The Pequot Society Gallery is one of three exhibition areas connected to, and complimentary to, the Pequot Village, which is a walk-through diorama that recreates a sixteenth century coastal Native community – indoors on a full half acre. The other two side galleries to the Pequot Village are Daily Life and Arrival of Europeans. Together these three areas augment the information available in the larger exhibit with their presentation of artifacts, interactive displays and videos.
The largest single exhibit in the Museum, the Pequot Village transports visitors back in time 450 years through its realistic depiction of Native figures, wigwams and other material items, human and natural sounds, and the flora and fauna of the period. There is no text in the village; visitors access information from a pre-recorded audio tour or by asking questions of museum interpreters who are visible throughout the exhibits in their black uniforms with red trim.
The three adjacent galleries compliment the village exhibit by exploring details about tribal material, social, political, spiritual and cultural life before and at the time of contact with European traders and settlers. In the Daily Life Gallery visitors can compare historical objects, such as tools, bowls and clothing, with replicated artifacts crafted by contemporary Native artisans specifically for display in the village diorama. In the Pequot Society Gallery a carved Pequot bowl inlaid with wampum that dates to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century is displayed along with other items, such as a Native game called hubbub, pipes and examples of natural medicines used by eastern Indians. The Arrival of Europeans Gallery explores the reasons Europeans came to North America, their early experiences and the initial impressions they had of the indigenous people, and vice versa.
In addition to examining the structure and nature of tribal life, Pequot Society Gallery contains information on Native languages, particularly eastern Algonquian languages, both living and dead. Visitors can view a map that indicates Native words used to describe various Connecticut and Rhode Island locations, including many place names that have survived to the present. For example, Misquamicut, a popular beach area in Rhode Island, is an Indian word meaning “at the red sand.” The names of both Connecticut (long tidal river) and Massachusetts (named for a tribe) have Algonquian derivation, among many others.
Although most of the Pequot language has been lost – like many other Native languages – a number of eastern tribes have retained their indigenous Algonquian speech. The Algonquian family, a group of languages with a common ancestor, includes those spoken in the Northeast, Canada, the Great Lakes, the Plains and California. Linguists believe that the 18 or more varieties that were spoken in and around New England are even more closely related, in some cases sharing many words and grammatical rules in the same the way that Romance languages do.
A computer interactive program available at three stations in the Pequot Society Gallery allows visitors to enjoy six traditional tribal stories narrated by speakers in four Algonquian languages: Micmac, Ojibwe, Passamaquoddy and Abenaki. While listening to a Micmac ghost story, visitors also view subtitles and an animation of the tale on the screen. Another computer option displays comparisons of selected vocabulary words from the stories so the user can compare, for example, how the word for “fish” or “lake” was spoken by different tribes. Like the various Algonquian languages themselves, the words are sometimes quite similar and sometimes not. Thomas Jefferson once reported that at the eastern end of Long Island “the three tribes can barely understand each other.”
One similarity between all of the estimated 400 Native languages spoken in North America prior to the arrival of Europeans is that they were spoken, not written. Many have since become written. As early as 1680, a bible was published in the Massachusetts language, recorded in the alphabet used for English. A copy is part of the MPMRC’s Research Library’s collection of rare books.
Complex and elegant, Algonquian languages are polysynthetic—that is, their words tend to consist of many meaningful parts. The words are sometimes lengthy and more precise than English. Additionally, because words can change according to context, speakers can convey subtle meanings in even a short sentence. Only a few early European visitors mastered the Eastern Algonquian languages of the Native people they met. One who did was William Penn, who noted about the Delaware language: “And I must say, that I know not a Language spoken in Europe, that hath words of more sweetness or greatness, in Accent and Emphasis, than theirs.”
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