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Chapter 6 asks how, in the context of King Philip's (or Metacom's) War, martyrdom rhetoric contributed to the reformulation of colonial and Native American identities. Colonists saw Algonquian offenses as yet another of the Antichrist's attacks on the saints. New Englanders became less and less interested in distinguishing between friendly and enemy Indians, eventually exiling the remaining Praying Indian communities to Deer Island, where they almost starved. Remarkably, the Massachusetts magistrate for Indian affairs, Daniel Gookin, attempted to defend Praying Indians from harassment and violence by incorporating their stories of suffering into the broader history of Christian martyrdom.

This chapter proposes a Powhatan theory of power and suggests links to the archaeology and ethnohistory of towns in the lower Chesapeake. Early colonial-era sources highlight a recurring process whereby powerful outside forces, materials, and people were socialized within the Powhatan settlements known as Kings’ Houses. We suggest that a key Algonquian concept for understanding this process is manitou—the vital spiritual force manifest in dangerously potent people, animals, objects, and places. Within the Kings’ Houses of the colonial-era, Powhatan leaders harnessed manitou by orchestrating ritual, trade, and the built environment. Archaeological evidence of feasting, ditches, and palisades points toward similar practices associated with the construction of boundaries—ditches and palisades—within prominent settlements, starting in the thirteenth century AD. By transforming the objects and people that transgressed these boundaries, religious practitioners and political leaders exercised a “tactical power” grounded in Kings’ Houses and animated by manitou.

This chapter examines the contours and characteristics of Algonquian communities in southern New England and how they developed bodily performance in response to English colonists' demands on their lands. It considers how Saconets and other Algonquian tribes in the region that English puritans would dub New England performed their own notions of the communal body, inscribing the land with their presence. It also analyzes the “laborious bodily service” and other feasting rituals to shed light on the actions and experiences of seventeenth-century Algonquians in a time of accelerated change. Finally, it discusses the importance of nickómmo and other feasts and dances for Algonquian as a means of accessing the power of other-than-human persons as well as coping in times of crisis.

While it is common in the literature to find claims that Algonquian languages do not have a grammatical mass/count distinction (because many nouns, and according to some authors, all nouns can be pluralized), the chapter argues in this paper that on the contrary Algonquian languages, and in particular Ojibwe, has such a distinction as part of its grammar. The pluralization of mass nouns is an illusion in that what is being pluralized is a noun that has been singulativized. The chapter shows that Ojibwe has remnants of a gender shift system (much clearer morphologically in Mesqualike (Fox) and that gender shift marks the singulative. That Algonquian languages are singulative languages is a brand new claim that makes many interesting predictions. Theoretically, the chapter integrates singulative systems into Borer's (2005) theory of division and argue that these languages provide another strategy to perform division on nouns that are still undivided.

This chapter emphasizes the diversity in the licensing environments of the subjunctive and concludes that the subjunctive is not a natural class in terms of one modality, or one type of subjunctive crosslinguistically. The author argues that it is not possible to define the subjunctive as a category on the basis of a predictable, uniform interpretation or form. Wiltschko points out that the fact that the subjunctive is not a universally uniform category indicates that it might be more promising to a develop a formal typology for categories that is not based on their substantive content or traditional categorical distinctions. In the case of subjunctive, Wiltschko suggests that what unifies the subjunctive across languages is that they contrast with the independent assertive clause-type represented by the [+coin] (coincidence) feature. This feature may be valued through different strategies across languages.

This chapter focuses on the descendants of the Algonquian peoples who once inhabited the region of New York Harbor. The descendants have recalled that the first Dutch colonists asked for as much land as the hide of a bullock could cover, then claimed as much land as that hide, cut into strips, could encircle. The author believes, however, that this fantastical story preserves the memory of an actual event. Moreover, the story threads the history of the founding of New Amsterdam together with those of other, far-flung maritime colonial outposts, and offers a window onto the cultural history of early modern European imperialism. This episode with the bullock's hide is the culmination of a longer historical tradition about “The Arrival of the Whites.” The first written version of this tradition is in an 1801 letter from the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder to the historian Samuel Miller.

This chapter explores how French and Native American women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries challenged European gender norms. Women from New France families that engaged extensively in trade with Native American nations mimicked the expanded economic and political power of Iroquoian and Algonquian women and used the French legal system to empower themselves. Karen L. Marrero shows how Native American women defied French imperial efforts to control their bodies and mobility, participated in trade and political negotiations, and at times challenged the French state militarily.

Using archaeology, ritual, and linguistics to supplement the observations of captives and other colonists, this chapter attempts to trace the contours of indigenous slavery among the central Algonquian and Siouan peoples of the Pays d'en Haut. These sources can show patterns of enslavement, domestication, and forced integration by which enemy outsiders were made into subordinate domestics. Linguistic records such as the translated pages of Algonquian phrases reveal how Indians explained the place of slavery in their own societies. Indians of the Pays d'en Haut, for example, expressed their relationship to slaves through metaphors of domestication and mastery, comparing captives to dogs and other domesticated animals.

