<\/p>\n
The recent controversy over Indian claims to Maine lands has led to renewed interest in the historical background of American Indians, especially those of what is now the Eastern United States, where the first to confront them were the English, French, Spanish and Dutch settlers who came to America in the early 17th century.<\/p>\n
Our Maine Indians were various tribes of the great Algonquin family that extended from Tennessee and Virginia on the south to Hudson Bay on the north, and all the way inland from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. It was a vast territory, mostly forested, watered by streams and lakes over which the Indians travelled in their birchbark canoes. No other people in any land have been known to use such a boat, so light it could be carried on a man’s shoulders from one stream to another.<\/p>\n
The first northeastern Indians to be contacted by white men were the Wampanoags of Cape Cod, whose Chief Massasoit was very friendly, but whose successor, called by the English King Philip, started the bloody series of Indian Wars in 1676.
\nOther New England tribes were the Massachusetts, the Pequots and the Narragansetts. Nearby were the Mohicans, made familiar to later generations by the novels of J. Fennimore Cooper.<\/p>\n
Most Indians in the area now encompassed in the State of Maine belonged to a large branch of the Algonquin family called the Abenaki, which itself was divided into several tribes and numerous subtribes, so that, as time went by, what came by the English to be called a tribe was actually only perhaps one small group of a larger unit, as for instance were the Norridgewocks who were mostly inhabitants of a single Indian village at Old Point in Norridgewock, whereas they were actually part of a larger group known as Canibas or Kennebecks, who had other villages along the Kennebec River and its subsidiary streams, with their largest village on Swan Island in the Kennebec near the present village of Richmond.<\/p>\n
By the time the white men encountered those Kennebec Indians, they were no longer nomads but agriculturists raising corn and pumpkins in fields they cultivated near their settled villages. But they were only partly dependent upon agriculture. They were still hunters and fishermen, the men going on long expeditions to get meat and furs. and assembled not only at river falls, but along the coast for a season’s fishing. That over the centuries many Indians assembled for such fishing at certain places is shown by the famous oyster shell heaps at Damariscotta. The very depth of those deposits of millions of shells proves that Indians had summer campsites there for at least 2,000 years.<\/p>\n
It was at the Indian village at Old Point above the village of Norridgewock that the Missionary Father Rasle was killed in an English raid in 1724, the result of which was the dispersal of the tribe, mostly to Canada.<\/p>\n
Though not far apart by modern measures of distance, those early Maine Indian groups had little contact with each other. What drew them together was the danger of raids by other tribes, especially the Mohawk warriors of the great Iroquois alliance known as the Five Nations, centering near the Great Lakes. The Mohawks were indeed enemies of our Kennebec Indians and it had been repeated Mohawk raids combined with an epidemic of small pox that had decimated Indian numbers on the Kennebec just before their first contact with white men.<\/p>\n
The reason the Indians lived in small groups, even after they began to stay in one place long enough to raise a crop of corn, is because the primitive condition of their living made it difficult to sustain life for more than a hundred persons in a single community. It was very hard to kill enough game for an adequate food supply.<\/p>\n
Our historic colonial legends picture huge bands of wildly shouting Indians attacking the villages of white settlers. The story of Braddock’s defeat during the French and Indian War depicts throngs of savages lining the trail to Fort Duquesne. which is the modern city of Pittsburg. The truth is that the Indians were always few in number. In Maine they probably never averaged more than one Indian for every three square miles of land. In the entire vast area now encompassed by the whole United States, their numbers never exceeded a million, and were much less by the time the white men came.<\/p>\n
Disease and warfare among the tribes had prevented any substantial increase in population when only Indians inhabited the continent. The Indians whom the Pilgrims encountered, though living not far from the ocean, were not dependent on the sea for livelihood. They did catch fish but more often at falls on the inland streams, or in the fresh water ponds. The ocean waves were too hazardous for the frail birchbark canoes.<\/p>\n
Those Cape Cod Indians did get game from the forest, but their major dependence was upon their cornfields. By 1600, those Indians as well as our Abenakis on the Kennebec, were made up of small groups in fixed settlements where they cultivated corn. That was certainly the situation by 1600, and had probably been true for several centuries earlier.<\/p>\n
