Surprises are in store for those attending the July 5 presentation on Native American history at the Meredith Community Center. In releasing his new book, Clash of Cultures: The Story of the Penacooks, the Winnipesaukees, and Chiefs Passaconaway, Wonalancet and Kancamagus, Rudy VanVeghten will delve into the more obscure details behind the events people have heard about.
An example is the story of the First Thanksgiving, when benevolent Native Americans who had taught the settlers of Plimoth Plantation to grow corn and other vegetables joined the Pilgrims in celebrating a bountiful harvest following a year in which several settlers had died of starvation.
Before assisting the Pilgrims, Squanto and other inhabitants of his village had been kidnapped by Thomas Hunt, an English sea captain, and Squanto spent time in England, where he learned the English language. When he returned to his village, its residents had perished from European diseases or fled, and Squanto had to seek refuge in a Wampanoag village led by the chief Massasoit.
The natives, therefore, were not initially welcoming to the Pilgrims who landed at present-day Provincetown and made their way to Squanto’s deserted village of Patuxet, which they named after the port in Plymouth, England, from which they had departed.
Instead of welcoming the Pilgrims, the Native Americans had first tried to use magic to send the Europeans back home. One of the sorcerers that Massasoit summoned was Passaconaway of the Penacook tribe. Passaconaway later recalled his attempts at sorcery, saying that despite his great abilities, he was powerless before the “Pale Faces.”
Rudy, a member of the Meredith Historical Society with Dutch ancestral roots, has spent more than a decade working as a contributor and copy-editor for a history journal, de Halve Maen (The Half Moon), focusing on Dutch-American history in the Hudson River Valley. He is former editor of the Meredith News and author of The History of Meredith Bay.
He also has lived at various locations around New England where there is a rich Native American heritage.
As he states in his introduction to his new book, “our local Native American history is a complex study that cannot easily be separated from the broader history of the state, the continent, or even the globe.”
In an interview, Rudy said his new book grew out of a request three years ago to give a talk on the American Revolutionary War.
“I’ve been doing research on it ever since,” Rudy said, “but in the meantime, I had been doing research for a history journal over in the Hudson Valley area.” He explained that de Halve Maen was the name of Henry Hudson’s ship. “One of the articles that I did recently was on Indian history.”
His research was so compelling that he brought it together in the new book, which will be released during his talk in Meredith.
“The Indian cultures were clashing even before the white men came, and as it turns out, the white men were clashing against each other even before they came over,” Rudy said. “And then you’ve got the whites and the Indians clashing. So it’s a lot of cultures that are clashing, and that’s basically what this talk is.”
The book makes an interesting observation: While the natives were living as hunter-gatherers, they were peaceful; but once they began planting crops, that changed.
“Agricultural cultivation allowed seasonally itinerant clans to coalesce into villages with a more sedentary lifestyle,” Rudy writes. “Soon we see the single-family wigwam structures along major lakes and riverbeds giving way to communal longhouses in fertile upland plateaus.”
Iroquoians developed into a matrilineal society in which the women were the farmers, growing crops and making pottery. Men were in charge of hunting and building longhouses — but hunting was no longer as necessary in an agricultural society. Some scholars believe that men turned to warfare as a means of gaining importance in such a society.
In discussing local sachems, Rudy describes Passaconaway as boastful, “bragging about all the scalps he has hanging on his wigwam pole from Iroquois, from Mohawks.”
Rudy notes that there is a Mohawk Island in Lake Winnisquam, but Mohawks never lived here. According to native lore, there was an ancient Indian battle there, but no written record of such a battle exists. Rudy suggests that the battle occurred before there were Europeans here to write of the incident.
As Europeans arrived in the New World, the Jesuits sought to convert the natives of the area to their faith, while the Calvinists came to preach their version of faith. To the natives, it was confusing: One group of Christians telling them to pray to a crucifix featuring Christ on the cross and the other saying that violated the Second Commandment’s prohibition on the worship of graven images.
“And it turns out that the Winnipesaukees and the Penacooks, when they got dispersed, some of them went up to Canada, some of them went over to New York,” Rudy said. “So why would they go different ways? Because of a clash of cultures.”
Rudy explains how archaeologists have determined the migration of indigenous people across the country, breaking down the various cultures and language groups. The Algonquians shared a common language, settling in the Northeast.
The Mahicans (different from the Mohegans) lived in western New England and the Upper Hudson Valley. Abenakis were in northern New England; Penacooks in the Merrimack River Valley; Nashaway along the Nashua River; Sokokis in the middle Connecticut River Valley; Cowass in the upper Connecticut and Pemigewasset valleys; Pigwackets in the Saco River and Ossipee area; and in Maine, the Kennebecs and Penobscots. Southern New England was home to the Wampanoag, Massachusetts, Nipmuks, Narragansetts, and Pequods. The lower Connecticut River was home to the Pocumtucs, and the Mohegans were in western Connecticut.
The opportunity to hear Rudy’s talk and purchase his book will occur on Tuesday, July 5, at 7 p.m. at the Meredith Community Center, 1 Circle Drive, Meredith. Information on the Meredith Historical Society and other talks in the Speaker Series is online at meredithhistoricalsocietynh.org.
This story originally appeared in The Laker.