This chapter examines how London had to learn to be colonial. From the very first moments of sustained encounter in the late sixteenth century, places like Ossomocomuck and London were entangled through the creation of knowledge. Even before explorers stepped ashore in “Virginia,” they were propelled there by an unprecedented urban crisis that threatened the stability of London society. This urban context shaped how English explorers and colonists saw the territories and people they encountered and how they attempted—often unsuccessfully—to organize themselves and others in these unfamiliar places. Meanwhile, the experiences of Indigenous travelers to London, and in particular those originating in the homelands of the eastern Algonquian peoples suggest that parallel Indigenous processes of exploration were taking place.

This chapter explores how the the combination of animal domestication and widespread urbanization across Europe, Asia, and Africa had led to the development of epidemic diseases against which Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere had little or no natural resistance. It was this urban reality that had likely cost the lives of the Algonquian people who disappeared into the city and that had prevented four of the five Inuit from making it home. Meanwhile, in London, for all the improvements of the Enlightenment—new understandings of disease, inoculation, and advances in urban design—disease remained one of the most intractable and threatening of urban realities. What scholars have called ecological imperialism, the means by which biology facilitated Europe's imperial and colonial incursions, had its roots in the city.

This chapter continues to investigate the cross-linguistic predictions of the morphosyntactic analysis of gender developed in Chapter 3. Chapter 3 proposed that Amharic contains a n that has an uninterpretable feminine gender feature, in order to explain feminine arbitrary gender; in contrast, masculine arbitrary gender is assigned by morphological default in the context of a n that lacks gender features. This chapter provides further examples of two-gender languages that contain uninterpretable gender features, including Spanish (Romance), which is like Amharic in that it has an uninterpretable feminine feature. In contrast, Maa (Nilo-Saharan) has a n with an uninterpretable masculine feature. The scope of the chapter also extends to animacy-based gender systems; it is suggested that Algonquian languages like Fox have a gender system that includes a n with an uninterpretable animacy feature. One interesting consequence of these proposals is that the animacy feature must be privative.

This chapter investigates the mass/count distinction in Michif. In many languages, mass and count nouns are distinguished via the (in)ability to occur with plural marking, the (in)ability to occur with numerals without a measure phrase, and the (in)ability to occur with certain quantifiers (Jespersen 1909; Chierchia 1998). However, these diagnostics do not apply to all languages. For example, in Inuttut (Labrador Inuktitut), none of those diagnostics distinguishes between mass and count nouns, but there are other diagnostics that do (Gillon 2012). This chapter shows that Michif displays a split: in one part of the grammar, the three diagnostics distinguish between mass and count nouns, and in another part, the diagnostics do not. This shows that Michif disambiguates between French-derived vocabulary and Algonquian-derived vocabulary, which complicates the notion that the Michif DP is French (Bakker 1997).

Michif has two different morphological exponents of plurality: the French-derived article lii and the Cree-derived suffix -a/-ak. This chapter investigates the syntax and the semantics of both plural markers, and shows that the two plurals cannot occupy the same position (as they can co-occur) and that lii occupies Num while -a/-ak occupies Div. The plural article lii is a ‘counting plural’ (following Mathieu 2013, 2014) and the plural suffix -a/-ak is a ‘dividing plural’ (following Borer 2005; Borer and Ouwayda 2010). The suffix -a/-ak can only occur on Algonquian-derived nouns, not French nouns, and it always creates count nouns. This analysis entails that multiple positions for ‘true’ plurality must be available to languages (contra Borer and Ouwayda 2010). This analysis also has implications for the semantics of Algonquian-derived nouns vs French-derived nouns, the development of Michif and—potentially—the semantics of plurality in Plains Cree.

On the surface, and according to the literature, Michif makes use of two different gender systems: the French sex-based system contrasting masculine and feminine gender, and the Algonquian animacy-based system contrasting animate with inanimate gender (see Bakker 1997; Papen 2002; Strader 2015). This chapter explores the morphosyntax and semantics of the two gender systems, focusing on their productivity. This chapter shows that while the Algonquian-type animacy-based distinctions remain productive and active throughout the Michif grammar, the Romance sex-based distinctions are now relevant mostly semantically, and are only minimally grammatically active. The chapter argues that this asymmetry in patterning suggests that there is also an asymmetry in the contribution of each language to the Michif grammar, with Plains Cree being the stronger influence.

This chapter focuses on the article system in Michif. Articles are particularly problematic for the French DP/Plains Cree VP split posited for Michif (Bakker 1997). Despite being French-derived, the Michif articles do not behave like their French counterparts. Michif definite articles occupy a lower position within the DP than French definite articles do, and Michif lacks definiteness, despite having borrowed both the definite and indefinite articles. Even more problematically, the singular definite articles are used to Algonquianize non-Algonquian vocabulary—both within the DP and the VP. Thus, a piece of French morphosyntax has been appropriated to create structures that can be interpreted within Algonquian syntax, providing more evidence that ultimately the Michif DP is Algonquian, rather than French.