Donald Duffy's Presentation on Quabog and Nipmuc Indians

Thomas Doughton: October 8, 2014

I do look at the Nipmuc!Nipmuck! site, if for no other reason than to keep track of who and what Ms. Stedtler is promoting whether Larry Mann, the New England Native American Institute, the Natick Nipmucs or herself and family.

There you’ll find a story about Donald Duffy and a talk he’s giving tonight [October 8, 2014] on his book entitled , The Quaboag and Nipmuck Indians.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quaboag-Nipmuck.../dp/1499659865

He is the author of Around Pottequadic, an “attempt to describe the Quaboag Indians in their tribal area in the Central Massachusetts highlands with a focus on settlement along the Ware River. It continues with the Scots-Irish settlement of the Elbow Tract along the Ware, Swift, and Quaboag Rivers. It is also an effort to describe the use of the land around Mt. Pattaquattic in Palmer, Massachusetts, as it is broadly located.” I didn’t find it accurate or useful. This new text I don’t know. The description is curious, however, “The Quaboags were a people of the Wolf and the same as others in the Connecticut River Valley. The Nipmucks of the Upper Quinebaug River Valley were their neighbors to their south and a different people. Both peoples followed their own path as they reacted to the exploding English population into southern New England.” I say ‘curious’ because basing any sense of New England Native history on Les mots loup is problematic; I’ve posted the actual text when at this site we were writing about N vs L dialects of Algonquian or Massachusett. Les mots loup deals with a limited sample of refugees in eighteenth century Canada and it may or may not be a language brought from the upper Connecticut River Valley. He seems to want to argue that the Natives of Palmer/ Ware are different from the Nipmucs along the Massachusetts and Connecticut border. This may in fact be the case; I’ll have to look at his text. But, still, we can’t even say with accuracy who spoke Les mots loup so there’s that limitation. I do think we need to narrow our vision of what was “Nipmuc” or Nipnet, the geographical area, of the seventeenth century to southern Worcester County/ Northern Connecticut. Zara Ciscoebrough claimed the Nipmuc “territory” extended to the Connecticut River Valley and I’m not sure this is true. For example, in our family oral history, it’s been repeated that a Joseph Dorus was originally named Van Dorus and he was “Mahican” from the Connecticut River Valley and had difficulty communicating at times with his wife who was a Pegan. Is this accurate? I don’t know but it was something I was taught by senior members of the family in the 1950s.