad and salmon. Winters took them into the wooded uplands to hunt. They called their country Nowashe, the land between the rivers. Podunk was a place word for boggy ground, roughly "where you sink in the mire," which the English attached to the people living there. Three bands made up the nation: the Namferoke near present Warehouse Point, the Hockanum along the river that still carries their name, and the Scanticook on the Scantic. Their language belonged to the Eastern Algonquian family, usually grouped with Quiripi, and sat close to the speech of neighboring river peoples such as the Wangunk and Tunxis. Almost none of it was written down beyond place names.

The name that outlived them

Their place in colonial history turns on an invitation. In 1631 a Podunk sachem, Wahginnacut, traveled to Boston and Plymouth to ask the English to settle the valley, hoping for a counterweight to the Pequot, who were pressing the river peoples for tribute. The governors declined. Settlers came anyway within a few years, as did a smallpox epidemic in 1633 and 1634 that emptied villages along the river. By the 1650s the Podunk were hemmed in between the Hartford and Windsor colonists and Uncas's Mohegans. When the missionary John Eliot preached to them in 1657 and asked whether they would accept Christianity, the colonial record has their leaders refusing flatly: the English had taken their land and now meant to make servants of them. In 1675 many Podunk men joined Metacom's rising, King Philip's War, and few came back. Over the following decades the remaining families joined other Native communities, by some accounts including the Tunxis and the Schaghticoke, and whatever Podunk descent survives is carried there. What remains in the valley is mostly on the map: the Podunk, Hockanum and Scantic rivers. The name took a stranger path. By the 1840s American newspapers were using "Podunk" as shorthand for any small, backward town in the middle of nowhere, and the joke stuck. Few who use it know it once named a particular place with particular people in it, a place that was, for them, the center of everything.