Tag: Munsee

Chief Marilyn Morrison teaching tribal members the importance of honoring those who have passed at a Circle of Life ceremony held on Roanoke Island in 2022. Photo: Joan Collins

From CoastalReview.org

The 13th Roanoke Island American Indian Festival and Powwow is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the Manteo High School Athletic Complex.

The grand entry will take place at 12 p.m. both days. Organizers recommend attendees bring their own chairs and blankets for seating.

The Algonquian Indians of North Carolina Inc., a nonprofit made up of people genealogically descended from the original historic Roanoke-Hatteras, or Croatan, Indians of Dare County, and Mattamuskeet Indians of Hyde County, are presenting the festival and powwow.

The Pea Island Preservation Society Inc. will have a booth at the event to share information about the society and those who worked at the historic Pea Island lifesaving station with American Indian ties.

The society’s goal is to make the story of Keeper Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island lifesavers broadly known.

Etheridge, who was once enslaved on Roanoke Island, became the nation’s first African American keeper in the U.S. Life-Saving Service in January 1880 when he took command of the Pea Island lifesaving station, known as the only all-Black lifesaving station in Life-Saving Service history, according to information provided by board member Joan Collins, an occasional Coastal Review contributor.

Many of the non-European residents on the Outer Banks were a mixture of African, European, and American Indian residents.

This included many members of the historic Pea Island Lifesaving Station, a facility that included men like Etheridge who was enslaved, and others who were the descendants of enslaved people and people with known American Indian ties.

The festival and powwow connect the historic Pea Island…

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Discovering an Algonquian Village’s Connection to the Lost Colony

The story of an English settlement known as the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke and Sir Walter Raleigh’s early explorers remains one of the most fascinating mysteries of American history. 

The search for what happened to the English settlers has recently focused on the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo, where researchers uncovered more evidence of a farmstead belonging to the “Algonquian village of Roanoke” (also spelled Roanoac), an Indigenous community that hosted the explorers in 1584. 

Excavations in March 2024 followed discoveries in the summer of 2023, when archaeologists from The First Colony Foundation uncovered what they believe are tantalizing clues. They dug up shards of Algonquian pottery dating back to the 1500s, along with a ring of copper wire they believe could have been an earring once worn by a warrior from an Indigenous tribe. 

“Finding domestic pottery—the type used for cooking—in close proximity to an apparent piece of Native American jewelry strongly confirms we are digging in the midst of a settlement,” said Dr. Eric Klingelhofer, the First Colony Foundation’s Vice President of Research. “And Roanoac is the only known village at that site.” 

“The copper ring indicates contact with the English,” Klingelhofer continued. 

The ring was made of drawn copper, and Klingelhofer believes it was brought to America by English explorers as part of their trade goods. Indigenous peoples did not have the technology to produce such rounded strands, and neither the French nor Spanish explorers ventured as far north as Roanoke Island to trade. 

The copper ring would have made for a valuable trade item. Historians say copper had spiritual significance for Indigenous tribes. 

What does the soil say? 

While artifacts were discovered last summer, the objective of the more recent dig was to find evidence of a farmstead…

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First Colony Foundation’s Elizabethan Gardens multi-year dig project completed; new excavations slated at Fort Raleigh in April

Published 9:17 am Wednesday, March 27, 2024

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Ramona Currie (foreground) and Paul Carson sift soil for artifacts. Courtesy First Colony Foundation

Jeremy Bliven shovels sand deposited centuries ago. Courtesy First Colony Foundation

Ramona Currie finds a small sherd of Algonquian pottery. Courtesy First Colony Foundation

Eric Klingelhofer examines a soil sample brought up using an auger. Courtesy First Colony Foundation

Area print and television media visit the Elizabethan Gardens dig. Courtesy First Colony Foundation

Jeremy Bliven stands in the 16th Century – on the dark soil of the ground level back then, anyway. Courtesy First Colony Foundation

Jay Ward digs through centuries-old sand, while Paul Carson looks on. Courtesy First Colony Foundation

Eric Klingelhofer directs volunteers Jeremy Bliven (foreground) and Jay Ward, as digging begins, while Tama Creef looks on. Courtesy First Colony Foundation

By Jack Currie, special to The Coastland Times

Pottery sherds uncovered during First Colony Foundation’s most recent dig at Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island may have been used during the key First Contact between Sir Walter Raleigh’s explorers and local Native Americans in 1584. And, in the present day, they help establish the size and extent of the Algonquian village of Roanoac that hosted that long-ago encounter.

The goal of the dig was to determine the extent of this part of the native village reached as well as uncovering any additional artifacts that could shed light on this historic period. In the course of the excavation, the team found good deal of…

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The outside of Big Tree Maple, located in Lakewood, and one of their sap tanker trucks. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

LAKEWOOD — Lloyd Munsee, owner of Big Tree Maple in Lakewood, has seen many different changes in the maple production business since he first began producing maple products.

Big Tree Maple began as a back porch business in 1993, and Munsee has expanded every year. He currently runs the business with his son, David, and the business consists of three separate parts. Big Tree Maple makes and sells maple syrup, is a part of the equipment dealership Lapierre, which Munsee said is a family name in Quebec, and the tanker trucks used to haul sap is also used to fill swimming pools in the summer.

