On a sun-drenched day in June 2018, a woman in traditional Native regalia dropped a large wreath of flowers into the Atlantic Ocean. The impact jostled loose a few petals before the circle of blossoms slowly drifted away on the luminescent blue Bermudian swells. All of the one hundred or so people gathered were silent, each absorbed by their own thoughts.
In its departure, the wreath commemorated the journey of enslaved New England Native Americans to the island nearly four hundred years earlier. Within an hour, the somber commemoration by the sea turned into a vibrant two-day intertribal powwow. Representatives from the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and other nations in New England mingled with Bermuda Natives on St.
David’s Island as they participated in dancing, feasting, and communing. Men and boys fulfilled traditional roles around a large circular drum, beating it rhythmically. Dancers in brightly colored moccasins, robes, and headdresses shifted from one foot to the other in a line around the large grassy space encircled by tents.
The smell of fry bread and stew wafted through the air, and for hours the singing and drumming drifted skyward as the flower wreath slowly caught a current and slipped out of sight into the open sea. Native American powwows are important cultural celebrations, but this one in Bermuda memorializes events often hidden in American history: the large-scale enslavement of Indigenous people and the simultaneous taking of Native land. The ancestors of the Bermuda powwow attendees were part of this buried and intertwined history.
The stealing of Native Americans and their homelands is not just a side story in the grand drama of American history. It is the central river that connects all other streams. Nearly four hundred years earlier, New England puritans hunted down well over one thousand Pequots, Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and individuals from other nations and shipped them to Bermuda, Barbados, Spain, Mexico, and other international destinations.
This took place during and after two wars between the puritans and local Indigenous populations. The first was the Pequot War in the 1630s, in which puritans tried to completely exterminate the Pequot nation. The second was King Philip’s War in the 1670s, which was a massive uprising in response to the harms of colonialism.
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