][<en,
Does Devil Duck know Mr Potato Head?  Is he still pissed rolling around in the back of your car?
Leland

-----Original Message-----
From: "Let us not speak foul in folly!" - ][<en Phollit [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Follett
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2003 3:55 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Anyone here familiar with Long Island?


Ruth,

The Shinnecock were Algonquin's and may still be today. Algonquins were a bigger gang than the Iroquois, but tended to side with the English during the Colonial Revolution so our historical retribution is to sh*t them out of our history, their history and all history, and likewise ignore their bloody raids on our innocent women and children... like the Mohawks & Last of the Mohicans -- same folks different woods, different diet. It may be fortunate, in some respects but I'm bollixed if I know which, that the Indians of LI tended to find out about the ravages of small pox sooner than most of the indigenous locals west of the Hudson, which is another reason that they are quickly forgotten. I mean, faster dead faster forgot.

Shinnecock Reservation between Southampton Beach and Montauk Highway is one of the oldest "reservations" though it seems to have been moved around and shrunk up a great deal into a fairly useless scrap of sand exposed to any and all hurricanes that run up the coast and any and all nor'easters that run down the coast. Despite their nearly perfect climate shrinking in land mass seems a primary characteristic for any self-respecting reservation and the Shinnecock simply by making it to the 21st century have reason for pride. The Shinnecock are a primary remnant of the Sebonac culture of 700 BCE that followed the Orient Point cultural epoch -- an essential fact we need to keep in mind, particularly when visiting for clam chowder. These folks have been hanging around in the sand and surf for a long time.

I've not been to any of their powwows, though I intend to do more than drive by their history, in time, given time and a Winnebago (the bus is battery dead in the driveway). I understand that the events are a nexus of Native American gathering for the entire true and wanna-be remnants of tribes on LI. They should be a friendly people, ethnic tourism (rent-an-Indian) is a good business, particularly when lobstering and sharking sucks. As they live right in the middle of the Hamptons they are well situated to be employed in the service industry to look after the plumbing, catering and entertainment needs of the wealthy, like Billy Joel, Paul Simon or Martha Stewart and the many more nameless but significant nabobs-in-their-own-minds that populate the warmer seasons of the South Fork. 

The Eastern end of LI is divided into a North and South Fork that on a map resembles the beak of a squawking duck in mid-squawk, angry to either express itself to some beast out there in the Atlantic, or simply dredging for a lucky mouth full of unsuspecting cod. You can get to the Shinnecock to visit without ever going to NJ or to New York City or even Atlantic City via the New London to Orient Point Ferry (a month or two ago they dropped a truck off the ferry and the driver who was in the cab drowned) to the tip of the North Fork then, among several routes, you can drive to Riverhead (Polish Town -- they have a really great HS Homecoming Parade and the best hardware store from which to purchase baby guinea fowl), visit the Flanders Duck (though the Duck is supposed to talk in a recording by Cindy Crawford I have yet to visit on a day when the duck is emoting and so I can't tell you what f*ck the duck has to say... unless you want me to make up something -- Oh, by the way, Devil Duck is always pestering me to visit the Flanders Duck...), then drive about as slow as you can possibly drive and not lose consciousness, due to the stream of tourista traffic that trickles along like frozen molasses, out along the South Fork through the sickening quaint Hamptons, spot a few Dutch windmills (though the English forcibly plopped themselves over the Eastern end of LI they had the good sense to not remove all of the Dutch industrial and power infrastructure), and look for where there is less architectural splendor of opulent weekend houses and obviously more railroad, sand, grass and water and you will soon enough find the reservation to the south of the LIRR track to Montauk.

Another Algonquin tribe, the Unquachaug a skip and jump to he west of the Shinnecock, the remaining element being the Poospatucks with their very very small reservation along Forge River (you would think by the size of this reservation that it would have to be the oldest, that is, if small size is a measure of socio-political evolution), are practically our neighbors. We live south of them a ways but nearby to Poospatuck Creek, where the crap floats freely and the blue crabs grow fat, and Poospatuck Island. 

Poospatuck Island is a lovely spot sheltered by the barrier of Fire Island at Smith Point. It is always submerged during high tide weather and is mostly a salty bog not worth landing a canoe at even if all you want to do is stretch a leg and whiz. 

