"A meanes to knitt them togeather": The exchange of body parts in the Pequot War

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 65, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 3-28

  Lipman, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67449158681     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/25096768     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Axtell, "The Moral Dilemmas of Scalping," in Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York, 2001), 259-279
2. Evan Haefeli examines trophies' place within two different "cultures of violence" in an essay on a contemporary Dutch-Indian war. See Haefeli, "Kieft's War and the Cultures of Violence in Colonial America," in Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, ed. Michael A. Bellesiles (New York, 1999), 17-40
3. Discussing the bounties for wolves' heads in New England, Jon T. Coleman made connections between colonists' and Indians' uses of human parts and their uses of animal parts. See Coleman, "Terms of Dismemberment," Commonplace 4, no. 1 (October 2003), http://common-place.dreamhost.com//vol-04/ no -01/coleman/coleman-2.shtml
4. "Relation of the Plott - Indian," in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3d ser., 3: 161-64 (quotation, 164)
5. These heads, scalps, and hands are prime examples of what anthropologist Nicholas Thomas calls "entangled objects": material artifacts of colonial encounters that are invested with so many meanings that they cannot be located within a single cultural context. See Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 1-23
6. Christopher L. Miller and George R. Hamell, "A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade," Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (September 1986): 311-28
7. Laurier Turgeon, "The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object," Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1-29
8. Cynthia Jean Van Zandt, "Negotiating Settlement: Colonialism, Cultural Exchange, and Conflict in Early Colonial Atlantic North America, 1580-1660" (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1998)
9. David Murray, Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges (Amherst, Mass., 2000)
10. Fred R. Myers, ed., The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Santa Fe, N.Mex., 2001), 3-61
11. Regina Janes, Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York, 2005), esp. chap. 5, "African Heads and Imperial Décolletage: Beheadings in the Colonies," 139-75
12. More typical is the debate between Adam J. Hirsh and Ronald Dale Karr about the English incineration of a Pequot village on the Mystic River. Hirsch posits that English frustration with the Indians' military tactics caused the colonists to resort to a ruthless new form of frontier combat, whereas Karr insists that the decision to burn the village was not a novel tactic; instead, it reflected how the colonists saw the Pequots as illegitimate enemies. Despite their differences, both scholars emphasize "drastic cultural imbalances" and "the failure to establish reciprocity between the military cultures of the English Puritan forces and the Pequots." See Hirsch, "The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England," Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1988): 1187-1212 ("drastic cultural imbalances," 1209)
13. Karr, "'Why Should You Be So Furious?' The Violence of the Pequot War," Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (December 1998): 876-909 ("failure to establish reciprocity," 909)
14. Much of the literature on the war builds from a debate between the self-confessed puritan hater Francis Jennings and the reluctant puritan apologist Alden T. Vaughan. See Vaughan, "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637," WMQ 21, no. 2 (April 1964): 256-69
15. Vaughan, The New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston, 1965), 93-154
16. Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York, 1975), 177-227
17. Vaughan, "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637," in Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York, 1995), 177-99
18. Steven T. Katz, "The Pequot War Reconsidered," New England Quarterly 64, no. 2 (June 1991): 206-24
19. Michael L. Fickes, "'They Could Not Endure That Yoke': The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637," New England Quarterly 73, no. 1 (March 2000): 58-81
20. Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: The First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), 34-86
21. Janes, Losing Our Heads, 1-9; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "capital," "decapitate." To compare English colonists' and coastal Algonquians' methods of torture and dismemberment succinctly, the following sections present some broad generalizations, which are not meant to imply that either society was static but rather to demonstrate that each had distinct practices of dismemberment before their first major conflict
22. Numerous scholars have investigated the symbolism of early modern executions with a focus on their theatrical properties, including Karin S. Coddon, "'Unreal Mockery': Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth," English Literary History 56, no. 3 (Autumn 1989): 485-501 ("traitors living and dead," 499)
23. See also Karen Cunningham, "Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death," Publications of the Modern Language Association 105, no. 2 (March 1990): 209-22
24. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2d ed. (New York, 1995), 3-103
25. Philip Smith, "Executing Executions: Aesthetics, Identity, and the Problematic Narratives of Capital Punishment Ritual," Theory and Society 25, no. 2 (April 1996): 235-61
26. Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre (Edinburgh, Scotland, 2005), 1-23
27. For an overview of the English uses of beheadings, see John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment (New York, 1960), 28-29
28. For an overview of how English colonists conceived of monarchical authority, see T. H. Breen, The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630-1730 (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 46-48
