Phantom Indian Tribes?

Myths have been interwoven with history since man began recording important events. Sometimes myths serve merely as embellishments, while other times they became cover-ups for unnecessary or cruel deeds. We've even seen examples of how the passage of time can sometimes fuse myth with history so completely that the two become indistinguishable. But what about complete works of fiction becoming reality just because one "historian" says so?

This actually happened in the case of the original 13 Indian tribes of Long Island. Arguably, some of the most myth-riddled historical accounts are those involving Native Americans, as these events were recorded with bias by Europeans and subsequent inhabitants of North America. In many of these situations, reality was embellished by myth in order to justify military battles against Native Americans in campaigns designed to drive them from their homelands. But the myth of the 13 Long Island tribes seems to have been concocted in an effort to bring Indian presence to a level of European understanding.

Back in the early 19th century, amateur historian Silas Wood of Huntington, New York gained a tremendous amount of fame by writing a list of 13 Indian tribes that he claimed lived on Long Island at the time of European contact. The tribes that he listed were the Canarse, Rockaway, Merikoke, Marsapeague, Secatague, and Patchague who populated the South Shore; the Matinecoc, Nissaquague, Satueket and Corchaug who lived on the North Shore; and the Shinnecoc, Manhanset and Montauk who occupied the South Fork and Shelter Island. Wood claimed that each tribe lived in a very specific territory, and nowhere else.

So convincing were Wood's statements that they became accepted as gospel. In fact, his findings were included in the 1824 book entitled "A Sketch of the First Settlement of the Several Towns on Long Island." But it didn't stop there. In 1839, historian Benjamin Thompson dedicated his book "A History of Long Island" to Wood, in which he also listed Wood's 13 tribes. And in 1902 Peter Ross published a multi-volume history again listing the same 13 Long Island tribes. In fact, this misinformation, or "mythistory", is embedded in today's textbooks, maps, and newspaper articles; schoolchildren are still being taught the names of these 13 tribes. As currently as 1970, Wood was named Long Island's "first great historian" in a Long Island historical journal.

How could such a fallacy receive so much positive attention and become accepted as known history? Historians and experts of the 21st century are finally unravelling the truth. One of these experts is John Strong, the author of "The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700". Strong is an expert on Long Island Indian history and a teacher at Southampton College. He states that Wood's findings were based on land deeds between Europeans and Indians, but that the names Wood attributed to tribes were actually place names, not tribal names. Primary documents clearly illustrate that no tribal systems existed on Long Island prior to the 1640-1645 raids called Governor Kieft's War.

The origin of this misinformation is further explained by the fact that early Dutch colonists who settled on Manhattan Island needed a familiar system by which to understand their new surroundings. They had established the same social order of their countries of origin, which included villages, land ownership, and farming. When they could find no such pattern in the Indian territories, they created their own familiarly defined boundaries of Indian land and considered groups of Indians living within certain areas to be members of specific individual nations. In fact, Dutch records use the terms "nations" and "tribes" interchangeably.

Wood's writings indicated that particular Indian tribes had "claimed" certain areas of land; in fact, the concept of land ownership and selling of land was foreign to Algonquian-speaking Indians of that time. This is yet another example of imposing Dutch standards on Native American peoples rather than an accurate interpretation of history. Most of today's experts agree that Wood's original 13 Indian tribes, as well as other tribes similarly designated in old Dutch records, were simply place names that the Dutch used to refer to specific groups of Indians.

In another case of misinformation that stubbornly continues to hold its place in history, Texas archaeologists have determined that some of the Red River War history was recorded inaccurately. These records were created by the military in an apparent effort to conceal brutalities against Indians during military campaigns to claim Native lands and drive Native peoples into reservations. Patterns of artifacts have revealed that local Indians were not savage warmongers who brought vicious attacks against white settlements. Rather, recent discoveries show that American military carried out sneak attacks on peaceful Indian camps while warriors and able-bodied men were out on hunting expeditions. Most of those remaining in the targeted camps were the elderly, women, and children. Returning warriors made valiant attempts to stave off the attacks in order to allow their families to escape, a futile effort in many cases. Household wares have been uncovered in patterns exposing the fact that families frantically shed their necessities during their flights in order to lighten their loads and hasten their escapes.

Many thanks to Suite101's ArticFox34 for suggesting this topic.