Wangunk Erotic

The Wangunk are named for a turn in the water. The name is usually read as at the bend, and the bend is real. It is the place where the Connecticut River runs south through the middle of Connecticut and then swings southeast past what is now Middletown. Wangunk villages sat on both banks of that stretch, from Pyquag at present-day Wethersfield south to Mattabesett at Middletown and across to the Portland floodplain still called Wangunk Meadows. They were river people in a practical sense. They planted corn, beans and squash in the bottomland soil, fished the spring runs and moved between planting grounds and hunting country as the seasons turned.

Their language belonged to the Southern New England branch of Eastern Algonquian, part of a chain of dialects that ran from Long Island Sound to Massachusetts Bay. Very little of it was written down, and no one has spoken it for generations. Older histories place the Wangunk in a so-called Mattabesic confederacy of Connecticut peoples. Many scholars now treat that label with caution, because in practice authority ran through local sachems and family ties.

The key figure of early contact is Sowheag, the sachem at Pyquag. In the mid-1630s he let English settlers from Massachusetts onto his land, on the understanding that he could stay nearby. Instead they drove him off. The colonists later blamed him for encouraging the Pequot raid on Wethersfield in April 1637. That raid killed nine settlers and helped push Connecticut into the Pequot War. Sowheag moved his seat to Mattabesett. When English settlement reached there too, around 1650, the Wangunk were left with reserved tracts on both sides of the river. Over the next century those tracts shrank through sales, debt and steady pressure.

Downriver, at Machimoodus in present-day East Haddam, earthquake rumblings called the Moodus Noises were understood as the work of a powerful spirit, and colonial writers recorded that belief. By the late 1700s the reserved land was nearly gone. Some Wangunk families joined the Tunxis at Farmington or the Mohegan. Some joined the Brothertown movement, which took Christian Algonquians from southern New England to New York and later to Wisconsin. Others stayed. The Wangunk have neither federal nor state recognition, but descendant families still live around Middletown. They are active in local history work and talk regularly with local institutions on former Wangunk land, including Wesleyan University.