Who Taught the Stockbridge Indians to Moon?

Yes, you read that title correctly, if you were thinking of "Mooning" as the pulling down of one's pants to expose one's butt as an intended insult.

William Kellaway's book, The New England Company 1649-1776 , is a history of the mission society that went by that same name.

The New England Company was the London-based philanthropic organization that supported the mission town in Stockbridge, Massachusetts starting in the 1730's. I'm not completely cynical about organizations like The New England Company...

I'm not starting the argument that they were ethnocentric; they were, we know that, this is about something else: Stockbridge, Massachusetts was a strategic location in the ongoing wars between Britain and France. If we can assume that the mission society gave the Indians something good (just for now, feel free to argue against that later), religion, "civilization," whatever, it certainly wasn't free, because the people of Great Britain got an excellent guerrilla warfare unit out of the deal.

During the American Revolution, the Continental warship Bonhomme Richard, commanded by John Paul Jones, won a hard-fought engagement against the British ships of war HMS Serapis and HMS Countess of Scarborough off the east coast of England. I figured it would be more appropriate to illustrate this entry with warships of that era than with a picture of a "moon."


By the 1770's Great Britain had become the enemy. The Stockbridges - lets remember they consisted of Mohicans and Wappingers and other Algonkian remnants - were the only Native nation to fully side with the thirteen colonies, that is, the Americans, for the whole Revolutionary War. At that point the officials of The New England Company had a chance to show that it was really about religion, that their support of the mission across the ocean was more than just a sort of inducement to support the British in war. And sure enough, the New England Company pulled through, paying John Sergeant Jr.'s salary as late as May of 1783 (Kellaway, page 278).

Things eventually broke down, however. There were logistical reasons for the breakdown, but there was also the realization that some of the New England Company's American commissioners were "among the prime leaders and first stirrers up of the rebellion."

The once-loyal British-allied Indians had been made 'treacherous' by the white Americans. (In other words, the Stockbridge Indians sided with the Americans, becoming "traitors" in British eyes.) This brings us to possibly the most remarkable incident in Kellaway's entire book:

[T]he Stockbridge Indians had been brought to Boston when British naval vessels were there on purpose to insult them, and were taught, by turning up their backsides, to express their defiance of them (Kellaway, 280).

So there you have it: One of the things the Stockbridge Indians learned before they left Massachusetts was how to insult people by "mooning."

Your Comments and My Posts

With over 270 posts, it can be somewhat of a challenge to find what you want in the Algonkian Church History blog.
A number of comments that were submitted recently were responses to some of my older posts.


Anyway, the most recent comment the blog received was to an old post. A reader who identified herself as Lisa said

So looking forward to information on the Gardner Family. My grandmother's father was Thomas Gardner, who is Stephen's son and really have not found too much reliable information. Great site!

Well, the Gardner family is - in my opinion - a very important part of the Stockbridge Indians, So I went back and created a new label for the Gardner family and tagged seven existing posts (plus this one) with it. (See the list of labels on the right of the screen).

Another thing to keep in mind if you're looking for something in particular: There is now a google-powered search box near the upper-right corner of Algonkian Church History. Of course, if all else fails, the site allows you to send me an e-mail.

Our Mother Tongues: A Recommended Site for Native Languages

I've recommended other Native language websites before. However, the Our Mother Tongues site succeeds in a way that no other sites have until now: It puts Native languages into the full-blown multimedia experience many of us have come to expect from the worldwide web. Our Mother Tongues is able to do just that because their focus is on Native languages that are spoken today.




Their "Voices" section features a grid of 40 photos of Native langauge speakers. A click on any of the photos opens an audio file, a recording of that person speaking their langauage.

Since this blog claims a focus on the Algonkian family of languages, the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project will be of particular interest.

Our Mother Tongues even offers e-Postcards (like the one below) that come with their own audio.