Wampanoag

The Wampanoag, or Wôpanâak, are the Algonquian people of southeastern New England; their name means people of the dawn. They moved between fishing stations and fields where women grew maize, beans and squash, and descent and property passed through the maternal line.

The epidemic of 1616 to 1619 killed as many as nine in ten, leaving Patuxet village empty when the Pilgrims founded Plymouth in 1620. The Patuxet captive Tisquantum, known as Squanto, and the sachem Massasoit helped the settlers survive, an alliance remembered through the harvest feast of 1621.

Peace ended under Massasoit's son Metacom, called King Philip, whose war of 1675 to 1676 killed forty percent of the surviving Wampanoag and ended with hundreds sold into slavery. John Eliot printed a Bible in their Wôpanâak dialect in 1663; the dialect gradually fell out of daily use after the American Revolution.