Another day, another lead, another potential conduit to information about our Pioneer Valley.
This latest source came to me the same way most arrive these days, by email from a reader responding to something I wrote. He wanted to meet and talk, preferably over lunch. He included a phone number after his name, which I interpret as an invitation to break the ice with a call.
First, I responded by email. Now, a couple of brief phone conversations later, we’ve loosely scheduled a meeting for next week in my hometown of South Deerfield. I’m looking forward to it. We may or may not connect, but like the saying goes, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” I’m there.
It’s not necessary to name this 75-year-old retired local historian yet. I will introduce him as a Springfield native who has called Holyoke home for 40 years. He’s active in the community and is still taking continuing-education courses in Native American studies at Westfield State University. Also, the man has a website focusing on Mount Tom that’s been out there for about six years and, get this, his wife sits on the Wistariahurst Museum’s board of directors. Given all that and probably much more — remember, at this point we’ve only touched base — how could we not find fertile ground for discussion?
What this man finds particularly puzzling, even vexing, these days is the paucity of information about local Native American culture and spirituality. I know the drill. It is indeed almost impossible to put anything meaningful together despite the many Native American place names that survive in our lexicon and rare, random Native legends like the Great Beaver tale of our Pocumtuck Range and Mount Sugarloaf. Honestly, what else is there in that realm? The answer is simple: not much.
Yeah, yeah, of course we have artifact collections strewn about in several repositories and dresser drawers, many of which have lost their context and provenance. But even these hints and traces are only vague reminders of a culture that long ago vanished, taking with it the rich winter tales and local plant-medicines dating back to our deepest pre-Columbian past.
In all the reading I’ve done on this subject, I have not read of one Pioneer Valley medicine man or shaman or whatever you want to call the indigenous spiritual leaders, healers and wise men. Yes, yes, we know of a few war chiefs, negotiators and land-deed signatories, but not a one of them is to my knowledge identified as a spiritual leader in the class of Penacook chief/sachem/sagamore Passaconaway of the Merrimack Valley. The influence of this great Algonquian leader would have reached into our part of the Connecticut Valley, particularly among the Sokoki of Northfield/Vernon, Vt., the southernmost Western Abenaki villages. But who were his spiritual equals or at least associates among the so-called River Indians of Deerfield, Hadley, Northampton, Springfield and Westfield? That is, the Pocumtuck, Norwottuck and Agawams. Even the Nipmuc. Who from these people, our own indigenous villages, would have sat around spiritual council fires with Passaconaway?
Frankly, that’s a question that may never be answered. Why? Because it wasn’t important to Puritan colonizers, many of them ministers more interested in converting the Natives to Christianity than respecting and recording their pagan, nature-based spirituality — their song, dance, beliefs and ritual. Primitive and
irrelevant in the interlopers’ narrow worldview, that was precisely what they were trying to erase, not promote, and the sooner the better.
What I find particularly interesting after speaking with my new local history contact is that he, through formal education, has discovered what I myself have learned traveling down my own autodidactic paths through many scholarly bibliographies. That is, if it’s culture and oral history and ceremonial landscape and ritual you’re interested in, well, your best bet is to study the tribes of the Midwest and West Coast, where information is fresher, much of it recorded on tape by our earliest anthropologists trying to preserve dying Native American languages and their rich fireside tales before they went extinct. By studying these faraway peoples’ ways of life and rituals, and their cosmological beliefs, you can indeed open a window into the Northeastern indigenous people discovered and displaced from earlier “frontiers.” In some cases, especially around the Great Lakes and into the Great Plains, you’re studying people from the same bolt of cloth, those who were driven west and either assimilated or set up shop in new surroundings. Some of these more familiar “tribes,” such as but not limited to the Potawatomi, Sioux and Blackfeet, share deep histories to East Coast or “Dawnland” origins.
I do hope this new Holyoke source, who came to me through a third-party reader I have never met or heard of, will bear tasty fruit. If it works like the discovery of such new sources most often does, we’ll converse, trade information, till fertile ground, plant random seeds of discovery and harvest whatever fruits and berries ripen.
Mount Tom? Yes, definitely part of our domain — its prominent, distinctive Holyoke Range on the southern horizon forming the lower banks of our Great Beaver’s ancient pond, the drained floor of which today serves as a breadbasket.