Thomas Jefferson & James Madison visited their fellow in crime, William Floyd (our property where our house is located was once owned by the Floyds and for all we know our small yard is a place where the Founding Father shat, possibly imbuing one of our commemorative oaks) in 1791 and collected a list of 162 Unquachaug words. From this junket Jefferson compiled his *Vocabulary of the Language of the Unquachaug Indians* (1791) accordingly. I also understand that the three Amigos frequented the local Ketchum Tavern (timber frame) and drowned a few pints, which may account for a little known apocryphal dictionary of the Unkachungy Oakbarkers that I am putting on my bookshelf right now as we speak. 

Most natives of LI were in the whaling industry. They taught the Dutch and English whaling -- which consisted in the early early times of waiting for an unfortunate and sickly whale to float up dead on the beach. The family would all gather on the beach, a place of great commune with nature and beautiful sunsets, and cut up the bounty before it would rot. Eventually the natives got into make-shift boating, being so close to the ocean it is always tempting to venture out into the deep. 

When the Dutch and English came along there was industrialization... of an odd sort. The local currency was in wampum which essentially was a whelk or quohog shell that had been worked into a bead by cracking off a piece of shell then rubbing it on an abrasive stone then with a stone-drill a hole put through it. A portion of the value of the beads had to do with the pain-in-the-tootie involved in making them. The Dutch brought along steel awls called "muxes" and suddenly the Dutch were able to make wampum faster(counterfeiting)and they began to buy a lot of stuff, like the land the natives, who had also become dependent on the trade with the Dutch, had been living on.

At one point in the history of the Poospatuck all of the men were wiped out in a storm grounding of the whaler they were working. The women of the tribe, rather than marrying other Native Americans from neighboring tribes wanted to upgrade their social status and married free blacks. Contemporary skin tone of the Poospatuck being a deeply hued and satin black, rather than the preconceived "red" man, exacerbates racial pressures in the tribe maintaining recognition and respect within the surrounding community. Not too different of a situation than for the Pequot fighting against the notion of their non-extinction. In the case of the Pequot, their history and the differences between CT/NY State and Sovereign Nation status the Pequot (including the Narragansett cousins who seem to be in the family power seat, it seems tribal identification is about as solid as negative electrons around a proton... is the electrons moving or not moving or neither?) are a wealthy and prosperous tribe due to casino development. For the Poospatuck there are legal non-tax tobacco sales, though any non-native NY State citizen is breaking the law if they purchase non-tax tobacco and get caught. If they don't get caught then it is to the advantage of all parties’ party to the transaction. The great conflict the Poospatuck have with the community stems from the uneducated and poor trash left over from the Euro-white invasion who would like to sell tobacco but whom I suspect would just as gladly sell crack if they felt they could get away with something. Dumb people have a right to evade the law too seems to be the lower undercurrent of the local politics.

I can tell you that it is unlikely that any Native Americans from Arizona are yearning to get themselves membership in the Poospatuck. The Poospatuck reservation looks like a really run down and crappy house park version of the run down and crappy white trash infested ex-burbs that form Mastic, Mastic Beach and Shirley -- the unHamptons where we live and love and our neighbors attempt to procreate with alien space beings nightly. 

On the East Coast the relationship of the tribes to the States through various treaties preceded Federalization and as such for each state there has been a different constipation in respect of recognition of Sovereign Nation status of tribes residing within their innards. Laws enacted following after Federalization mainly are dispensed upon native Americans who were a nuisance in territories West of the original 13 colostomies and when native Americans in the East express for the same rights as for those of the West there is often complications between State and Federal jurisdictions.

You may be pleased to note that East of the Shinnecock were the Montocks. It seems that none of the three tribes understood each other, each speaking a distinctly separate language. It gives one a local sense of how distant people can be without either radio or television to co-exist and never really need to understand each other. I suspect this is what the Reaganits meant by the Good Old Days. Of Algonquin on Long Island there is a working consensus that there were 13 tribes, though there seems to be arguments between the ethnographers in favor of 20 or more, or less than zero.

][<en

Nhj׹ zǽzjۊxjwry r캻؂ȶښˢyj۷ Fxi

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