One nation two worlds

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

As the Indians were rapidly losing their land and culture through the 1700s, some found a new sense of identity in the Christian church. The Rev. Roland Mars, holding the bible, traces his family to Samuel Niles -- founder of the Narragansett Indian Church where Mars now preaches part-time.

Today

Tuesday: The Rhode Island Indian Council and job counselor Michael Bliss help city Indians "get on the right path."

City Indians

Erasing the Narragansetts from the Rhode Island map

Slideshow

Full series

Near the end of King Philip's War, a wounded Indian staggered into the settlement at the head of Narragansett Bay.

The colonists, who believed he had been a leader in the attack on Providence, clamored for his execution. Town and military officials were summoned and the wounded man was shot.

Indian captives who were not executed were sold into slavery.

Both the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies sold Indians to buyers in New England, the West Indies, Spain and on the Mediterranean coasts. Philip's 9-year-old son was enslaved.

Although Rhode Island prohibited the enslavement of Indians, Roger Williams and others devised a plan for selling captives into "involuntary servitude."

Adult Indians sold in Providence were forced to work for nine years, a term that was later reduced to seven. Children were indentured until their 20s and 30s.

Some broke the law. And Rhode Island's Indian captives could always be sold to other colonies, where they could become permanent slaves.

The profits from the sales -- Indians sold for an average of 33 shillings, or 3 pounds -- went to the trading companies and to the small group of citizens who stayed in Providence during the war.

Although Indians could work voluntarily as apprentices, and even learn a trade, many were pressed into labor because they could not pay their debts.

Servitude helped satisfy the dilemma of what to "do" with the Indians, historian James D. Drake wrote in King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676. "The war produced hundreds of Indian refugees, who lived as vagabonds within or on the edges of New England towns."

There were practical considerations, too, says Jill Lepore, author of The Name of War.

Indian labor helped the struggling colonists rebuild their ravaged towns, while the sale of Indians into foreign slavery helped them "fill the coffers emptied by wartime expenses," she says.

Only a handful of colonists objected. Selling "souls" for money, said the missionary John Eliot, "seems to me a dangerous merchandise."

SOME INDIANS were bound to white families for other reasons.

Stripped of much of their ancestral land, Indians were seen as a propertyless people by a society that viewed land as a sign of personal worth.

Local officials, who thought of themselves as "fathers of the towns," saw the Narragansetts in their communities as "the poor," in need of oversight and relief.

Poor or orphaned children were often placed in "proper" homes, where they worked until they were adults.

This saved towns the cost of raising the children, and provided families and business owners with cheap labor, says Ella Sekatau, the tribe's ethnohistorian. It also broke the tribe's community bonds and exposed the children to sexual abuse by their masters.

In 1730, the General Assembly adopted regulations that lawmakers said would curb the exploitation of native labor. An Indian could not become a servant or an apprentice without the approval of two justices or the colony's wardens.

"Evil minded persons in this colony, of a greedy and covetous design, often draw Indians into their debt, by selling them goods at extravagant rates, and get the . . . Indians to be bound to them for longer time than is just or reasonable," the law said.

Still, by 1774, more than 35 percent of all Indians in Rhode Island were living with white families. Many were given the names of their bondholders, names they keep today: Stanton, Wilcox, Brown and Hazard.

After King Philip's War, town clerks started classifying Narragansetts as blacks, say Sekatau and Ruth Herndon, a professor at the University of Toledo, who studied the period with Sekatau. By misnaming the Indians, Sekatau says, the clerks committed a kind of "documentary genocide."

SOME INDIANS gained a sense of identity from an unlikely place: the Christian church.

For more than a century, the Narragansetts had resisted the English missionaries carrying thick Bibles, some of them in the Algonquin language.

The English had made conversion of the Indians a priority in building the New World. In Massachusetts, officials were charged with introducing the Indians to the "only true God and Saviour of Mankind."

Conversion required more than a deep knowledge of the Bible -- Indians had to abandon their way of life, too.

The Narragansetts believed that everything, both animate and inanimate, had a spirit provided by the Creator, Sekatau says. Every Indian was governed by spirits, which made him or her strong.

The Europeans failed to grasp the Indian's close relationship with the Great Spirit and the natural world.

The tribes, wrote the authors of New England's First Fruits, an early Puritan treatise, "serve the Devill and are led by him."

According to historians, the sachem Ninigret, asked to endorse Christianity for his people, coolly replied that "it would be better to preach it among the English till they brought forth its good fruits."

BUT IN THE 1740s, many Narragansetts joined the religious revival, or Great Awakening, that swept New England.

More than any other form of Christianity, the new religion resembled the tribe's ancestral beliefs. Itinerant preachers, like pawwaws or medicine men, were recruited to their calling by dreams and visions. Called New Lights, they emphasized the spoken rather than the written word and relied on personal experience rather than formal training.

For the Indians, decimated by war, disease and encroachment, the revival offered hope that "the new world in the making would include them," says Brown University Prof. William S. Simmons, author of The Narragansett.

Samuel Niles heard the message.

Around 1750, Niles and about a hundred other Christian Indians broke with the Rev. Joseph Park, a Harvard-trained English minister with a Congregational church in Westerly.

They built a "Meetinghouse 25 feet square" in the Charlestown woods and "spontaneously gathered themselves . . . into a Church, or agreed to walk together as such," wrote Ezra Stiles, a Newport clergyman and contemporary.

Niles was ordained by his Indian brethren, without the support of the English clergy.

Stiles found it "extraordinary" that a man who could not read or write could also be a preacher. But, he added, Niles was "an earnest, zealous man, and perhaps does more good to the Indian than any white man could do."

A FIERY SPEAKER, Niles divided his time between baptisms, sermons and political reform.