29. James D. Drake, King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 (Amherst, Mass., 1999), 44-48
30. Cunningham, Publications of the Modern Language Association 105: 212-13
31. For further discussions of English notions of a just war, see Karr, Journal of American History 85: 880-88, esp. 885-88
32. Lepore, Name of War, 105-13
33. An overview of how the colonization of Ireland influenced the colonization of America is found in Nicholas P. Canny, "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America," WMQ 30, no. 4 (October 1973): 575-98
34. For a discussion of Standish's actions at Plymouth, see Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 130
35. Axtell and Sturtevant, WMQ 37: 464
36. William S. Simmons, "Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans' Perception of Indians," WMQ 38, no. 1 (January 1981): 56-72
37. Puritans also saw David as the author of the book of Psalms, making him a key source of spiritual inspiration. See Michael D. Coogan et al., eds., "Introduction to 1 Samuel" and "Introduction to Psalms," The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New Revised Standard Version), 3d ed. (Oxford, Eng., 2001), 398-99, 775-77
38. Laurence, History of Capital Punishment, 11 (quotation)
39. Roger Williams, A Key Into the Language of America; Or, An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New-England . . . (1643; repr., Bedford, Mass., 1997), 136 (quotation)
40. Paul A. Robinson, "Lost Opportunities: Miantonomi and the English in Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Country," in Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632-1816, ed. Robert S. Grumet (Amherst, Mass., 1996), 13-28, esp. 21-24
41. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 44-49, 130-39, 140-55
42. Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 1-36
43. For a discussion of the long theoretical debate about the role of the gift in nonstate societies from Marcel Mauss to Marshall Sahlins and its relevance to Indian and colonial exchanges in early America, see Murray, Indian Giving, 15-47
44. Daniel K. Richter, "War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience," WMQ 40, no. 4 (October 1983): 528-59, esp. 529-37
45. Hirsch, Journal of American History 74: 1190-92
46. Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Baltimore, 1993), 9-11
47. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 148-50, 226
48. Williams, Key Into the Language of America, 50-51 ("their arrow sticks")
49. For a discussion of how Indians related torture to justice and catharsis, see Richter, WMQ 40: 529-37
50. Haefeli, "Kieft's War," 20-22
51. See also Simmons, Cautantowwit's House, 52, 54-55
52. For a discussion of Indians' preference for whole heads, see Lepore, Name of War, 303 n. 103
53. Williams, Key Into the Language of America, 52 ("much delighted")
54. Philip Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England, Between the English, and the Salvages (1637; repr., Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1974), 17 ("as a testimony")
55. Jennings, Invasion of America, 190-91
56. Cave, Pequot War, 57-68
57. Cave, New England Quarterly 62: 27-44
58. Kevin McBride, "The Historical Archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots, 1637-1900," in Hauptman and Wherry, Pequots in Southern New England, 99
59. Cave, Pequot War, 40-43, 192 n. 63
60. Oberg, Uncas, 18-20
61. Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 210-11, 218
62. Hauptman, "Pequot War and Its Legacies," 72
63. Cave, WMQ 49: 509-21
64. Robinson, "Lost Opportunities," 21-22
65. Johnson, "Uncas and the Politics of Contact," 32-33
66. Winthrop, History of New England, 1: 223 ("set all their heads")
67. In his account Lion Gardener only mentions that the Pequots killed four men. See Gardener, "Leift. Lion Gardener his relation of the Pequot Warres," in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3d ser., 3: 131-60, esp. 3: 149
68. Winthrop, History of New England, 1: 190, 195 ("crept into a swamp")
69. Descriptions of the Mystic attack are found in Underhill, Nevves From America, 28-29, 36-42
70. Winthrop, History of New England, 1: 217, 260
71. Vincent, True Relation of the Late Battell, 6, 10-14
72. Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, ix, 7-10
73. Vincent, True Relation of the Late Battell, 15 ("It is not good")
74. Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, 13 ("for fear")
75. Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, 14
76. Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, 17 ("Pequots now became")
77. Ps. 118:6. The conquest of Ammon in the King James Bible is probably mistranslated. In the New Revised Standard Version, the passage reads that David "set them to work with saws and iron picks and iron axes, or sent them to the brickworks." Still, to Underhill, "harrowes" and "sawes" referred to violence, not tools of coercive labor. And Underhill was not the only colonist who made such connections. In his celebration of the Treaty of Hartford, Mason quored David's thirty-fourth psalm: "How the Face of God is set against them that do Evil, to cut off the Remembrance of them from the Earth? See Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, 20-21; Ps. 34:16
78. The July executions are also discussed in Hubbard, History of the Indian Wars, 2: 31
79. Vincent, True Relation of the Late Battell, 12 ("waiting [for] the fall")
80. Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, 17 ("Pequots now")
81. Williams to Winthrop, Feb. 28, 1638, in LaFantasie, Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1; 146 ("owne thoughts")
82. Vincent, True Relation of the Late Battell, 17 ("wily Mowhacks")
83. Salisbury, "Toward the Covenant Chain: Iroquois and Southern New England Algonquians, 1637-1684," in Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800, ed. Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), 61-74
84. Fickes, New England Quarterly 73: 61 n. 13
85. Williams to Winthrop, Aug. 20, 1637, in LaFantasie, Correspondence of Roger Williams, 113 ("Chenock," emphasis added)
86. Further discussion of Miantonomo's disillusionment with the English is found in Robinson, "Lost Opportunities," 23-28