By Reginald Johnson
Lucianne Lavin, the author of “Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples,” was
reading the paper one day when she was taken aback.
A story covered a
lecture she gave on her book and Connecticut Indians and one reader had left
the following comment: “Why would anyone want to read a book on Native
Americans? They’ve contributed nothing
to our society.”
Lavin said, “I was enraged about this. I really wanted to
write something, but I didn’t. I went to bed and thought about it.”
“I decided to come up
with a list of all the things that Native Americans have contributed to the
building of America.”
It was substantial.
“First of all, 90
percent of our food culture, was actually contributed by Native people,” she
said. The list includes corn, which came from the teosinte plant is northern
Mexico and was cultivated by Indians more than 8,000 years ago, but also beans and
squash.
“And tomatoes,
tomatoes are actually Native American coming out of South America, well before
the Italians got it,” Lavin said. Also developed first by Indians were
potatoes, which also originated in South America and the Southwest US and then brought to Europe by the Spanish.
“And chocolate,”
Lavin said, “all kinds of things you wouldn’t think were Native American, were
Native American”
Indians also provided
the basis for America’s transportation system, said Lavin, who has taught
archaeology and anthropology at Connecticut College and other universities.
“Our American
highways system is based on Native American pathways that crisscross the
continent,” Lavin said.
Good examples of that
are some of the first “federal roads,” like Routes 1 and 7.
“Route 7 was part of
the old Berkshire path that originally started in the coastal area of Stratford
and went up through Western Connecticut going through Schaghticoke and up into
Massachusetts, connecting coastal Connecticut communities with major Indian
communities and Western Massachusetts," she said. “For example Stockbridge, which
was a major Indian town --- it was actually called Indiantown before it was called
Stockbridge.”
Indian pathways were
also the basis for much of the United States railroad network.
Native Americans also
had a major impact on the development of American democracy, with the Founders like
Thomas Jefferson taking political ideas from Indian tribes.
“Jefferson and (Benjamin)
Franklin actually visited the Iroquois to learn more about their Confederation,
which was a democracy. In fact, all of the Native political systems in North
America were democracies. They ruled by consensus. Everybody had to agree. That’s
why it took so long for Native people to make decisions,” Dr. Lavin said.
“Our Bill of Rights
as well as the Constitution was based on Native American democracies,” she said.
Other areas where
Indians have had a major impact are music, art, sports and medicine.
“A lot of our herbal
doctors are utilizing Native plants and using Native prescriptions on how to
use them,” she said.
Finally, Lavin noted Indians have participated in large
numbers in the nation’s military. She said that as a percentage of their
population Native Americans have the highest participation rate in US military
of any ethnic group.
So the contributions
by Native Americans to America have been many and varied.
“What it also shows is not only that Native American
communities contributed to the building of America, but that Native history is
very much intertwined with American history,” Lavin said. “I mean Native histories are part of American
history --- you can’t separate them. Before the Europeans came, American
history was Native history because there were no Europeans here.”
Dr. Lavin, the
director of research and collections emeritus at the Institute for American
Indian Studies in Washington, CT, made her comments in a presentation at the
Bridgeport Public Library in November and then in a later interview. The talk
in Bridgeport coincided with Native American Heritage Month and was entitled
“Connecticut’s Indigenous Communities: An Introduction to their Histories and
Cultures.”
Lavin related that
indigenous people have been on the North American continent a very long time, predating
the arrival of Columbus and other Europeans in the 15th and 16th
centuries by thousands of years.
Archaeological discoveries
show signs of human habitation in the southwestern United States going back
36,000 years.
In Connecticut, an archaeological discovery in Avon revealed
the presence of a habitation site 12,000 years old.
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| The Pequonnock River Valley in Trumbull. Archaeologists found evidence in the valley of human habitation dating to 7,000 years ago. (Photo by Reginald Johnson) |
While Europeans arrived
thinking that they were going to “tame a wild wilderness” only inhabited by
“savages,” quite the opposite was true.
Indigenous people
lived in well-organized societies, with a “complicated and sophisticated
culture,” Lavin said. People had adequate food and shelter and health problems were minimal. Tribes were run
democratically, and everyone, including women, had a voice in the conduct of
tribal affairs.
“Native women had it
so much better than English women,” Lavin noted. “Native women could vote and
they could hold office. A number of sachems (chiefs) were squaw sachems in
certain Native communities.”
Indians lived
harmoniously with the environment, practicing “land stewardship” ----- long
before present-day environmental agencies did.
“A lot of this had a
basis where obviously they knew that if they didn’t practice stewardship, there
wouldn’t be any food, and people would die,” she said, adding, “ but there was
also spiritual basis behind his stewardship. ‘The Creator’ gave the tribe their
homeland and therefore it was their duty to oversee and protect everything on
those homelands.”
