Quiripi

The Quiripi were Eastern Algonquian-speaking village peoples along Long Island Sound, from the lower Connecticut River to central Long Island. Their best-known band, the Quinnipiac, or “long-water people,” had their main village at New Haven. They farmed, fished and hunted, moving villages as the soil wore out, and were governed by local sachems.

Contact with Dutch and English traders early in the seventeenth century was followed by epidemics and the founding in 1638 of the first English “Indian reservation” near New Haven for the Quinnipiac. Abraham Pierson translated a Quiripi catechism in 1658, but conversion made little headway.

Land sales, warfare and shrinking numbers broke up the communities. Many survivors joined the Tunxis and Mahican, and later the Brotherton settlement, whose people were removed to Wisconsin in the nineteenth century; the Quiripi language died out around the end of the 1800s.