Machapunga

The Machapunga, also called Mattamuskeet, were a Native American tribe, was the tribal area on the east coast of present-day State of North Carolina in the United States. Linguistically, they belong to the small group of North Carolina Algonquian.

Name and residential

Machapunga means in the Algonquian language bad dust or much dirt, presumably based on the partially dusty marshland their residential area. In the 17th century they settled on the Pungo River, which rises in the Great Dismal Swamp and southward flowing discharges in the Lake Mattamuskeet. Mattamuskeet is the name of their village, which in 1733 was located in the southeast of the lake named after this. The approximately 29 km long and 11 km wide lake lies in the southeast of the Albemarle - Pamlico Peninsula in Hyde County. Anthropologists suspect that the tribe has separated in prehistoric times by the Virginia Algonquian, moved to the south, and thus is one of one of the most recent of all the Algonquian walks, the southward along the Atlantic coast moving ..

Life and culture

The Machapunga were referred to in 1713 as an excellent fisherman. They made their networks with different widths loops from the fibers of Asclepias syracia for catching herring, croaker and shad. They hunted deer, bears, turkeys, and other wildlife in the vast swamps of eastern North Carolina. Close to the city were the fields in which men and women jointly cultivated corn, beans and pumpkins. The annual about 240 -day growing season often allowed two crops from the same field. The Yupon bush (Ilex vomitoria ) covered large parts of the countryside and brought a wealth of evergreen foliage produced. The leaves were dried and roasted a type of tea that has been infused with an outstanding, healing drink. For Indian craftsmanship was the basketry, in which baskets of hickory and oak chips were manufactured in the prevailing style, which was common among the Iroquois and Algonkinstämmen of the East. Some special notes on the Machapunga can be found in the notes of John Lawson. The English explorer reports from 1701 that Machapunga lived in a town called Marmuskeet or Mattamuskeet and could make 30 warriors. In some families special customs were discovered which did not exist elsewhere. For example, practiced two Machapunga families from the Jewish custom of circumcision, which was apparently nowhere else practiced at Indians.

History

16th to 18th century

On April 9, 1585 broke out in Plymouth on behalf of Sir Walter Raleigh to Roanoke Iceland several ships off the coast of present-day North Carolina, of which 107 persons remained as settlers to Roanoke and on August 17, who founded Roanoke colony. On the mainland, between Albemarle and Pamlico Sound, they met an Indian tribe, whom they called Secotan. Members of this tribe were detained by a British artist named John White in numerous drawings and watercolors and so on to posterity. After the fall of the first English colony in the New World, it took more than 120 years, until 1714 reliable reports of the local Indian tribes were written by an explorer named John Lawson. Lawson named several local groups that had been described by John White as Secotan, this included living on the sandbanks off the coast of Hatteras, the. Machapunga Bear River and on the mainland at Lake Mattamuskeet Whether it is the descendants of the Secotan is obvious but scientifically not released. The tribe's name Secotan was no longer found in his records.

In the Tuscarora War (1712-1714), the Machapunga presented together with the neighboring Coree against the colonists, as is evident from contemporary accounts. De Graffenried 's Manuscript Journal mentions the Marmusckits as participants in looting and robberies on the side of Tuscarora warriors. 1713 killed and abducted them about 20 people from Roanoke Iceland and from Croatan. 50 warriors of the Mattamuskeet, Catechnee and Coree attacked colonists in the Alligator River. She then fled to the Great Dismal Swamp. With the help of friendly Indians, the English drove out the Mattamuskeet from the bottom and took them captives. Apparently allied with the English Tuscarora under Chief Tom Blunt were mainly responsible for that many warriors of the Mattamuskeet were killed. The finally completed with the Coree and other Indians defeated peace agreement dated February 11, 1715 stipulated that this could settle in the area of ​​Mattamuskeet under colonial supervision. 1731 included the Mattamuskeet together with members of other tribes, only 20 families who lived on the islands and sandbanks. From 1753 there is an estimate of 15 to 20 families from the same area.

19th to 20th century

With the decreasing number of the interest went to the Indians of North Carolina and lost from the second half of the 18th and throughout the 19th century, there is little information about Indians on the coast of North Carolina. In his research in 1916, the anthropologist Frank Speck identified in the survey of settlers on the Albemarle - Pamlico Sound, and that some people originally descended from Indians from the Pungo River in the vicinity of Lake Mattamuskeet. They were proven descendants of Machapunga, after which the Pungo River was named. These people led their ancestry to Israel Pierce, a Pungo River Indians back. Such Christian names were common from 1718 among the tribes of the region, such as a list of the chief name proves. This list comes from the neighboring tribe of the Chowan and is among the documents of the colonial authorities. Among his descendants was Mrs. M.H.Pugh. She was his granddaughter, was already born and brought up an old woman of about 80 years, and in the area of the Pungo River. In later years, she moved to Hatteras Iceland. She had four sons and daughters, and numerous grandchildren. In addition, the families Pugh, Daniels and Berry, all dark-skinned people, in Roanoke, on Hatteras and the neighboring islands lived. These families had intermarried with African Americans, while a family Westcott of lighter skin color was. Externally it differed considerably from the appearance of an Indian and had more features of whites or African Americans, with the latter dominated in the younger generation. Not one of these people knew a word from the Indian language and no one had a memory of Indian customs and traditions. You did not even know the name of their tribe.

Specks research provided the most recently published report on the North Carolina Algonquian. His small collection of material about the Machapunga is located in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.