Ninnimissinuok information

Ninnimissinuok is an indigenous term, to refer to Native Americans of southern New England region.^[1][2] These people include the Pawtucket, Massachusett, Nipmuck, Pokanoket, Niantic, Mohegan and Pequot, as well as the people of western Connecticut and Long Island. This term, a variation of the Narragansett word Ninnimissinûwock, which means roughly 'people', connotes familiarity and shared identity.^[3]

The use of the term Ninnimissinuok does not imply, however, a homogeneity of social forms or motivations among the various groups so labeled. The region now known as southern New England was home to a complex variety of communities, sometimes grouped into larger polities, which can be divided into at least three basic ecological subregions: the coastal, the riverine and the uplands. Although sharing an underlying cosmology, similar languages, and a long history, the peoples living in each of these regions developed distinctive social and economic adaptations.^[2]

Although their habitations were relatively mobile, being made of striplings fixed in a circle in the ground with their tops tied by walnut bark (with hole for smoke from central fire inside), covered with mats of reed, hemp and hides,^[4] the one main migration of the entire population of each tribe (including women and children) was a biannual one and took place only from winter residence (in warmer forested areas) to summer habitation (near the cornfields) and back again.^[a] Maize and other cultivated vegetables made up a substantial part of the Ninnimissinuok diet. William Wood noted in his 1634 report that "to speake paradoxically, they be great eaters, and yet little meate-men …"^[9] Stanford nutritionist M.K. Bennett concluded that 60% of their daily caloric intake came from grain products and only 10% from animal or bird flesh (as opposed to more than 20% in the average diet in mid-20th-century America).^[10] To support their dependence on corn cultivation, the men cleared fields, broke the ground and fertilized the soil with fish and crustaceans,^[11] while the women tended to weeding with clam-shell hoes, with assiduity that amazed English settlers.^[b]

Sachems acquired their positions by selection from a hereditary group (perhaps matrilineal). The polity of the sachem was called a sontimooonk or sachemship. The members of this polity were those who pledged to defend not only the sachem himself by the institution of the sachemship itself.^[14] Colonial writers noted that sachemships could themselves be subjected to a ruler over many sachems, a great sachem or kaeasonimoog, which the English writers referred to as "kings".^[c] Sachems held dominion over specific territories marked by geographical identifiers.^[d] The authority of the sachem was absolute within his domain.^[22] It was traditional, however, that for the sachem to strive to achieve a consensus in all important matters.^[23] One factor limiting the despotism of sachems was the option, said to have been frequently exercised, for a subject to leave a particular sachem and live under a more congenial ruler.^[24]

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