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"A meanes to knitt them togeather": The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War
Andrew Lipman
| In the early seventeenth century, when New England was still very new, Indians and colonists exchanged many things: furs, beads, pots, cloth, scalps, hands, and heads. The first exchanges of body parts came during the 1637 Pequot War, a punitive campaign fought by English colonists and their native allies against the Pequot people. Throughout the war Mohegans, Narragansetts, and other native peoples gave parts of slain Pequots to their English partners. At one point deliveries of trophies were so frequent that colonists stopped keeping track of individual parts, referring instead to the "still many Pequods' heads and hands" that "came almost daily." Most secondary accounts of the war only mention trophies in passing, seeing them as just another grisly aspect of this notoriously violent conflict.1 But these incidents were more than just a macabre footnote. They were a strange kind of negotiation, a cross-cultural conversation rendered in flesh and blood. |
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Algonquian Indians often exchanged wartime trophies to affirm alliances, whereas the English decapitated enemies and displayed their heads to establish dominance. Because body parts were symbols of political relationships in both cultures, these acts of giving were a way for the two peoples to express and mediate their different notions of authority. Narragansett sachem Miantonomo described what he saw as the function of such exchanges when he began to plot a war against English and Dutch colonists in 1642. At a meeting with his coconspirators, Miantonomo told them that "when the designe should be putt in execution he would kill an Englishman & send his heade & handes to Longe Iland," and the Indians of Long Island and those near the Dutch should do the same, "& this would be a meanes to knitt them togeather." Miantonomo's phrase aptly suggests how body parts could represent relationships. Anthropologists note that exchanged objects symbolize thoughts and values, define the flow of power within societies, and foster expectations between givers and receivers. Exchanges between cultures in particular deserve close attention because different peoples attach multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings to the same things.2 |
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At first heads, hands, and scalps conveyed simple messages about trust and power that were understood by natives and newcomers, strengthening their partnership during the campaign against the Pequots. Yet any such pidgin communications obscured many secondary meanings, causing disagreements about what exactly the exchanges symbolized. In the years following the war, some Indians became disillusioned with their alliance with colonists, arguing that it was built on faulty assumptions of cultural sameness and that the English were violating its fundamental terms. These exchanges demonstrate the peculiar character of frontier relationships at this early stage in the colonization of New England. By attempting a military conquest at a moment when they could not yet assert cultural hegemony, colonists dealt with Indians in ways that were at once aggressive and accommodating.3 |
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