Quadrille: Christianity and the Early New England Indians

By Diane Glancy

4 x 4

The first words were footprints of the wind
in our ears.
Sometimes we cried with earache.
We wrapped our heads in animal-skins.

Our cries were feral in the dark.
We packed dried berries and pieces of meat
and camped for the night.
We followed hoof-prints in the snow.

We saw a tuft of animal-hair on a thorny branch
jittering as we passed
We dreamed of it at night.
We followed the course of streams and rivers.

It was an old knowing of the world.
Our journeys were written on the lines of rocks.
We left stories of our migrations back and back
further than before we had names.

Diane Glancy begins Quadrille with the cries of primitive voices trying to understand the changes in their world after the arrival of the Colonists. Here she continues her exploration of the effect of Christianity on Eastern Native Americans that she began in The Reason for Crows. Glancy uses first-person narrative to bring characters' interior thoughts to the surface, from early voices not yet identified as individuals, to the four Native men who helped John Eliot translate the Bible into the Algonquian language; from Tatamy, a Munsee-Delaware who translated for the missionary David Brainerd, to David Pendleton Oakerhater, a Cheyenne prisoner at Fort Marion who was later educated at St. Paul's Church in New York and became an Episcopal priest. These poems are influenced by the Psalms of David. David is content to let his thoughts rise and fall like the tides in an interior sea. This is what it is like to run into the living God. This is what it is to be in over one's head--to swim with thoughts heavy enough to drown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Apr 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385211050

Diane Glancy

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. She has published six books with Wipf & Stock— Uprising of Goats (2014), One of Us (2015), Ironic Witness (2015), Mary Queen of Bees (2017), and The Servitude of Love (2017). Check out my interview with Sheila Tousey

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QUADRILLE

Christianity and the Early New England Indians

Diane Glancy

QUADRILLE

Christianity and the Early New England Indians

Copyright © 2024 Diane Glancy. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 979-8-3852-1103-6

hardcover isbn: 979-8-3852-1104-3

ebook isbn: 979-8-3852-1105-0

version number 04/24/24

Table of Contents

Title Page

THE FLYING HEAD or the Nightmare of Christianity

The Flying Head Put to Flight by a Woman Parching Acorns

What the Matter with Them?

Praying Indians

When the Gravy Is Consumed

NEW ENGLAND INDIANS

Cockenoe [Montauk]—

Cockenoe [continued]

Wowaus or James Printer [Nipmuc] (d. 1717)—

James Printer—

James Printer [continued]

John Sassamon [Massachusett]— Betrayal

Job Nesuton [Massachusett]—

I, TATAMY

THE CONVERSION OF HE GOES FIRST, DAVID PENDLETON OAKERHATER

Acknowledgments, Notes and Bibliography

Quadrille—

as in quad [four parts]

as in drill [military]— as in John Eliot’s efforts to bring Indian languages

into subjugation with RULES of the English language—

as opposed to the freedom of motion in the historical dance called

Quadrille [though it also has its rules].

THE FLYING HEAD

Or the Nightmare of Christianity

From David Cusick’s sketches of ancient history of the Six Nations, 1842, Illustration from Myths of the Iroquois, Erminne A. Smith (1863-1866), Anthropologist, Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution

The Flying Head Put to Flight by a Woman Parching Acorns

If I work. And work. The Flying Head would. Take his puffy head. If I roast acorns. If I not look. He might shut his teethy mouth. If I ignore. If I parch my acorns in the fire. If I write. My own version. He won’t. On his four-clawed feet. My little fire hot. He cannot interrupt. He can’t hone in. He have no arms. If I parch. If I put hand to mouth. He take his awful head on feet. He have short legs. Neck gone. He growl. AAAAHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRR. If I keep stick in fire. Feet on ground. If I keep back to him. He not there.

What the Matter with Them?

Somehow they come. We did not ask. Their ships arrove and did not have a place to stay. They camp with us. They hungry. We say plant crops. Most dead by spring. But more ships flung. Move over. The animals they brung— cow, sheep, hog. Our people dead of smallpox. We have message from God, they say. Hold Jesus on stick. There are cornfields in heaven. See the clouds in rows of corn. Why they keep coming? It was trouble with them. They fought for land. It was unto us to do the same. But ground was lost. We knowd not what to do. Some went to the God they brought. Seeing something beyond the ships that flopped on shore. They wade. To see words written on