The geographic location of Algonquian-speaking people in North America prior to European settlementsA 16th-century sketch of the Algonquian village of Pomeiock near the present-day Outer Banks in North Carolina[1]
Before Europeans came into contact, most Algonquian settlements lived by hunting and fishing, although many of them supplemented their diet by cultivating corn, beans and squash (the "Three Sisters"). The Ojibwe cultivated wild rice.[3]
Colonists in the Massachusetts Bay area first encountered the Wampanoag, Massachusett, Nipmuc, Pennacook, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Quinnipiac. The Mohegan, Pequot, Pocumtuc, Podunk, Tunxis, and Narragansett were based in southern New England. The Abenaki were located in northern New England: present-day Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont in what became the United States and eastern Quebec in what became Canada. They traded with French colonists who settled along the Atlantic coast and the Saint Lawrence River. The Mahican were located in western New England in the upper Hudson River Valley (around present-day Albany, New York). These groups cultivated crops, hunted, and fished.[5]
The Algonquians of New England such as the Piscataway (who spoke Eastern Algonquian), practised a seasonal economy. The basic social unit was the village: a few hundred people related by a clankinship structure. Villages were temporary and mobile. The people moved to locations of greatest natural food supply, often breaking into smaller units or gathering as the circumstances required. This custom resulted in a certain degree of intertribal mobility, especially in troubled times.[citation needed]
In warm weather, they constructed portable wigwams, a type of hut usually with buckskin doors. In the winter, they erected the more substantial longhouses, in which more than one clan could reside. They cached food supplies in more permanent, semi-subterranean structures.[citation needed]
In December, when the snows began, the people created larger winter camps in sheltered locations, where they built or reconstructed longhouses. February and March were lean times. The tribes in southern New England and other northern latitudes had to rely on cached food. Northerners developed a practice of going hungry for several days at a time. Historians hypothesize that this practice kept the population down, with some invoking Liebig's law of the minimum.[citation needed]
The southern Algonquians of New England relied predominantly on slash and burn agriculture.[9][10][11][12][13][14] They cleared fields by burning for one or two years of cultivation, after which the village moved to another location. This is the reason the English found the region relatively cleared and ready for planting. By using various kinds of native corn (maize), beans and squash, southern New England natives were able to improve their diet to such a degree that their population increased and they reached a density of 287 people per 100 square miles as opposed to 41 in the north.[15]
Scholars estimate that, by the year 1600, the indigenous population of New England had reached 70,000–100,000.[15]
Midwest
The French encountered Algonquian peoples in this area through their trade and limited colonization of New France along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The historic peoples of the Illinois Country were the Shawnee, Illiniwek, Kickapoo, Menominee, Miami, Sauk and Meskwaki. The latter were also known as the Sac and Fox, and later known as the Meskwaki Indians, who lived throughout the present-day Midwest of the United States.[16]
During the nineteenth century, many Native Americans from east of the Mississippi River were displaced over great distances through the United States passage and enforcement of Indian removal legislation; they forced the people west of the Mississippi River to what they designated as Indian Territory. After the US extinguished Indian land claims, this area was admitted as the state of Oklahoma in the early 20th century.[16]
Doctors Dean R. Snow and William A. Starna -- Archeologists and historians who have conducted ground-breaking archeological research in the Mohawk Valley and other Algonquian and Iroquoian sites.
^Stevenson W. Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agriculture and Country Life 1640-1840 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1950), 2, 35-37, 63-65, 124.
^Day, Gordon M. (1953). "The Indian as an Ecological Factor in the Northeastern Forests". Ecology. 34 (2): 329–346. doi:10.2307/1930900. JSTOR1930900.
^New England and New York areas 1580-1800, 1953. Note: The Lenni Lenape (Delaware) in New Jersey and the Massachuset in Massachusetts used fire in ecosystems
^Russell, Emily W.B. Vegetational Change in Northern New Jersey Since 1500 A.D.: A Palynological, Vegetational and Historical Synthesis, Ph.D. dissertation. New Brunswick, PA: Rutgers University. Author notes on page 8 that Indians often augmented lightning fires. 1979
^Russell, Emily W.B. (1983). "Indian Set Fires in the Forests of the Northeastern United States". Ecology. 64 (1): 78–88. doi:10.2307/1937331. JSTOR1937331. Author found no strong evidence that Indians purposely burned large areas, but they did burn small areas near their habitation sites. Noted that the Lenna Lenape used fire.
^Gowans, William. "A Brief Description of New York, Formerly Called New Netherland with the Places Thereunto Adjoining, Likewise a Brief Relation of the Customs of the Indians There." New York, NY: 1670. Reprinted in 1937 by the Facsimile Text Society, Columbia University Press, New York. Notes that the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) in New Jersey used fire in ecosystems.
