Mohican Indian tribe shaped early Berkshire agriculture

Print Story | Email Story
Muhheconnuk, Moheakunnuk, Muhikonneuw, Monhegan, Mohican, Mahican: the name means “great waters or sea, which are constantly in motion, either flowing or ebbing.” They were the people of the Hudson River. They became the Stockbridge Indians. They were hunters, trappers, gatherers, farmers. They lived in palisaded villages in open forest, kept clear by controlled burning, and by the gathering of brush and kindling to feed their cooking fires. They traded beaver pelts and maple sugar with the Europeans. They allowed marriages to break and reform among them; children inherited through the female line. They joined John Sargent’s Mission in what would become Stockbridge, in the late 1700s. They converted to Christianity and became literate. Eventually, they served with the British against the French in the French and Indian War, and with the colonists against the British in the American Revolution. Their way of life was more relaxed than the Puritan English farmers’ life. They took long trips for pleasure. The Dutch farmers gave them hospitality — or got them drunk and cut deals with them. Many young Europeans joined them, or were restrained from joining them. The son of Sargent’s successor, John Edwards, grew up speaking Mohican and associating with them, and he went with them when they left Massachusetts. After the revolution, the Mohicans in Stockbridge slowly lost the lands they held in town (partly thanks to one Ephraim Williams). They were pushed steadily west and scattered to several reservations. They are best known now as the Stockbridge-Munsee Indians in Wisconsin. David McAllester, an ethnomusicologist and retired Wesleyan professor, wrote a series of articles on the Mohicans for The Monterey News between 1981 and 1994. He lives in Monterey. He has studied the Navajo, listened to their music. Mohican music is no longer available, he said, but it was probably similar to Iroquois. There are no Mohican speakers left either. Even the Navajo now teach Navajo in schools, so their children will remember it, he said. But Stockbridge resident Lion Miles is working on a Mohican dictionary. Farming In 1984, McAllester wrote, “Vegetable Gardens were laid out near the villages in the river valleys. Trees were girdled and burned and maize, squash, beans and sunflowers were planted between the stumps. ... In late August, most of the men returned from the hunting and fishing camps to assist with the harvest and take part in the Green Corn ceremonies. With dances, songs and feasting they gave thanks to the Three Lifegiving Sisters (corn, beans, squash). The harvest was carefully stored in pits lined with grass or bark. There were other ceremonies associated with the gifts of nature: the First Fruits ceremony celebrated the ripening of the strawberries. The Deer Sacrifice took place after organized drives in the fall had brought in an abundance of venison.” Native Seeds Project Lawrence Davis-Hollander began the Eastern Native Seed Conservancy to preserve some of that agriculture. He began the conservancy with the Native Seeds Project, in 1994. He wanted to find original New England seed stock, he said. He wanted to find and save the oldest indigenous seeds for this region. Many standard New England plants are newcomers. ENSC grows more than 100 varieties of tomatoes, for example, but tomatoes were not grown in 15th century New England — they did not migrate so far until the late 1700s, Hollander said. He started looking for original sources of seeds, for native people, though not all of his seeds have come directly from native sources. He developed contacts in the Native American world. He began meeting people. Many of the seeds he has collected are Iroquois, he said. Theirs is a more intact group than many. Seventy-five percent or more may be Iroquois in fact. Most Algonquin seeds have been lost, he said, but they may have been lost by 1570. By the time the white man came onto their land, whole villages had sometimes died of disease. Hollander has been collecting and growing them and saving tobacco and a few squash — squash cross-pollinate so easily that most varieties are gone, he said. He has a couple dozen kinds of corn and close to three dozen kinds of beans. Peoples and villages may have grown different varieties of vegetables, though they lived close together, he said. Personal, family, village and tribal selections of seeds may have varied. He can only estimate from what he has seen in the present. At the time, observers did not keep specific records of seeds. They stuck to “red, blue and yellow corn,” he said. Some choices and varieties depend on how long people and crops are separated, he said. Take a calico corn with eight colors; someone else selects for ears two colors. The original corn with all eight colors may be lost. There are lots of reasons how and why crops varied, Hollander said. “It seems Seneca Indians liked calico corn in many colors.Other Iroquois favored a more solid color. That seems true now, as a generalization.” All the seeds Hollander has collected are rare, and most are endangered. They are close to extinction, he said, and some in immediate danger. He has been planting, growing, saving seeds, and then casually redistributing them to Native Americans. He generally does not return seeds to the people who gave them, he said: many of these people are elderly and already have seeds. He generally redistributes seeds to younger generations. In many groups, he said, he finds interest in regenerating agriculture, but people are “not there yet,” not really active. People may grow plants for generations but not save seeds, he said. A few people do, and there are a few conservancies, a few in the Native American world. But in the past few months has had calls from people who gave him seeds and do not have them any more. Some stories wind up better. ENSC grows one bean it calls the Stockbridge Indian Bean, Hollander said. They got this bean from Stockbridge-Munsee Indians of Wisconsin. It is a New England bean, and it is quite possible it came from here. But Hollander knows a Tuscarora man who lives near Buffalo, N.Y. This man’s family had been growing and saving an Iroquois corn bread bean for generations. He went into the army. When he returned, he found that his family had stopped saving seeds and eaten all the beans. They were gone. He told Hollander it made him sick at heart. His father was the Tuscarora Chief Rickard. Stockbridge-Munsee Indians had visited Rickard, and he had given them some bean seeds. They looked a lot like the beans ENSC is now growing, Hollander said. He has collected seeds from all over New England, he said, and most do fine in the mountains. It depends on the weather. Some Delaware and Seneca from further south marginally make it up here. The Mohicans probably grew different kinds of beans and corn and squash, Hollander said. They probably did not just plant, say, one kind of corn that needed 125 days of sun to mature, and would fail in a wet summer. He added that agriculture was probably centered in the Hudson and Housatonic river valleys, 30 to 40 miles up from the sound. The Mohican diet varied far beyond those three vegetables, though. McAllester wrote on a variety of food sources. Hunting “In November the villages were almost deserted as family groups moved out to their individual hunting territories in the low hills ... Each hunter, through dreams, prayers and fasting, sought the assistance of a Guardian Spirit to advise him and bring him success in the chase. At midwinter the families again returned to the village for the Bear Sacrifice.” The Mohicans traditionally chose their chief or Sachem from their Bear clan. “In March, the hunters went out on snowshoes, hoping to catch moose in the deep snow ... families moved to their