Lavin estimated that indigenous people in Connecticut lived
in a “Golden Age” of culture somewhere between 1000 and 1600.
But the arrival of
Europeans brought disaster for the Native community in New England.
European traders, as
well as the earliest English and Dutch settlers, brought with them diseases that
had already hit Europe, such as the plague and smallpox. Indians had not been
exposed to these diseases and had no immunity.
Disease swept
through Native communities in the early 17th century, decimating
their population. In some cases, tribes became extinct.
“They say anywhere from 70% to 90% of the Native Americans
in New England were killed off by 1650,” Lavin said.
Travelers found that
“when they came upon an Indian town, everyone was ill. So many people were ill,
they couldn’t help anybody and they just died. It was devastating.”
Lavin went on, “This
is the problem. After the Pequot War in 1637 the English began settling along the
coast and the Indians couldn’t stop them because they were a crippled society.
You know it’s not just the population, but it’s the leaders in those
populations that are killed off.”
“Think if Covid had
killed 77% or 90% of our population?” Lavin asked. “During the pandemic, I
think that people who died from Covid, the CDC came out with figures, it’s one
third of 1% of our population died from Covid. Think if you had 77% of them
dying?”
Natives also began
losing their land, as settlers made continual encroachments to expand farms and
steal wood. In many cases Indian land was illegally sold off to other whites.
Natives also lost
land due to cultural differences. Indians had no concept of the word “selling”
as it was done in Europe. In Native culture if one person from one tribe
approached another Indian in another tribe and asked to use their land the
first person would give it to them as a gift or as a temporary loan. The person
using the land would later give it back.
So when Indians were
first approached by white settlers about selling their land they thought they
were simply giving up their land temporarily. But that was not the case.
Natives also suffered a disadvantage since
they didn’t know English and didn’t know how to read contracts. Sale documents
were in English and they were meaningless to them.
In many cases Natives
had their land taken through outright fraud and when they complained to local
or state authorities the complaints went unanswered.
Another factor that
hurt Natives economically was the fur trade that developed after the Europeans
arrived. While Natives acquired other valuables in return for the trade the
number of animals that they needed for food drastically diminished.
“The whites totally
destroyed the Native American economy,” said Lavin. “By 1800, you know, the
largest animal in Connecticut were woodchucks.”
By the 19th century, indigenous people in Connecticut were vastly reduced in number, poor and suffered
discrimination at all levels.
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| Native dancers. (Photo Wikimedia Commons) |
According to Lavin,
Native leaders realized they had to begin adapting to the new world thrust upon
them in order for their people to live.
They came up with
strategies to survive. First, learn
English. They began doing that, in part by joining Christian churches, where
missionaries were teaching the Bible in English and helped Natives learn the
language.
Being a Christian
also give the Indians some protection from discrimination, Natives believed.
Another path followed
was to join the Anglo-American market economy, Lavin said. Indians took jobs as
laborers, farm hands, colliers (charcoal makers), silversmiths, basket weavers,
dockworkers and sailors.
Another means of assimilating into society was to join the
military. And Natives did that in large numbers, as noted above.
Today, the number of
tribes in Connecticut, officially recognized by the state, is 6. They are the
Mohegans, Mashuntucket Pequots and Eastern Pequots in the southeast, the Golden
Hill Paugussetts in the southwest and west; and the Schaghticokes (now in two
branches) in the northwest.
But Lavin says there
are many more Natives living in Connecticut who are from other tribes,
inexplicably not recognized by the state. Among those tribes are the
Quinnipiacs in the New Haven-Branford area; the Nipmucks in the east and the
Niantics in the southeast.
In spite of
ignorance by many non-Natives about Native-Americans and their history and
contributions, as well as ongoing discrimination, inconsistent help from the government
and in some cases poverty, indigenous people carry on, maintaining their
culture and upholding their traditions.
In the chapter
entitled “A.D. 1633 into the Twenty-First Century” in her book, Dr. Lavin said:
“Despite the efforts of archaeologists and social historians, the public tends
to believe in inaccurate portrayals of Native histories. Few people have any
conception of the continuity of local Native communities, Native preservation
of cultural traditions and group identities and the longtime resistance of Native
people to the intensive continuous discrimination and detribalization efforts
of local and federal governments and non-Native individuals. This book aims to
change all that. As Cree-Salish-Kootenai author D'Arcy McNickle wrote: “Only
the Indians seemed unwilling to accept oblivion as an appropriate final act in
the New World drama… They lost, but were never defeated.”
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