Mohican History Walking Tour of Stockbridge (Stop Three)
Library and Archives
Earlier Posts in this Series
Stop One (Town Offices) is here and has a discussion of the timeframe covered in this walk.
Stop Two (Chief Konkapot’s Property) can be found here, in which I discuss Native naming conventions and explain why there were two Sachems when Stockbridge was created.
Stop Nine (Town Cemetery) is here — in addition to Native burials, I mention the gravestone of Mumbet, and tell about the ceremonial use of tobacco.
much more information is available at https://www.nativeamericantrail.org/
Reminder and Update
Berkshire OLLI will again be sponsoring “Footprints of Our Ancestors” tours during the Housatonic Heritage walk month in 2025. Kate Kidd and I will be offering the walks on most weekends in September as well as the first weekend in October. Details have now appeared on the Housatonic Heritage website (although their list is chronological, and not by topic or location), and sign-ups will later be offered on the OLLI website.
In this series of posts, I am describing some of the topics that have been covered in these walks. Many of my comments are in addition to the material in the brochure and short videos, all of which are linked to in my posts.
Even if you have absorbed all of the material in these posts, please join us in person, if you can. Each walk is different because we mold our conversation around the comments and questions from those on the walk. It’s a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours on a crisp autumn day.
Stop Three Video and Text
From the brochure (lightly edited):
Today, Stockbridge Library’s Museum & Archive has a multitude of rare historical documents that complement the tour: One is an original copy of the June 1750 Proprietorship document — a larger version is in the Proprietor Book in the Town Office. This is the document that lists the land allotments for each Indian male “proprietor,” 42 men in total, which was the important step in moving from communal to individual land that was more easily taken away by the English. Reverend John Sergeant had passed a year prior to this taking place, in 1749, and had complained of the stealing of Indian land.
The 1750 survey granted the land on which now stand the library and the Old Corner House to Johannis Mhhuttawampee and it was passed down to his wife Hannah Mhuttawampee and daughter Elizabeth Soutosquoth.
The following two images are “compiled” maps, meaning that they were created after the fact, based on other documents. They provide some insight into how much the tribal land was carved up and taken over by the English, despite the original agreement, which gave the land to the Indians “forever.”
My Comments
As stated in the brochure, Johannis Mhhuttawampee [meh-hut-AH-wamp-PAY] passed this parcel along to his wife Hannah, and daughter Elizabeth Soutosquoth [SAW-tuss-kwath], who may have married a free African-American.
In the video, Bonney Hartley comments on the feelings she has at seeing the original documents, of which the tribe has only copies.
That 1750 document, referenced in the brochure and the video, providing for the break-up of tribal lands into individual proprietorships, is seen as the beginning of the end. We will learn more about John Sergeant at Stop 8 (The Mission House), and about his successor, Jonathan Edwards at Stop 6 (Jonas Etowaukaum Home). Both of these Missionaries tried to stop the English Colonists from stealing land from the Natives, but in between the death of Sergeant and the arrival of Edwards, the Colonists managed to break up the tribal lands.
Although Reverend Sergeant had protected the Natives from the worst instincts of the Colonists, he also believed that the Natives would benefit from giving up their culture and learning to live as Christians. He established a boarding school in order to remove the children from their parents’ teachings, so they would stop learning the local culture.
That schooling idea, and the pattern of breaking up tribal lands, were repeated (though probably not copied) on a national scale in later years. We all know of the horrors of the Indian Boarding Schools. Probably lesser known is the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act (after Senator Henry Dawes of Pittsfield), which provided for the breakup of the Reservation System.