Munsee said making maple syrup is a lot of work, isn’t easy, and is expensive, but added that there have been many changes in the business over the last few decades.

“There have been a lot of changes as there is with all agriculture,” Munsee said. “A few decades ago the majority of sap was collected and gathered in galvanized buckets. There was a process to collect from each one of those buckets and bring it to the truck or whatever they were transporting in.”

These days, Munsee said the maple industry has moved away from buckets and the majority of producers these days use plastic tubes and sometimes also vacuums, which now increase the volume of sap producers are able to collect from trees. This has also enabled producers to make a lot more syrup and grow their businesses.

Big Tree Maple’s reverse osmosis machine, a machine that allows producers to take most of the water out of the sap and produce more syrup. P-J photo by…

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TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO

KEYRIS MANZANARES: Indigenous Peoples have deep ties to William & Mary’s campus. The land was originally claimed by native populations and prior to 1723, Indian boys attended residential school at the college’s Wren Building, and later Brafferton. Now, in a space where Indigenous peoples were stripped of their cultural heritage, including language, this group of women has chosen William & Mary as a meaningful place to meet, to awaken what was once lost.

RAVEN “BRIGHTWATER” CUSTALOW (FOUNDER, EASTERN WOODLAND REVITALIZATION): Unfortunately, through assimilation and genocidal practices, both physical and paper genocide, our people in this area haven’t spoken fluently in at least 200 years, I would say. So, all we have left are a few, maybe a thousand or so words, if that.

KEYRIS MANZANARES: Raven “Brightwater” Custalow grew up on the Mattaponi tribe reservation in King William County. She’s committed to advocating for preserving Indigenous heritage.

RAVEN “BRIGHTWATER” CUSTALOW: I think most of us can probably say, maybe a short introduction… wingapo (hello), (welcome) nitapewak (my friends), kenah (thank you) anah (goodbye), those sort of like basic words that you would use it in like everyday language.

KEYRIS MANZANARES: During meetings, Custalow, along with Diana Gates and Young Brinson, who are cousins from the Cheroenhaka Nottoway tribe, research words and pronunciations as they start trying to put the puzzle of Virginia’s Algonquin language back together.

YOUNG BRINSON (CONSULTANT, EASTERN WOODLAND REVITALIZATION): The culture of Virginia has always been steeped in Algonquin culture and I think that’s why we’ve been led to it. And so, it’s just cool that we are all coming together now to really lift this off the ground and get it started because we’re making moves and I love it.

KEYRIS MANZANARES: The group is in the beginning stages of language revitalization. And while they…

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(March 14, 2024 – New York City, New York, USA) – The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief, Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, attended the United Nations 68th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York City, on traditional territory of the Canarsie, Munsee Lenape, and the Wappinger people, as part of the Canadian delegation. The Canadian delegation also included representatives from federal, provincial, and territorial governments, including Minister of Indigenous Services, Patty Hajdu, Minister for Women and Gender Equality, Marci Ien, and Parliamentary Secretary, Lisa Hepfner. The priority theme of the CSW is, “Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective”.

“The empowerment of First Nations women is essential for the overall well-being and prosperity of First Nations communities and society as a whole,” said AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak. “Addressing poverty and its multifaceted affects require not just policy change but also the mobilization of resources. When we finance with a gendered perspective, we’re not just investing in women but in the prosperity of First Nations and the well-being of future generations. That is why we urge governments worldwide to commit to transparent, multi-year funding for programs aimed at supporting our women and communities.”

“I was pleased to share my perspectives as part the productive discussions at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York City. By working together, we can ensure that concrete steps will be taken to address gender inequalities and the unique challenges faced by First Nations women and gender-diverse people and ensure the protection of all women’s and girls’ human rights.”

―30―

The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) is a national advocacy organization that works to advance the collective aspirations…

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EAST HAMPTON, Conn. (AP) — Donna Lindstrom was lying in bed and looking at her phone Wednesday morning when she heard a loud bang that rattled her 19th-century house in the central Connecticut town of East Hampton.

Soon, the 66-year-old retired delivery driver and dozens of other town residents were on social media, discussing the latest occurrence of strange explosive sounds and rumblings known for hundreds of years as the “Moodus Noises.”

“It was like a sonic boom,” Lindstrom said. “It was a real short jolt and loud. It felt deep, deep, deep.”

It was indeed a tiny earthquake with a magnitude of 1.7, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Robert Thorson, an earth sciences professor at the University of Connecticut, said booms, rumblings and rattling have been recorded in the East Hampton area, including the nearby village of Moodus, for centuries, dating back well before a larger earthquake, recorded on May 16, 1791, knocked down stone walls and chimneys.

In fact, Moodus is short for “Machimoodus” or “Mackimoodus,” which means “place of bad noises” in the Algonquian dialects once spoken in the area. A local high school has even nicknamed their teams “The Noises,” in honor of that history.

The occurrences were frequent enough that the federal government, worried about the possible effect of seismic activity on the nearby, now-decommissioned Haddam Neck Nuclear Power Plant, conducted a study of the “Moodus Noises” in the late 1980s, Thorson said.

What they found was that the noises were the result of small but unusually shallow seismic displacements within an unusually strong and brittle crust, where the sound is amplified by rock fractures and topography, he said.

“There is something about Moodus that is tectonic that is creating these noises there,” Thorson said. “And then there is something acoustic that…

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