Quinnipiac - Language, Religion, and Folklore

Language, Religion, and Folklore

The Quinnipiac Language is the PEA-A R-Dialect, known today as WAMPANO-QUIRIPEY. It was originally spoken throughout the Dawnland around 1500 to 1600 AD. After contact with the Europeans, which caused the epidemics and resulted in a shift of regional dialects, the language was spoken in western Connecticut, eastern New York, half of Long Island, and northern New Jersey. From 1770 to the 20th century, the dialect became a pidginized hybridization of the n, l,y, and r dialects, until ACLI began reviving the original dialect. Today QTC (Quinnipiac Tribal Council) Press (ACLI series) has a 295-page Complete Language Guide and has been training people to speak, write, and understand the archaic r-dialect.

The Quinnipiac people practiced a number of traditional religious ceremonies, hosted by seven medicine societies. Chapter 12 of the Complete Language Guide preserves these teachings according to linguistic and cultural traditions, while Chapter 13 preserves the ancient graphical writing systems of the Eastern Algonquians, used by the sachems and shamans. As noted by contemporary scholars, the Quinnipiac/Algonquians remained the strongest group to resist the Puritan ethnic cleansing. Rev. Pierson was taught by Rev. John Eliot, who founded the Puritan Praying Towns, where any Quinnipiac who “converted” had to renounce everything “Indian”, including religion, language, dress, ceremonies, homes, businesses, freedom, and families, and live like Europeans in square houses, but with stringent rules of conduct not imposed on Europeans. Many converted just to stay alive; some pretended to convert in order to remain in their homeland and/or to avoid being sold into slavery; others converted but relocated at missionary refugee camps that boasted better treatment; still others migrated to refugiums on land of other Algonquian or Iroquoian peoples.

Contrary to popular assumptions, those who did relocate were not absorbed into the receiving tribe. They were made part of Dawnland Grand Council Fire Circles, which is their traditional mode of socio-political existence. This is known as socio-political preservation and is how many of the Algonquian groups obtained state recognition in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, after they had been rendered “extinct” with the stroke of a pen in the legislatures of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York.

Basically, Quinnipiac/Algonquian Shamans, called powawaus, prayed and made offerings of tobacco, etc., to the spirits (mandooak) of game animals to ensure successful hunts. The warrior-shamans called Pinessi (plural is Pinessisok) were dedicated to the Thunderer who bestowed supernatural powers on them. Offerings were also made to the mandooak of the sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, oceans, the Little People, and the Stone Giants, Hobbomock and Maushop. Women tended all crops except tobacco and herbals, which were planted by shamans only. The Algonquians used over twenty herbals in smoking their ceremonial pipes.

The Quinnipiac Stone Giant Twins (Hobbomock and Maushop), as the primary culture heroes, acted as the epitome of good and bad, right and wrong, honorable deeds and mischievous behavior. The Puritans refused to acknowledge any of this. Religious conversion and cultural ethnocide operated to redefine many of the Quinnipiac ancient traditions and language definitions. For example, the Puritan families refused to honor Quinnipiac teachings. Hobbomock was, to the Quinnipiac, a benevolent spirit who taught the people how to hunt, fish, and survive the Ice Age, earthquakes, famines, etc., and he was the one prayed to when assistance was needed. The Puritans knew this, yet they forced the Long Water people to teach the children that Hobbomock was a “Bogeyman.” The Puritans redefined Hobbomock, Maushop, and other Quinnipiac spirit helpers as “devils.” Some Puritan descendants still maintain a paternalistic attitude towards Quinnipiac traditionalists and refuse to acknowledge even their existence, by choosing to hold on to the misconception that the Quinnipiac have vanished from the earth. As the motto of the New England Algonquian Alliance proudly proclaimed after the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, “WE ARE STILL HERE”; so today do the Quinnipiac.