Past sachems had sold or given away much of the tribe's land, and Niles worried the tribe would lose more.

To protect ancestral land from acquisition by colonists, the sachem Ninigret II had struck a deal in 1709 with Rhode Island. He gave up all of the tribe's land except for a 64-square-mile tract of shoreline, farmland, swamp, woods and ponds in Charlestown. The colony, in turn, agreed to protect the tribe's permanent reservation.

But the deal was flawed.

It allowed sachems, considered by the English to be the legal managers of the tribe's land, to sell property with the legislature's approval.

By the time Niles established his own church, Ninigret II's great grandson, Thomas Ninigret, ruled the tribe.

Educated in England and dubbed King Tom, Ninigret lived like an English planter in a big house.

Deep in debt, he persuaded the General Assembly in 1759 to repeal all laws limiting the sale of reservation land. In just five years, Ninigret sold 3,247 acres of Indian land to pay off his creditors.

Niles and his group hired a lawyer and lobbied officials to stop Ninigret. The land, they said, is "being disposed of contrary to our minds."

They tried unsuccessfully to depose Ninigret, and even sent an envoy to England to plead their case.

But in 1767, the Rhode Island Assembly allowed King Tom -- who owed some lawmakers money -- to sell as much land as he needed to retire his debts. Members of the General Assembly continued to allow the sale of Indian land until four years after his death, in 1769.

AFTER KING TOM'S death, Niles and his followers asked the legislature to abolish the position of sachem and replace it with a tribal council. The last hereditary leader, George Sachem, King Tom's grandson, died around 1779, when a tree fell on him.

In 1790, the U.S. Congress prohibited the purchase of Indian land by individuals or states without federal approval. The Nonintercourse Act, intended to protect Indians from fraud or being forced to pay off debt with land, was widely ignored.

Two years later, Rhode Island lawmakers established a treasurer to oversee the tribe's finances. They also restricted voting in council elections to males 21 years and older. Those whose mothers were black could not vote.

By then, the tribe had lost much of its land, including its coastal land. The Narragansetts, Niles said, could no longer fish without trespassing.

A census count listed 528 Indians in Charlestown.

Unable to fish, hunt and log on older tribal land, some Narragansetts joined nearby tribes and moved to New York and Wisconsin.

Those who stayed worked small farms, cut wood or were day laborers, carpenters and stone masons. Some married non-Indians. Most spoke English.

Some Indians, who had "converted" to Christianity to coexist, still practiced the tribe's ancient ways. But preserving Narragansett culture in Charlestown "was an arduous task," Sekatau says.

IN THE MID-1800s, state and local officials began to debate the tribe's future.

As early as 1832, a state committee on Indian affairs recommended that all common lands belonging to the Narragansetts be sold. The land, said a committee member, was "impoverished." The Indians lived in miserable huts and lacked "almost everything necessary to make life comfortable."

Selling their land, the committee said, would help civilize the Indians and greatly increase their "comfort and happiness."

The Indians accused the whites of coveting their land.

Nationally, a similar notion -- that tribal reservations and governments prevented Indians from joining American society -- was taking hold. Congress was spending $10,000 a year on an Indian "Civilization Fund."

In 1880, the Rhode Island legislature approved "An Act to Abolish the Tribal Authority and Tribal Relations of the Narragansett Tribe of Indians."

There were no more "pure" Indians, a three-man committee reported. Over the years, the Indians had married into white and black families, the commission said. The reservation land was of little value; tribal culture, they said, encouraged "pauperism and vandalism"; and an Indian school, started a century ago by the English, had failed.

Less than 1,000 acres of common tribal land was left.

The tribal council agreed to the sale. But many Indians opposed it.

Tribal council member Joshua H. Noka worried that Indians would fare no better than blacks who had won the title of U.S. citizen.

"For a colored man to be a citizen, he will remain about the same as at the present time," Noka told the commission. He "can't expect ever to be President of the United States, or an attorney general. It makes no difference how well he is qualified, he can't be put into a jury box, to be drawn as common juror, or anything of the kind; but if you have got a cesspool to dig out, put him in there."

Some who opposed detribalization eventually gave in.

"They were strongly influenced by the parties and the booze," says tribal medicine man Lloyd Wilcox, whose father and grandfather often talked about the terrible event. "There was a depletion of the tribal will and of tribal numbers. Everything was failing."

In a closed-door session the legislature approved the sale of 922 acres of tribal common land to the state for $5,000. The tribe reserved two acres, the site of a stone church built in 1859 to replace the original wooden church destroyed by fire.

To receive money from the sale, the Narragansetts had to prove their heritage. During a half-dozen public hearings, they had to produce genealogical records and prove an interest in tribal affairs. They could hire lawyers, but the commission had the final say.

In the end, the state recognized 324 Narragansetts and gave them each an equal share of the purchase price -- $15.43.

One of Sekatau's relatives used the money to buy a jackknife and some candy.

Some Narragansetts who qualified for a payment never claimed it, Sekatau says. "They laughed about it. They said, 'We will never cash this in because this is a form of genocide.' "

The name of the Narragansett tribe, the commission concluded in 1883, "now passes" from the state books.

A handful of officials later offered a sentimental farewell. They gathered at Fort Ninigret in Charlestown to remember the tribe with speeches and to mark its former land with an unadorned boulder.

The Rev. F. Denison gave the oration.

"Alas!" he said. "Without a written language, without institutions, without a code of laws, and without real estate, except a communistic ownership of the wilderness as hunting grounds and corn patches, the natives sat in darkness, proving the weakness of nature's light, and transmitted no lessons of knowledge to the centuries following them. Here was shown the impotency of unaided paganism; its strength was insufficient for man's elevation."

Governor Augustus O. Bourn said the Indians had "melted away like hoar frost before the summer sun."

But they left a list of names.