Wampanoag Erotic

The Wampanoag are the people whose country became Plymouth Colony, and they are still on it. The name means something close to people of the dawn, and the geography agrees: their homeland is the eastern edge of the continent, southeastern Massachusetts from the Narragansett Bay shore across Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Most Wampanoag today belong to the two federally recognized tribes, Mashpee on the Cape and Aquinnah at the western tip of the Vineyard, or to smaller bands such as Herring Pond, Pocasset and Assonet that sit close to the old village sites. They are shellfishermen, teachers, lawyers and tribal officials working the same estuaries their ancestors farmed and fished.

Their language, Wôpanâak, is Eastern Algonquian, a close cousin of Narragansett and Pequot and a distant relative of Ojibwe and Cree. It has an unusual paper trail. In 1663 the missionary John Eliot and his Native translators printed the first Bible produced in the Americas in it, and for generations literate Wampanoag wrote deeds, petitions and letters in their own tongue. Daily speech went silent in the nineteenth century. In 1993 a Mashpee woman, Jessie Little Doe Baird, began rebuilding the grammar from those documents, and the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project has since raised children as first-language speakers, the first time a Native American language has been brought back with no living speakers to learn from.

The history everyone half-knows is sharper up close. An epidemic emptied whole coastal villages between 1616 and 1619, before the Mayflower arrived, which is why the sachem Ousamequin, called Massasoit, chose alliance with the newcomers in 1621. His son Metacom, King Philip to the English, led the war of 1675 and 1676 that killed a larger share of the population, English and Native, than any later American war. He died at Mount Hope in what is now Bristol, Rhode Island, and many survivors were sold into slavery in the Caribbean. The Vineyard communities, converted early and shielded by water, largely sat the war out, one reason Aquinnah endured. Later generations shipped out on Nantucket and New Bedford whalers and married into African American and Cape Verdean families, a heritage many Wampanoag families carry today.

Christianity arrived with the praying towns and never fully displaced older practice. Mashpee's Old Indian Meeting House has stood since 1684, and the tribe's powwow has run each summer for more than a century. On Aquinnah, children get Cranberry Day off school each October to pick the wild bogs with their families. And since 1970, Wampanoag and other New England Natives have gathered on Cole's Hill in Plymouth each Thanksgiving for a National Day of Mourning.