Changing World, Changing Weaponry
Eastern Woodland Bows, Arrows, and Quivers
Daniel Firehawk Abbott, a descendant of the Nanticoke and Choptank people and Drew Shuptar-Rayvis (traditional name: Black Corn), citizen and cultural ambassador of the Pocomoke Indian Nation, discuss the construction and use of Eastern Woodland Bows, Arrows, and Quivers.
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(meditative music)
DANIEL: We-ee Nucataquan. Ani tunt MahSquallen. Welcome. My name is, Firehawk. It is my given name. Fire—I am a fire maker, and Hawk—guide or teacher for our people. My people are Nentego, N-E-N-T-E-&-G-O. Nentego until about the late 1800s, and then Nanticoke in the modern era. Loosely translated, people of the tidal waters.DREW: Natadawense Pekatawas MakataWai’U, Pocomoke renape naxpi lenu ne. I'm called black corn. I'm a citizen and cultural ambassador of the Pocomoke Indian Nation. My English name is Drew, Shuptar-Rayvis.
DANIEL: I am holding a pignut hickory bow. The stave, hickory is a good word. It's not a snappy a some, but, a very good bow. This bowl was made in the mid 90s. It has served me well through hundreds of presentations and, archery demonstrations. It's still functioning beautifully. It is a, reproduction bow of one of three bows, now housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. They believe, taken from the Powhatan peoples, just to the south. We're on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and, in 1656.
This denotes the four winds cross. The circle is the universe. No beginning, no end. That is where each of us stands in the universe. So it's a flat bow. The bars that you see are dyed with the green hull of black walnut.
If you notice, I'm. I'm holding at center and shooting about one inch above center. Okay. Generally, we're not going to draw individual arrows. We're going to draw several arrows. And we're going to lay them under the bow, okay. And then shoot., and you don't aim because you have been holding one of these since, you're about four years old.
Okay. So to give you the idea, you just simply knock the arrow and, pinch and then lay 1 or 2 fingers under the string, and you're going to pull, all right, like so, and release very quickly and then drop the next arrow down. I have a friend, Shawano that—or Shawnee, that brings them up between the bow on the string and knocks them quickly.
I think he has, his record right now is 26 arrows in a minute. That's that's unbelievable. And, 60, 65 pound draw weight. Well, good, good war bows. Hunting bows can go 80, 90 pound. I had a Shawano tell me that, those could go up even over 100 pound draw weight. So you draw quick. You can't hold it. And their their arms must have been like my legs.
DREW: Yeah.
DANIEL: I mean, unbelievable, probably from using a bow throughout your life. Of course, a good bow is useless without good arrows.
DREW: We have this quiver here. This quiver and arrows were made by Daniel Firehawk Abbott. Quiver is made of bulrush. There's lots of documentation among the Powhatan people of bulrush quivers. Bulrush is a marsh grass that grows. It's very spongy. It's very soft. We know among the Wampanoags, bulrush is used to make woven mats that cover the inside of the home.
DANIEL: Kind of like a cross between, styrofoam and foam rubber.
DREW: Yeah, yeah. The arrows inside. We have different types. One of the things that mark Eastern-Woodland arrows is this type of pinch style grip. One of the things that we know through books such as the Encyclopedia of Bows, Arrows and Quivers,Volume One by Jim Hamm and Steve Allely, is that a lot of the eastern arrows from multiple different communities have this pinch style release.
What the style of knocking shows is that the preferred method of release among Eastern Woodland people is likely a primary release that requires your thumb and forefinger, or a pinch style release, as opposed to a mediterranean or tertiary style release that requires three fingers. So that means that arrows are being shot this way, and that's what this grip talks about. These Eastern Woodland arrows that Daniel has replicated here show is this primary style of release.
DANIEL: You won't find the style of, fletching on arrows west of the Mississippi.
DREW: No, that's an this Eastern Woodland.
DANIEL: Is an Eastern Woodland, two fletch quarter twist, and it, imparts a spin, to the arrow on release, giving the arrows much greater accuracy.
DREW: And it's found in multiple communities as well. I mean, from the Lenape, to the Senecas, to the Mohawks, this style of fletching was one of the most common.
There are many different points in many different woods that were used. We know that things such as Arrowwood viburnum, Rivercane, and other hardwood shoots and shafts were used to make arrows.
DANIEL: So many, many, many choices. You never have just one choice for doing anything. You wish to do in the natural world. Earth mother gives us many choices.
From Spear to Musket
Daniel Firehawk Abbott, a descendant of the Nanticoke and Choptank people and Drew Shuptar-Rayvis (traditional name: Black Corn), citizen and cultural ambassador of the Pocomoke Indian Nation, discuss the influence of the changing world, from the Ice Age through the end of the 18th century, on Eastern Woodland weaponry.
