Naumkeag people

Detail from Sidney Perley's 1912 collection of original Essex County, Massachusetts Indian deeds showing his estimate of precontact Naumkeag territory based on the towns receiving their deeds from Naumkeag descendants. Note that this map does not include Naumkeag territories to the west and south in Middlesex and Suffolk counties.

Naumkeag is a historical tribe of Eastern Algonquian-speaking Native American people who lived in northeastern Massachusetts. They controlled most of the territory from the Charles River to the Merrimack River at the time of the Puritan migration to New England (1620–1640).

Naumkeag is also the term for a Native American settlement at the time of English colonization in present-day Salem, Massachusetts, meaning "fishing place," from namaas (fish), ki (place) and age (at)[1] or by another translation "eel-land."[2] However, the settlement Naumkeag was only one of a group of politically connected settlements in the early 1600s under the control of the sachem Nanepashemet and his wife the Squaw Sachem and their descendants. Although referred to in this article as Naumkeag, confusion exists about the proper contemporary endonym for this people, who are variously referred to in European documents as Naumkeag, Pawtucket, Penticut, Mystic, or Wamesit, or by the name of their current sachem or sagamore.[3]

  1. ^ Perley, Sidney (1912). The Indian land titles of Essex County, Massachusetts. Salem: Essex Book and Print Club. pp. 8–12. Retrieved 2008-12-11.
  2. ^ Douglas-Lithgow, R. A. (1909). Dictionary of American-Indian Place and Proper Names in New England. Salem, Massachusetts: Salem Press. p. 132.
  3. ^ Lepionka, Mary Ellen (2018-03-28). "CHAPTER 1 What do our Algonquian place names really mean?". Native Americans of Cape Ann. Retrieved 23 October 2021.