Flint at the Fort: Investigating Raw Material Scarcity and Locations of Lithic Activity at Monhantic Fort

The Monhantic Fort site on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation in southeastern Connecticut has yielded many insights into Pequot life in the late 17th century. This fortified village, occupied during King Philip\u27s War, has given archaeologists a glimpse of the domestic practices and organization of the people who lived within as well as details about how they engaged with military expeditions. In this thesis, I examine the lithic assemblage from Monhantic Fort. This assemblage, comprised of European flint employed to create tools like gunflints and strike-a-lights, can be used to investigate how the Pequots utilized new stone tool technologies and negotiated these technologies with pre-contact practices of lithic tool making. The first issue my thesis explores is raw material availability, as other sites have suggested that European flint was a scarce raw material in 17th century New England. The second issue concerns the retention of pre-contact Native practices of lithic production and maintenance. By analyzing the flakes and debitage recovered from different areas at the fort, one can see whether or not the Mashantucket Pequot had adopted specialization in production and maintenance of stone tools and where these activities were taking place. The evidence from both the artifacts and the documentary record demonstrates that raw material availability was not a problem for the Mashantucket Pequot living at the fort. It also shows that production and maintenance were not specialized activities, but that some households did have a more heavy focus on lithics

Lasting Marks: The Legacy of Robin Cassacinamon and the Survival of the Mashantucket Pequot Nation

My dissertation is a political and cultural history of seventeenth-century Anglo-Algonquian New England. Between the Pequot War of 1637 and King Philips War in 1675-76, a covalent Anglo-Algonquian society existed in New England. This created conditions which allowed the Pequots to reconstitute their communities after the devastation of the Pequot War. Robin Cassacinamon was instrumental in this process. His skills as an interpreter, diplomat, intermediary, and community leader connected Cassacinamon to the surviving Pequots and to important regional Algonquian and Puritan figures of the time. Cassacinamon became Pequot sachem, leading his people until his death in 1692. His work provided the Pequots with essential tools needed for long-term survival as an identifiable people: a land-base and the ability to form and maintain Pequot communities. Cassacinamon and the Mashantucket Pequots navigated this conflicting political climate to pursue their own agenda. The period between the Pequot War and King Philip\u27s war provided a finite window of opportunity by which Cassacinamon could exploit the seventeenth-century Native strategies outlined in Eric Spencer Johnson\u27s work. These strategies included alliances, marriages, settlement patterns, coercion, and others. Cassacinamon\u27s deep ties to the Pequots and other Algonquian groups, as well as with the Winthrop family and other colonial leaders, let him exploit various political and social tools. Cassacinamon\u27s skills made him an essential part of regional negotiations between these Algonquian and English polities. By operating in the gaps and intersections where these polities met, Cassacinamon and the Pequots carved out a place for themselves within the regional social and political power structure. By focusing on Cassacinamon\u27s story, a greater understanding of how the Pequots survived after the Pequot War is reached. Cassacinamon\u27s biography also broadens our understanding of this seventeenth Anglo-Algonquian society, as well as what happened when the Anglo-Algonquian frontier shifted to an Anglo-Iroquoian frontier after King Philip\u27s War. Thus, my dissertation is not just a biography; it is a political and cultural study of New England, with broader Atlantic World elements. It provides insight as to how an indigenous North American population exploited overlapping political and social systems and tactics to survive in a changing colonial world

A Jurisprudential Quilt of Tribal Civil Jurisdiction: An Analysis of Tribal Court Approaches to Determining Civil Adjudicatory Jurisdiction

In 1998, Tammy Lang embezzled approximately $8,000 from the Ho-Chunk Nation’s child daycare. Lang was a non-Indianemployed by the tribe as the Director for the Ho-Chunk Nation’s Head Start program. However, instead of supporting the children of the tribe, she abused her position to steal the tribe’s money to start her own business. The FBI declined to prosecute Lang, and the Ho-Chunk Nation could not prosecute Lang. As a result, the Ho-Chunk Nation was left with few choices: it could let this injustice stand; it could attempt recovery in state or federal court, subjecting itself to the laws of another sovereign; or the Ho-Chunk Nation could assert its sovereignty and sue Lang in its own courts.The Ho-Chunk Nation sued Lang for civil conversion in its own courts. Before the Ho-Chunk Tribal Court could render a verdict against Lang, the court had to determine it had jurisdiction, both subject-matter jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction. The Ho-Chunk Nation’s Tribal Court based subject-matter jurisdiction on the personnel manual Lang signed, which acts as the Nation’s employment law, and on Lang violating the laws and the constitution of the Nation.The court based personal jurisdiction on Lang’s employment by the nation and the mutually consented to relationship. The Ho-Chunk Nation Trial Court ordered Tammy Lang to return to the Tribe the embezzled funds and to “repay the Nation for its attorney fees for each hearing appearance.

Sex Discrimination under Tribal Law

This article broadly identifies and then briefly examines tribal laws that prohibit sex discrimination and secondarily addresses laws that make sex-based distinctions. As explained below, the project is somewhat limited in scope due to the lack of widespread availability of many tribes\u27 laws. Specifically, this article addresses tribal equal protection guarantees as well as all types of tribal statutory and constitutional laws that explicitly prohibit sex discrimination. It also discusses tribal case law addressing such discrimination, including case law addressing equal protection guarantees, cases interpreting tribal codes or policies, and case law creating tribal common law

Indian Time at Foxwoods

An analysis of the self-representation of the Pequot Nation of Connecticut, one of the wealthiest Indian nations in the U.S. The article is a published version of a paper originally given at the 2005 conference (Im)permanence: Cultures In/Out of Time at Carnegie Mellon University