In the video for this stop, Bonnie says “wa-NOT-a-cook” (or perhaps “wa-KNOCK-ta-cook”) for “the Great Meadow” — we will see that meadow for ourselves at the end of the tour (Stop 11: Burying Ground and Wnahktukook). This is now the site of the Stockbridge golf course. Before the English arrived, it was undoubtedly one of the most fertile of the agricultural lands of the tribe. Great Meadow is an accurate, though not literal, translation of the name. The Algonkian word with that meaning would be Maskikon. The late Lion Miles of Stockbridge compiled a list of Algonkian words, and he included five different spellings for the name of that area, in addition to the spelling in the brochure. They are all pronounced approximately the same, so I’ll just give one of those: Wnogquetookoke. As you can see, that is pretty much the way that Bonnie pronounced it. The literal meaning of the word is “enclosed by the arc of the river” — which perfectly describes the area we will view.
Gender Roles
By this point in the tour, we often get questions on the role of women in Algonkian culture, or about how the young were educated. What I present here is my understanding of the way things were in Stockbridge in the time period we are discussing. Local customs varied, so what was true here may not have been practiced in other locales. Native cultures also have evolved, to accommodate new legal and technological realities, though many of the core values remain.
As background, it is important to understand the clan system, which continues to be very important throughout most of North America. Native people are born with multiple loyalties. Geographically, the first loyalty is to the village, and then to the wider Nation, made up of many localities. As explained in my description of Stop Two, the township that became Stockbridge was populated by Natives from (at least) two different villages (Wnahktukook and Skatekook). They were also loyal to the Mohican Nation, and to the clan into which they were born (see the clan animals pictured below on the current logo of the tribe). See the link just given for a more detailed explanation of the clan system, as well of for some of what follows here.
In Haudenosaunee culture, it is said that women are the givers of life, and men are the destroyers of life. The same was true here, and, again, throughout a much wider region. Women, aside from being the ultimate pollical power in the village, were creators of life because they bore children and tended to the crops. They were also the creators of young minds, because they were responsible for educating the children.
The women of the clan jointly educated the children, at least until the boys were old enough to go with the men to learn how to hunt and fish — the activities that destroyed life. The men were also responsible for burning the forest floor, for making weapons, canoes, and structures. Women made clothing and did the cooking.
Despite these clearly defined gender roles, the culture was completely tolerant of people whose interests did not match their sex. If a young woman, for example, wished to be a hunter and a warrior, that was fine. In some places, such people were called “two-spirited” and in Haudenosaunee culture they were an essential part of some ceremonies. There was no feeling that one gender was superior to the other. Their roles were different, and they were equally important in supporting the community.
All of this created great consternation among the English. The Natives and the Newcomers did not understand each other’s ways. The Natives did not understand why the men worked in the fields, when that was women’s work. The Newcomers, on the other hand, thought the Native men were very lazy because all they did was hunt and fish. Back in England, these were the leisure activities of the aristocracy. They did not comprehend that the men were providing an essential part of their community’s diet. They were not killing animals for fun, but to provide food and clothing for their village.
Next Up
We will go to Stop Four: Captain Naunauphtaunk Home.
Postscript
In today’s turbulent times, it is increasingly difficult for me to resist comparing our present discontent to the original (Native) culture of this area (indeed, of much of what the Haudenosaunee call Turtle Island — now North America).
Yes, the Natives sometimes had consequential wars over territory. They also had skirmishes over petty insults. They sometimes took captives and tortured them, or even held them as slaves. Yet, with all of this, they did not have prisons.
They did not have standing armies. There was a saying among the part-time warriors: “If you are off fighting, you are not feeding your family.”
For the most part, they were a peaceable people, and community was everything. There was an extensive trading network, and cultural exchanges were common.
When I praise the egalitarian nature of the Native culture, I am sometimes met with the objection that such a plan might work in small villages, but would not scale up.
Keep in mind that there were probably more people living in the Americas than there were in Europe when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And the largest cities in North America were at least as large as the biggest cities in Europe.
The Natives did not have a market economy. They did not believe in private ownership of land. Nearly two hundred years ago, Lewis Henry Morgan characterized Native culture as “communism in living” — long before that became a dirty word. European Colonists wanted nothing to do with this primitive culture. And look where we are now.