Why did the Indians raise corn rather than some other grain? It was originally a wild plant first cultivated in Mexico as early as 3000 years before Christ. That is determined by what is called radiation dating, the scientific method of determining the age of long fossilized organic matter.<\/p>\n
The Indians themselves had many legends to explain the origin of various things. A rather touching one was told about corn. There was once an Indian who lived alone, far from others. He knew nothing of fire, and he lived on roots, barks and nuts. One morning when he awoke, he saw standing near his crude hut, a girl, not with dark straight hair of the red folk, but with long, golden, curly tresses. She led him to a field of dry grass, and showed him how to rub two sticks together until the the grass caught fire and the whole ground was burned over. Then the girl said: “When the sun sets, take me by the hair and spread me over the burned ground. If you do that,” she said, “you will see a new grass spring up, and my hair will come from between the leaves and the seeds will feed you.” He did as she said,and ever after the Indians know when they see the silky hair in the stalks that the food seeds are coming again.<\/p>\n
It was not the Indian men but the women who cared for the corn, planting it, hoeing it and harvesting it then pounding it\u00b7 into meal. This is so true of other peoples besides American Indians that it may well be a fact, anthropologically, that women started agriculture. Perhaps it was a woman who invented the hoe. One object of great importance to the developing civilization was unknown to our Maine Indians until after the white man came. That was the wheel. Vehicular locomotion, leverage by pulling and many other uses of the wheel were unknown to American natives.<\/p>\n
Indians, however, did advance in culture. One reason why we know so little about their development is that they lacked another invention even more important than the wheel. They never developed the art of writing. Thus except for the handing down of badly garbled oral traditions, all we know about American Indians is what the white men wrote about them. In recent years, allover the nation from Maine to Oregon, the tribal people on Indian reservations have, under direction of their own educated leaders, done much to preserve and even resurrect old tribal customs, attempting to revive
\na very real culture that preceded the white man’s on this continent. That ancient culture should not be entirely lost.<\/p>\n
What we have been able to learn tells the story of a primitive, nomadic people learning slowly to tame the wild plains whose seeds they had already learned to eat and to grind by mortar and pestle into meal. Gradually by use of fertilizers, one form of which was dropping a fish into each hill of corn – they improved the size and quality of certain plants, as well as
\nthe methods of gardening, being able to get deeper and deeper into the topsoil.<\/p>\n
In addition to agriculture they developed pottery, as did other peoples allover the world.<\/p>\n
Maine history from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 18th is almost an uninterrupted story of Indian wars. The Pilgrims, though at first meeting peaceful savages, were scarcely settled at Plymouth before they began shooting at Indians. What we called our Indian wars began when, after a few Indians had robbed some white settlers and had committed some annoying but non-violent offenses, the whites retaliated with what the Indians did not have – firearms. Miles Standish, gathering a band of settlers with muskets, attacked an Indian village and killed most of the inhabitants – men, women and children. Then the early peaceful relations become marred on both sides. The truth is the Indians were less prone to kill than were the whites, but when they did resort to killing, those Indians were ruthless enemies.<\/p>\n
Relations between white settlers and the tribes would probably have been much more peaceful had it not been for European conflict spilling over to the American colonies. England and France were for centuries at war with each other, with only brief periods of an unstable truce. As one Franco Anglican war after another broke out, the hostilities spread to the English and French settlements in America. The French were more successful than the English in making allies of
\nthe Indians. What has been called the French and Indian War was actually the continuing conflict between England and France on this continent of a long series of wars that lasted more than a century in Europe. But it was the end of that last conflict, with the English victory on the Plains of Abraham, that made North America English rather than French territory. The people who got the worst of it were those Red Men caught in the middle – our Maine Indians.<\/p>\n
Year: 1979<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1207, Broadcast on June 10, 1979<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[803,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}