My New Project

About a year ago, I was deep into research on the history of slavery in Connecticut, as part of my work on the education committee of a local historic house.  I learned how this state was the "Georgia of the North," with more slaves than any other New England colony, and also how slaves continued their West African religious practices such as hiding minkisi under floorboards for protection.  I also spent some time looking into pirates and privateers who operated in the waters of Long Island Sound.

Now I'm beginning research on Native Americans in colonial Connecticut, in the 18th-century.  It's just the beginning of my research, but with both the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and the Institute for American Indian Studies here in the state, I know I'll turn up some interesting information to share with the fifth graders come April.  But one statistic strikes me:  there were approximately 30,000 Native Americans here in what is now Connecticut when colonists arrived.  By 1762, there were less than 1,000.

We're also going to be including some discussion of archaeology, essentially how we as historians and docents learn about the ordinary people who didn't make it into the written historical record.  There have been thousands of artifacts discovered at our site, which should make for wonderful discussion, even if we can't show the classes anything more than pictures of objects or replicas.  Of course, when I was in elementary school, Indiana Jones popularized archaeology.  I hope our tour will be able to do the same and get the students excited about our local history and how we learn it.

Urban Legend

We were playing Native American village yesterday in the cold and blustery, very November weather, inspired by our Mashantucket Pequot museum visit. Bud's already become quite a shot with his bow, sending arrows more than 25 feet. Luckily the arrows have little power and no tip so they won't hurt anyone, but we're still encouraging safety and aiming only at trees, bushes, or the ground. Sis was the medicine woman in the two-story wigwam (aka our playset fort). "It's a New York wigwam," she explained, "with a shop on the bottom and the house on the top." Plus, apparently, it has tv: when Bud went on his elk hunt, we stayed behind to watch on television! Very urban Indians, these, which is in keeping with our continued emphasis that Native Americans today don't live in wigwams and wear feathers all the time but are still very much present and living their culture. It's very present for us too, because as I type, here at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, the kids have headed outside into yet more cold to continue playing.

The Second Holiday

Today we celebrated Native American Heritage Day, though we didn't know it when we set out this morning to visit the Mashantucket Pequot museum. With the celebration of Thanksgiving and all the discussions of first peoples at home and at school, Sis and Bud have been very interested in Native Americans these days. So we decided to revisit the museum.

Our favorite part of the Pequot museum is the walk-in, life-size, recreated village panorama, with several wigwams and numerous Pequots performing various tasks from hunting to weaving, fishing to cooking. Sis particularly likes the medicine man healing the sick warrior. Bud likes spotting various animals and activities; today it was find-the-papoose (since he made a paper one at school which he has been wearing along with his bow). They both loved operating and listening to the audio tours on "magic wands." They went from number to number, learning about aspects of village life.

Today there was a special performance of a puppeteer and ventriloquist ("venticklist!"), Buddy Big Mountain. At first the kids were nonplussed . . . because they didn't realize he was making all the voices, songs included! Such modern, high-tech kids--they thought it was a recording. They were pretty amazed when they realized how it all worked. Though, many of the jokes (like the one about "Custer had it coming") went over their heads. But we did learn that it was the relatively new annual observation of Native American Heritage Day, always celebrated the Friday after Thanksgiving.

As per usual, we ended our visit in the shop, where we finally consented to Bud having a bow with an arrow (and Sis got yet another critter, this time a woolly mammoth). I picked up a James Beard Award-winning cookbook, Spirit of the Harvest, and hope to cook up some more appreciation of indigenous peoples here at home this weekend, another way to celebrate Native American Heritage Day.