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We the People Called Quinnipiac
by Iron Thunderhorse - Thunder Clan Grand Sachem
Excerpts from CHAPTER 1
Roots of the Algonquian Family Tree
WE THE PEOPLE CALLED QUINNIPIAC are directly related to the Algonquian Family of Nations. We share a common language, traditions and culture, as the editors of ALGONQIANS OF THE EAST explain: “Despite [slight] variations in speech between the eastern and central Algonquians, they retain certain stories and rituals in common. Indians from Manitoba to Maine warned of a cannibal monster who came down from the north to devour people… and tribal groups living as far apart as the shores of Lake Superior and the tidal inlets of Chesapeake Bay told of a fabled creature called the Great Hare, who dwelt in the land of the Rising Sun…”
So who exactly are the Algonquians, where are they from, and what’s their connection to the Quinnipiac? These questions will be answered in this chapter about the Roots of the Algonquian Family Tree.
The lands of Southern Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Cape Breton Island and Eastern Canada are where Algonquian language and culture first began to emerge. This all began to take shape after the Ice Age or approximately 12,500 - 7,500 years BP [Before Present].
The first Algonquian bands were the Neskapi, Montaignais, MicMac, Eastern Cree and the Beothuk. When the Norse Viking seafarers journeyed to Iceland (and onward to Greenland and Newfoundland) they came in contact with native people they called skraelingr (i.e. ‘the Screechers’). These natives were whalers and spear-fishers who navigated “their unique double-crescent, three-peaked canoes…” They were the Beothuk.
Links to Red Paint Maritime Traditions
Historical records of the Beothuk range from 1000 AD in the Icelandic Sagas to the 1800s. All accounts agree on their physical appearance. Some were dark skinned but many more had unusually light complexions. A typical record was made by Gaspar Corte Real (1501) who had kidnapped 57 Beothuk People from Eastern Newfoundland. “They are somewhat taller than our average person,” he explains, “their faces marked with great signs … The color of their skin must be said to be more white than anything else.”
Again, in the year 1612 John Guy’s Narrative was the last peaceful trade ship to dock at Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. He adds, “They are full-eyed, of a blacke colour… the color of their hair is divers, some blacke, some browne, and some yellow.” [Jewell 2001: 20] So much for the stereotype that all Indians are red-skinned. Our ancestors used red ochre paint mixed with bear fat as a kind of protection from the elements. This red paint was very sacred. Our ancestors also were fond of tattooing their faces, arms, legs, chests and backs.
Another stereotype is that Indians can’t grow beards or moustaches. As Jewell noted in his article, “the Beothuk were the first called ‘red Indians’, but only due to their lavish use of red ochre… A Beothuk relic statue depicted a bearded, mustached man… [In] 1667 to 1675, Louis Nicholas sketched a ‘Head of the Earth God’, white, mustachioed, double-spaded beard, tattooed…” This is similar to the Earthmaker carvings found as far south as the Powhatan Confederacy of Okewis throughout Algonquian domains.
After hundreds of years of exploitation and troubles the Beothuk began to move southward as Jewell continues “The Beothuk were the last descendants of the ‘Lost Red Paint People’ of the ‘Maritime Archaic’… spread from Labrador to the tip of New Jersey…” [Ibid]. Thus, the Beothuk, Red-Paint Indians, Maritime Archaic and the Skraelingr are in fact different labels for the same people.
In ancient times the Algonquian People called themselves the mamawinini, which is roughly translated as ‘nomadic’ in the English language. Each nation considered themselves the stewards or caretakers of their ecosystems and domains. These included a set of summer fishing camps along the shores and river-banks as well as a winter refuge farther inland where they hunted and trapped large quadrupeds and small game under the protection of forests. In the center of their summer and winter camps stood the Algonquian mawiomi or central council fire where the sachema/sakema (chieftains) and sagamough/sagamore (elder orators and councilors) contemplated tribal politics.
