Long Island Books: Algonquian Peoples

"The Algonquian

Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700"

By John A. Strong

Illustrated by David Bunn Martine

Empire State Books

Heart of the Lakes Publishing

$50

"We Are Still Here!' The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island Today"

$12

Can present-day Long Islanders, European immigrants of 400 years, presume to write the history of their predecessors of 10,000 years?

"The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700," a book by the ethnohistorian John A. Strong, proves he can.

Mr. Strong is professor of history and director of the social science division at Southampton College of Long Island University, and he has made Algonquian history his life work for the last 32 years.

Mr. Strong examined archeological digs, anthropological findings, contemporary records, and oral histories, alongside reports by 17th-century observers, as he pieced together the lives lived by the Algonquian peoples. The result is scholarly, yet accessible and constantly fascinating.

What To Call Them

At the start, Mr. Strong faced the puzzle of what to call these first Long Islanders. He found no clear consensus among the descendants of the original inhabitants except for a shared antipathy to European nomenclature, "Indian" and "Native American."

They had originally called themselves by their geographical place names of residence, such as Shinnecocks or Montauketts, and had no other generic name to differentiate themselves from strangers. Mr. Strong adopted this practice.

He also looked to shared languages - "All of the original inhabitants in what is now Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and southern New England, for example, shared a common language root called 'Algon-quian' which distinguished them from their Iroquoian-speaking neighbors to the north."

Peace And Plenty

Mr. Strong prefers these terms, along with "original inhabitants" or "native peoples," which he considers "the only unencumbered generic references." This circumspection, which opens the volume, sets the tone for his entire work.

Mr. Strong paints the picture of a lost Eden, a vibrant society of peace and plenty on pre-European Long Island. The first inhabitants seem actually to fit the idealized image of native life that has often been imagined for them. He finds no evidence of the warfare that dominated the lives of the Iroquois to the north.

Villages spread themselves out spaciously over an acre or two and organized themselves around open public areas. The earliest Long Islanders picked sites on the banks of freshwater streams, at the point that they flowed into tidewater bays, where they had easy access to fresh water and seafood.

Extensive Networks

They preferred locations open toward the southeast, where the rays of the winter sun warmed their wigwams, but sheltered from the northwest winter winds by high hills or dense woods. These were beautiful as well as practical settings, popular with later European immigrants as well, a circumstance that has obliterated many archeological records, Mr. Strong notes ruefully.

Long Island wigwams, round or oval structures framed with saplings and covered with bark, provided warm and comfortable living quarters. They were "ingeniously designed to make efficient use of limited space," furnished with mats, benches, and sometimes beds, Mr. Strong believes.

These original inhabitants enjoyed a life of social and trade exchanges throughout Long Island and southern New England, as well as extensive trade networks with the mainland. Young people found marriage partners from throughout these many communities, and were free to select their future homes among either set of in-laws.

Ceremonial feasts marked the seasons of life. Algonquians greeted the emerging plants of spring with what is now called the "June meeting" and the autumn harvest with the "powwow." They celebrated rites of passage and buried their dead in cemeteries near the crests of hills on their southeast slopes.

Men occupied themselves with smoking rituals, still not well understood. They added tobacco to their local mixtures about 1,000 years ago when Nicotiana rustica reached the Northeast. The men tended their tobacco plots themselves, though the women of the villages cultivated and gathered food crops.

Mr. Strong best illustrates the abundance of early Long Island life when he describes the varied and bounteous meals that were the center of Algonquian social life. The archeological record, confirmed by later oral histories and written records, indicates that food preparation was an art.

Cooking As Art

Village women memorized herbal remedies. They prepared a varied diet of game, fish, shellfish, nuts, and berries - strawberries colored the fields red in June, and they were the high point of the June meetings.

The sweet white oak acorn was ground into flour for baking. They harvested ground nuts, small thin twining vines with tubers the size of hen's eggs, and Jerusalem artichokes during the late fall and winter thaws. In the spring they gathered green-leafed vegetables including chenopodium, or lamb's quarters, a relative of domestic spinach, and the new shoots of pokeweed. (Mature pokeweed is toxic.)

Stews were the cook's mainstay, but fish, fowl, and game were baked in clay molds - a meal of piquant delicacy and flavor. Clam bakes, prepared with hot stones and wet eelgrass, celebrated special occasions. Corn, beans, and squash, introduced from the Midwest and called the "three sisters" by the Iroquois, were adopted slowly on Long Island because, Mr. Strong believes, local food sources were abundant and satisfactory.

Europeans Arrive

Mr. Strong calls Algonquian life comfortable, with a rich religious system, lived in harmony with the environment - a beautiful environment little scarred by the passing of the first Long Islanders.

The arrival of Europeans in 1524 brought this idyllic life to an end. Mr. Strong recounts this more familiar story with patience. First, trading patterns changed. Wampum, made from Long Island shells, was in great demand among the inland tribes that trapped beaver. The Dutch and British traders made it legal tender, purchasing large quantities from the Long Island Algonquians and drawing them into a new economic network.

As the Dutch and English clashed in their grabs for Long Island land, the Algonquians became more structured politically to respond to these clashes. Their "sachems" engaged in intricate schemes to strengthen their power and influence, and they proved to be as adept at diplomacy and intrigue as the Europeans.

Dispossessed

The Montaukett Wyandanch was the most successful of these Algon-quian leaders, and his friendship with the English through Lion Gardiner, that nation's most powerful representative on Long Island, helped stabilize Long Island for Wyandanch's people. Wyandanch was proclaimed Grand Sachem of Long Island by the English in 1657. His death two years later marked the end of the Algonquian era.

The introduction of European diseases devastated the Algonquian populations. Lion Gardiner estimated that the smallpox epidemic of 1659-1664 took the lives of two-thirds of the Algonquians on Long Island.

In the latter half of the 17th century, European settlers took over Long Island, leaving just two tracts to the natives, Shinnecock and Poospatuck. "Cultural misunderstandings, deceit, patent violations, manipulation, the calculated use of alcohol, and payments made at roughly half of the market value characterized most of this tragic process of dispossession," Mr. Strong writes.

Still Here

But the original Long Islanders did not become extinct, as some reports claimed. The second volume, originally the final chapter of Mr. Strong's history, was expanded and published separately to tell the story of Algonquian survival and renewal.

Mr. Strong has written a contemporary classic to put on your shelf alongside James Truslow Adams's two volumes from 1916 and 1918, Henry D. Sleight's three volumes from 1929, 1930, and 1931, and Everett T. Rattray's 1979 "The South Fork."

Lois Beachy Underhill is the author of "The Woman Who Ran for President, the Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull," Bridge Works, 1995, Penguin, 1996. She lives in Sag Harbor, where she co-chairs the Sag Harbor Tree Fund and writes a bimonthly "Our Town" column for The Sag Harbor Express.