The Dredge Cycle

Intentions of the Gods

To set the stage: At the start of Metacom’s War  –  the blood­i­est con­flict per-​​​​capita in Amer­i­can his­tory, per­haps in all the continent’s story  –  there was one of those fuse-​​​​lighting moments. Most of it hap­pened Decem­ber 19, 1675. That might seem like an early date to you  –  but get steeped in the 17^th cen­tury, and you’ll see it’s almost three gen­er­a­tions years deep. It’s not early at all; it’s the begin­ning of the end. Or, if you pre­fer, the begin­ning of this. All this. For more than five decades, the Pilgrims…

The Search for Maugus

I grew up on Mau­gus Avenue. When peo­ple (from a few blocks, towns, or states over) vis­ited, they asked my par­ents the same ques­tion: “What’s a Mau­gus?” I’ve spent most of my life won­der­ing, “Who was Mau­gus?” The time’s almost here I get to start really tear­ing into that question.

Buoyed

Tues­day after­noon I went over to Pat’s place and dug through boxes-​​and-​​boxes-​​and-​​boxes of books with her hus­band, John. To give a sense of the rar­ity and qual­ity there, a good deal of her col­lec­tion will be donated to UNM’s library archives, and prob­a­bly another university’s.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Toward the end of Pat’s book, Wee­t­a­moo has some hard con­cerns about writ­ing, itself. Young Meta­com has learned to write the fig­ure A. He pro­nounces it for her, and explains the white men’s util­ity in writ­ing  –  and the Indian need, there­fore, to be con­ver­sant in it. I had to stop read­ing a while after I saw her response: …What if, when­ever we wanted a story, we could just reach out and read it from a paper, instead of wait­ing for the right time and place and…

Next Levels of Dramatic Irony

Your expe­ri­ence as a stan­dard reader: Toward the end of Pat’s ren­di­tion of Weetamoo’s diary, the sachem-​​​​to-​​​​be is finally called for her adult­hood rite. The year is 1654. She’s been antic­i­pat­ing it most of the book; she’ll spend sev­eral days and nights in a sweat­lodge, tend­ing a fire and wait­ing for con­tact from the non­ma­te­r­ial world. In her two visions, a deer she’d uncer­e­mo­ni­ously killed leads her through the win­ter night to an impor­tant fish­ing area to the Pocas­set, down­stream from a water­fall. The sec­ond night, the deer…

I miss you, Pat

I’m read­ing my late editor’s Wee­t­a­moo (pro­nounced Weh-​​​​táh-​​​​moh) book, Heart of the Pocas­sets. It’s a heavily-​​​​researched, 95% imag­ined diary of the Pocas­set sachem at 14. Pat wrote it for Scholas­tic, for those lucky eighth-​​​​graders with an Indian His­tory unit. It’s sim­ple and refresh­ing, if light-​​​​weight for my needs. An easy lit­tle recap after the over-​​​​saturated and dis­turb­ing Mayflower. Weetamoo’s par­ents man­date that she find time each day to learn patience. Because the his­tor­i­cal Wee­t­a­moo didn’t read or write (her cul­ture didn’t use those tech­nolo­gies) it’s a…

Three Shouts of "Huzzah!"

A stom­ach bug this week afforded me time to fin­ish Mayflower. The epi­logue, where Philbrick draws most of his con­clu­sions, is a fat ham­mer to the chest. And while there are many ideas worth dwelling on in there, one ques­tion has me absolutely enthralled: How did Meta­com (aka Philip) go from the most hunted man in New Eng­land in the late 17^th cen­tury to a mytho­log­i­cal proto-​​​​American freedom-​​​​fighter in the early-​​​​19^th? Philbrick, under­stand­ably, rushes through the inter­ven­ing 150 years, and left me pon­der­ing. As I said to…

So Many Questions

Almost done with Mayflower. Help­ing me: I know a tremen­dous amount more about the region and the 17^th cen­tury than when I started. Not help­ing me: the absence of infor­ma­tion about the area I’m most inter­ested in. This morn­ing I’m look­ing for a map (or five) of tribal lands in 1605 (and 1620, 1650, 1675, 1690). I just want to know the names of what and who the hell I’m look­ing for. This absence of acces­si­ble infor­ma­tion may be a core moti­va­tion of my book, but…

No one stays / without invitation.

My girl­friend (Mary, to you comment-​​​​hounds) wrote this morn­ing with the only crit­i­cism she has after two read­ings of Well­wa­ter Dredge. It’s one line, at the end of the book: “Of course, in our town /​​ no one stays /​​ with­out invi­ta­tion.” She has a cou­ple inter­pre­ta­tions. One’s a par­tic­u­lar invi­ta­tion  –  say, to a party  –  the other, the invi­ta­tion the Eng­lish might have offered to Magos, the 16^th cen­tury sachem. That lat­ter read­ing sets up ques­tions of land own­er­ship and stew­ard­ship in the enor­mously com­plex metaphor of…

Central Questions

It doesn’t take a his­tory PhD to fig­ure Meta­com declared war on the Eng­lish in 1675 to fight the now English-​​​​favoring bal­ance of regional power. Power was land, reli­gion, guns and fol­low­ers. Let’s take that for given. There was, of course, another huge, com­plex fac­tor in the mix: Indigenous-​​​​English rela­tions. And as much as that had to do with the foun­da­tions of Amer­i­can racism, it was also wrapped up in ques­tions of debt. Accord­ing to Philbrick, the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­cans  –  the chil­dren of the Ply­mouth colonists, and…