sugar camps on the hillsides and the steam of boiling sap began to rise ... ” The spring brought geese, ducks and passenger pigeons. Fishing “In the spring, great schools of herring, shad and salmon came up the rivers and their tributaries to spawn. Then, and during the summer while the women planted and tended their gardens, the men were busy on the water in dugouts and bark canoes, spearing fish and searching for mussel beds. In the smaller streams they built ingenious fishweirs ... They consisted of walls of stone or close-set stakes across the stream, arranged so that fish moving upstream would have to enter a narrow opening.” The men also fished with spears and bone fish hooks. They sliced the fish thin and smoked them over slow fires. They threaded mussels on long strings and dried them the same way. Trees Trees yielded more than nuts, and nuts yielded a great deal. Beech nuts “can be eaten raw, roasted or ground to make a caffeine-free coffee, or powdered into a nutritious flour. The Indians make nut-cakes of suck flour with cornmeal added. The batter could be fried in deep fat or roasted over hot coals” and eaten with maple syrup. The Iroquois, and likely their neighbors, “dried and ground the inner bark [of the beech] to make bread. In addition, the new leaves in the spring could be cooked and eaten as greens.” Other trees have edible bark and other parts. “The Iroquois called the Hurons ‘Hadironcaks,’ tree eaters, and early travelers reported the reason: whole groves of pine trees stripped of their bark....” It contains vitamin C. “Our 60 native species of oak are made up of two families, white and red: the acorns of all are high in food value ... Walnuts and butternuts and chestnuts can be made into nut ‘milk’ by pounding in a mortar with a little water added. This can be used as a seasoning ... or boiled into a fragrant soup. Nut oil was obtained by boiling the ground meats and skimming the oil from the surface.” It was used to season vegetables, herbs and meats. Ground nuts McAllester quotes Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity among the Indians during King Phillip’s War, in 1675: “The chief and commonest food was ground nuts: they ate also nuts and acorns, artichokes, lily roots, ground beans and several other roots and weeds that I know not ... ” Ground nuts, he explains, “are in the pea family, and are also known as Indian Potato, Wild Bean, and Hopniss. It is a twinging vine with alternating leaves ... [the roots] consist of an elaborate chain of tuber-like enlargements with a milky juice and a pleasant taste, rather like a turnip. Early Colonial records cited ‘Grounds nuts as big as Eggs and as good as Potatoes, and 40 on a string, not two inches underground.’ ” Ground nuts were such a staple, he later quoted Rowlandson again, describing Indians in retreat: “... and the enemy in such distress for food that our men might track them by their rooting in the earth for ground nuts, whilst they were flying for their lives.” Berries There are more native berries in New England than show up at farm stands: over 200 species of wild fruits and berries, McAllester wrote. They included “shadberries, cranberries, blueberries, ground cherries, checkerberries (wintergreen) and strawberries ... ” These are the best known. Some small town drug stores still carry checkerberry syrup for ice cream sodas. Some are less commonly known now. “Raw barberries were prized for their refreshing astringency.” Like sumac berries, they were dried and stewed “for a citrous-tasting drink, or for flavoring ... the Indians also chewed the bright yellow root of the barberry and made a tea of the leaves for relief from rheumatism.” Juniper berries “can be eaten fresh or picked all winter, after they have dried on the bush, and be moistened in the mouth until they yield a raisin-like flavor ... False Solomon’s seal bears small clusters of fragrant red berries in autumn.” The Mohicans also used “nannyberries, bearberries, partridgeberries, and even the bittersweet berries of nightshade. The toxic alkaloid, solanine, in [nightshade] becomes less dangerous as the fruit ripens and is completely dissipated by the heat of cooking.” Later, over several stories, McAllester cites the Rev. Johannes Megapolensis Jr., a missionary over the mountains in the Hudson valley. In his sketch on the Mahakuase (Mohawk) in the New Netherlands, he is eloquent about the resources in this new land: “In the forests and in the wilderness along the water side ... there grows an abundance of chestnuts, plums, hazelnuts, large walnuts of several sorts ... The land on the hill is covered with thickets of bilberries and blueberries; the ground in the flat land near the river is covered with strawberries which grow so plentifully in the fields that we go there and lie down and eat them ... ” McAllester researched the Mohicans through written accounts, and checked on his sources, he said. Bruce Trigger has article in Smithsonian Handbook of Native Americans; Taylor’s History of Great Barrington has a section on the local Native Americans; Electa Jones wrote Stockbridge Past and Present in the 19th century, while there were still Mohicans around to talk to, and quoted extensively from the lost history of the Mohicans written by Hendrick Aupaumut, a Mohican student at Dartmouth. Patrick Frazier, finally, wrote The Mohicans of Stockbridge in 1992. Recipes (Cooking methods, ingredients, preparations and seasonings have changed — but here are a couple of ways, besides pie, to enjoy one of the three sisters. The first is from New England Cooking: Seasons and Celebrations Copyright 2001 by Berkshire House Publishers, written by Claire Hopley.) Ginger-Pumpkin Bread 4 ounces crystallized ginger 6 ounces butter at room temperature 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar 2 eggs 1 cup cooked or canned pumpkin 1 tbsp. ground ginger 1 tsp. ground Cinnamon 1/2 cup all-purpose flour 1 tbsp. baking powder 1/4 tsp. salt 1/4-1/2 cup milk 1. Preheat the oven to 375 F. Grease a 9 x 5 loaf pan. Cut the crystallized ginger into bits about the size of a pea. Set aside. 2. Cream the butter with the sugar in a large bowl. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, and when thoroughly blended, mix in the pumpkin, ground ginger, reserved crystallized ginger, and the cinnamon. 3. Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl, then add to the pumpkin mixture. Add enough milk to make a dough that’s spreadable but not runny. (Generally, you will need less milk if using pumpkin you cooked yourself, more if using canned pumpkin.) 4. Put the mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool the pan on a wire rack for 15 to 20 minutes. The remove from the pan and finish cooling before cutting. (This is from The Perfect Pumpkin by Gail Damerow, published by Storey Books in 1997.) Pumpkin Soup 1 medium yellow onion, baked 6 cloves garlic, baked 2/3 cup pecans or walnuts, toasted 1/4 tsp. ginger 1/4 tsp. allspice 1 cup amber lager 2 cups chicken or vegetable stock 1-1/2 cups pumpkin puree 1 cup sour cream 1 extra-large egg 1/2 cup milk Salt and pepper Beforehand, bake the unpeeled onion in the microwave on high, for six minutes, or in the oven at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. Bake the unpeeled garlic and roast the nuts on a cookie sheet in the same oven, at the same heat, for 15 minutes. Cool and peel the onion and garlic. 1. In a food processor, combine the onions, nuts, garlic and spices, and process fairly smooth. 2. Heat the lager, stock and pumpkin. Stir in the pureed mixture. Simmer 15 min. 3. Stir in the sour cream. 4. Beat together the egg and the milk. Stirring constantly, pour into the soup. Without boiling, heat 10 more minutes. 5. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot.
Share
If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.

