Reservation Subsistence: A Comparative Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of a Mashantucket Pequot and Euro-American Household

Abstract

This article examines the social practices of two 19th-century Connecticut households, one of them inhabited by Mashantucket Pequots and the other by European Americans. By analyzing the plant remains left behind by the people living at these two sites, I seek to examine the subsistence and land-use strategies that they employed to successfully navigate and mitigate the challenges of life in a colonized setting. The Mashantucket Pequot are the descendants of an indigenous group known as the Pequots, who, prior to the 17th-century arrival of Dutch and English settlers, controlled a great deal of land in southern New England. After the devastating outcome of the 1630s Pequot War, the Pequots were split into two groups and allocated two distinct reservations under the oversight of the colonial government (Campisi 1990: 118–119). These new land bases consisted of small portions of the former Pequot territories. In this article I seek to reveal facets of daily practice by exploring the ways in which Mashantuckets utilized their reservation landscape in the pursuit of their subsistence goals. The study further reveals the means by which Mashantuckets implemented novel subsistence practices, such as an increased participation in regional labor markets, to replace and supplement traditional practices made cumbersome by state restrictions. This article also examines the relevance of the forest landscape to both Mashantucket Pequot and European American subsistence practices. Each of these foci will serve to challenge and complicate the myth of the destitute Indian, an historical misconception that shaped political dialogues central to the lives of New England’s indigenous people in the 19th century. The continued agency of New England’s native people in the face of colonialism has been discussed by a number of recent works (Den Ouden 2005; Cipolla, Silliman, and Landon 2007; Holmes 2007; Witt 2007; Law 2008; Mancini 2009; Silliman 2009) and is further analyzed here. However, it is important to note that the setting of 19th-century southern New England offered real challenges to the continuity of native practices and to the daily survival of every Mashantucket both on and off the reservation. The continued relevance of these issues lends political weight to this article. This study explores the concepts of cultural continuity and change, facets of identity that were major factors in the lives of both indigenous peoples and European Americans. Although both households discussed herein experienced change and continuity, their individual daily challenges forced them to experience change and continuity differently. Households on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation modified their subsistence practices to negotiate the difficult realities of reservation life. European American households in southern Connecticut similarly broadened their subsistence strategies Reservation Subsistence: A Comparative Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of a Mashantucket Pequot and Euro-American Household