Narragansett

At the height of their power in the late 17th century, the Narragansett, a Native American tribe of the Algonquian linguistic stock, occupied most of present-day Rhode Island, from Narragansett Bay on the east to the Pawcatuck River on the west, as well as parts of western Connecticut and eastern Massachusetts. Their precipitous decline and gradual recovery typify the experience of indigenous tribes after the arrival of Europeans.

Cultural anthropologists, using archeological data and written archives of ancient oral histories, believe that the Narragansett were among the oldest organized tribes in North America, dating back 30,000 years before the first contact with European explorers in the early 1500s. Like most New England tribes, the Narragansett were primarily agricultural, but given the wooded wilderness and the readily available ocean stock, they also hunted and fished (most notably clams).

Their communities were organized around a sachem, who, in consultation with advisors, guided the settlement's development, saw to its economic stability, and maintained its security. The Narragansett were known for military acumen; several smaller tribes sought them in protective alliances. That influential position was strengthened when a wave of epidemics (most likely Weil's syndrome, introduced by itinerant French trappers) swept southern New England between 1615 and 1617, decimating other tribes but leaving the Narragansett largely untouched.

During the first decades of the 17th century, the Narragansett looked with concern at the growing influence of English settlers in neighboring Massachusetts. To maintain peace, the Narragansett, under the powerful sachem Canonicus, structured a land deal with the outspoken Protestant theologian Roger Williams and his followers in 1636, giving those settlers much of what is present-day Providence.

The Narragansett originally sided with the Puritan settlers in their war against the militant Pequots, until evidence of the brutalities of the English convinced the tribe to pursue a more aggressive stand against the English incursion into Massachusetts. By 1643, however, with much of the scattered resistance defeated and the English threatening to invade their lands in Rhode Island, [Page 1544]the Narragansett agreed to a treaty that would ensure peace for nearly 30 years.

Detail from a participant's headgear at an August 2008 powwow of the Narragansett tribe in Charlestown, Rhode Island. The 2010 U.S. Census recorded 2,000 members of the tribe living in Rhode Island.

That neutrality, however, ended when the Narragansett, then numbering close to 5,000, joined a cabal of tribes, most prominently the Wampanoag, to oust the English occupation entirely in a bloody year-long uprising known as King Philip's War (1675–76), named for the Wampanoag sachem (the English saw the sachem, incorrectly, as a monarchial figure). When an English expeditionary force attacked a Narragansett fortress and killed hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children (the Great Swamp Massacre) in December 1675, the Narragansett retreated into the heavy woods and swamps in southern Rhode Island. The English pursued. Over the next decade, those Narragansett who refused to accept occupation either headed west to New York State and beyond or were subjected to harsh treatment, most often sold into slavery to work on Caribbean plantations.

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