Prophecies and Protocols
Evan T. Pritchard, Director of the Center for Algonquin Culture [CAC] and author of NO WORD FOR TIME: The Way of the Algonquin People also tells us that: “The history of the Algonquian people is filled with prophets and prophecies, secret medicine societies, and visions of the distant past. Some of these were written in pictographs on remote rock faces in the mountains … Others were handed down from one strong elder [ginap] to another…” [Pritchard 1997].
The Algonquian people developed a sophisticated writing system with five inter-working levels (used in public and secret teachings) that evolved in three stages: archaic, intermediary and hybrid conventionalization over several thousand years. [Thunderhorse 1996]. The oral and graphic traditions which relate to the development of the Algonquian People’s history is known as “Seven Prophets - Seven Fires” which held that our creation was an unfolding process that would expand in seven stages into the future.
The Great Migrations
The original Algonquians of Eastern Canada began their exodus down along the shores of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. They, in turn, gave birth to the Western Cree, Salteaux, Ojibway, Kristenaux, Nipissing, Ottawa and Menominee at the junction of the Great Lakes known as the Canadian Shield Region. This area gets its name from a particular style of rock art where images of human-like shields possess heads, hands and feet. Thousands of these sites dot the region.
These nations gave birth to still others who are known as the Shawnee, Miami, Illini, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Mousketan, Kaskaskia, Peoria, Sauk, Fox, Tamaroa, Piankashaw, Piasu, Rhea and Cahokia… in the states known now as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Another group of Algonquians kept moving south and west until they reached the continental divide and Rocky Mountains. These families are known today as the Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blood, Piegan and Gros Ventre.
A separate group followed on the eastern banks of the Saint Lawrence split off where it meets the Connecticut River confluence at Kebec (Quebec) Canada. As they moved along the Connecticut River and formed new maweomi they became known as the Abenaki, Penobscot. Maliseet, Passamoquoddy, Mahican, Wappinger, Espous. Massachusett, Pennacook, Wampanoag, Scaticook, Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, Nipmuck, Wangunk, Podunk. Quinnipiac, Tunxis, Siwanoag, Munsee, Unami, Montauk, Shinnecock, Unquachog, who settled along the states now known as New England all the way to Long Island Sound.
Still another family continued on from the New York and New Jersey Region where the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) bands spread into Pennsylvania and these bands went as far south as North Carolina. They are known to history as the Nanticoke, Connoy, Chickahominy, Appamattox, Pamunkey, Pamlico, Mattaponi, Chowan and the Powhatan. By the time the European explorers arrived, as Evan Pritchard of the CAC estimates, there were about 84 Algonquian Nations and over a dozen or so Confederacies in the three districts. When the Jamestown expedition met the great Algonquian mamanatowick (i.e. Paramount chief) named Powhatan in Virginia, he was said to have a domain covering six thousand square miles and included thirty Algonquian nations in the largest of all Algonquian Confederacies. [Rountree 1990].
Icons of Identity
Algonquian Thunderer (pictograph and dream forms)At Thunder Bay in the heart of the Canadian Shield region, archaeologists discovered hundreds of slate discs inscribed with specific images. These are known as naub-cow-zo-win amulets of great power. These same images were found painted on the rocks at hundreds of rock art sites in the Great Lakes region. Most of the very same images are well-known icons of Algonquian cosmology found in the Sacred Birch Bark Scrolls of the Anishinaabeg (Ojibway) and is part of the Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Society. On the east coast it is pronounced Medawlinno or “Men of the Great Medicine Society”.
These images or icons are also found throughout the Long Island Sound region. The most common are Thunderbird, Great Horned Serpent, the Thunderer himself, and Lightning Serpent. All are directly related to the ancient Thunder Clan/Society/Cult where the Wabeno or Wapeno/Wampano, i.e. Men of the Dawn Sky and the Pinessisok, Warriors of the Thunder’s House are found in rock art, artifacts, marked on Treaties and agreements. These are the traces of the ancestry at the heart of the Quinnipiac family, our own Thunder Clan.
