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WAMPANOAG

WAMPANOAG. In the seventeenth century the Gay Head (or Aquinnah) Indians of Martha's Vineyard were members of a confederacy of Wampanoag communities in southeastern Massachusetts. After epidemic diseases struck Martha's Vineyard in the 1640s, dropping its Indian population from 3,000 to 1,500, the terrorized survivors embraced Christianity and allied with the English. These shifts led Vineyard Natives to fight alongside colonists

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when they successfully battled mainland Wampanoags in King Philip's War of 1675–1676.

In 1685 the Gay Head Indians deposed their sachem (chief) for selling land. However, a mixed blessing occurred when a missionary organization, the New England Company, acquired the title to Gay Head. The company supervised Gay Head until the Revolution, and although Indians resented its oversight, it kept the colonists from seizing Wampanoag territory. Secure land and Indian church leadership stabilized Gay Head throughout the eighteenth century as its people struggled with indebtedness, indentured servitude, male whaling deaths, exogamous marriages, and the loss of the Wampanoag language.

In 1871 Massachusetts made Gay Head a town and divided its common lands. Nevertheless it remained a Wampanoag place because the Natives discouraged treating land as capital, passed on the people's stories, and rallied around their church. In 1983 the Wampanoags of Gay Head-Aquinnah successfully petitioned the United States to become a federal tribe and established a reservation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McBride, Kevin, and Suzanne G. Cherau. "Gay Head (Aquinnah) Wampanoag Community Structure and Land Use Patterns." Northeast Anthropology 51 (1996): 13–39.

Mandell, Daniel R. Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Silverman, David J. "Conditions for Coexistence, Climates for Collapse: The Challenges of Indian Life on Martha's Vineyard, 1524–1871." Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000.

Simmons, William S. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986.

Starna, William A. "'We'll All Be Together Again': The Federal Acknowledgement of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head." Northeast Anthropology 51 (1996): 3–12.

David J. Silverman

See also Massachusetts; New England Company.