Mass MoCA Welcomes New Tenant, Hosts Route 2 Study Reveal

By Breanna SteeleiBerkshires Staff
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Commission approved a new tenant Monday for the third floor of Building 1, above Bright Ideas Brewery.
 
Gianne Inc. uses recycled materials to create funcational art. 
 
"They are corporation that recycles textiles into functional handmade home art pieces such as quilts and rugs, promoting sustainability through creative design," said Jason Ahuja, senior manager of public initiatives.
 
According to Ahuja, the company is a mother and son duo who will be producing their work in the 400 square foot space.
 
Their lease will be two years long and started on Oct. 1. 
 
Director of Public Initiatives & Real Estate Morgan Everett updated the commission on an upcoming exhibition, "Race/Hustle" by Zora J Murff. The exhibit will be on view starting Dec. 6.
 
The exhibit features many different types of works "that examine physical, psychic, and political violence, the rhythms and resonances of oppression throughout history and into the present, and the harmful desires that our visual culture cultivates," according to the Mass MoCA website.
 
View Full Story

More North Adams Stories

Community News
image description

New Mass MoCA Welcomes New Tenant, Hosts Route 2 Study Reveal

Community News
Community News
image description

Companion Corner: Millie at No Paws Left Behind

Community News
A & E
image description

Weekend Outlook: Jolly Holiday

A & E
Schools
image description

North Adams Schools' Food Service Being Spotlighted by DESE

Schools
Community News
image description

Thanksgiving Dinners, Donations Delivered by Local Groups

Community News
Community News
image description

Berkshires' First Snowstorm Could Bring Nearly a Foot of Snow

Community News
Latest Stories
Previous Next

What's Trending?