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(meditative music)
DANIEL: Just over 4000 years ago, native people are laying down their spear thrower, and javelin—are beginning to—in favor of the bow and arrow.DREW: The environment’s changing.
DANIEL: And the environment's changing.
DREW: So you're no longer in these large, grassy, open lands were atlatls are very advantageous. You're now starting to get increase forests, and these forest structures are now developing into what we know as modern mixed hardwood forests, where the atlatl does not perform well, but a bow and arrow works very, very well to work in between trees.
DANIEL: Keep in mind that these hard, these great hardwood forests only found in eastern North America, did not even start to develop until about 9-10,000 years ago as the climate warmed after the Pleistocene, the ice age. So here really in the Mid-Atlantic region, this was not hardwood forest. This was grassland with scattered clumps of, conifer trees.
And then as the climate, began to warm even more, you have the hardwood trees with seed fruit nut producing plants, increasing in number and becoming dominant eventually.DREW: And what we know is the bow and arrow survives for an incredibly long time. Daniel said well into Historic period. The latest I know bows and arrows are being used, at least that we can document, is around the 1770s with the Stockbridge Mohicans, who were a Native American militia unit in the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Kingsbridge, where that unit, really suffered a major defeat and largely fell apart.
There's an image of Stockbridge Mohican man with a musket in one hand and a bow and arrow over his shoulder. So we know that bows and arrows are being used well into the end of the 18th century, and continue into the 19th century in other parts of North America.
The gun that I'm holding here is a Smoothbore gun. It is a type-two Dutch trade musket. Period correct for around the 1640s to about the 1660s. What we know is that Europeans bring a variety of things. They bring things such as brass kettles, glass beads, hawk bells, mouth harps, knives, alcohol. And they also bring firearms. We don't really see on the Eastern Shore ’till about the end of the 1640s into about the 1650s. One of the reasons why firearms such as this Dutch trade musket would have become prolific and predominant in the area is for a couple unfortunate factors.
One factor is that due to epidemic diseases brought by Europeans, these Euro-Asiatic diseases such as smallpox, measles, mumps, that are animal borne diseases. Native Americans had very little immunity to those diseases, and because they came at them with such frequency, there was no time to build an immunity and people were dying by the scores. The old and the young.
DANIEL: By the time the English arrive at Jamestown in 1608, there's already been 100 years of intermittent trade, with the Atlantic coastal Native people. And they've been spreading these unseen enemies. Okay. Regarding, the ability to continue these traditional, hand crafts, if you will, or, handmade items, who are the first to go when epidemics sweep through your villages?
The very young and the very old. So there goes your next generation, and there goes the ability to teach them. If you teach, through hands on and, and verbal, teaching.DREW: You have to learn to build a bow and arrow. As Daniel said, from the time you're 4 to 5 years old, you have to learn to build that bow and arrow. This firearm comes completely manufactured from Europe to you in your hands. All you have to do is learn to point and shoot. We know that firearms by the 1670s become endemic with Native Americans, particularly in Maryland.
In order to make this firearm work. This is a internal flintlock. There's no dog. This was built by Leonard Day in the early 1990s. All the pieces of this gun are based off of historical pieces of Dutch trade guns found throughout the larger northeast—the Susquehanna River, as well as parts of New England. And how this lock works, it's an internal flint lock. So you turn it, the cock. I can now load it into this priming pan here, closing my battery or frizzen. I then take my charge and I would pour my gunpowder into the barrel, putting down my round ball or my buckshot, which is made from lead. We know through multiple archeological finds that Native Americans were producing their own shot molds, and they were also requesting shot molds, and they were requesting lead, and they were requesting powder.
And there have been recovered these soapstone shot molds where Native people are pouring lead into these shot molds. So I put my shot, my powder and my shot into my barrel. I take my ramrod for scouring rod, as it was called in the period. And, as the command says, to ram-ho, and I ram that down, returning the scouring rod to the firearm, I then pull to half-cock.
And what will happen, this will strike the battery, creating a spark. The battery, or frizzed as it's called in French, coming from the French word frisé, which means to spark. Bichon Frisé. If that name sounds familiar. This will spark igniting the powder in the pan, which will then ignite the powder that's in the charge produced, forcing the projectile to move forward.
All you'd have to do as a Native person is learn how to use this from a trader, an ex-soldier. There were many ex-soldiers and soldiers for hire, mercenaries that were throughout colonial America, and all of those people, depending on who was friend and who was foe at the moment, could teach you how to use this firearm. In Helen Rountree's, Indians of the Eastern Shore, she says by the 1690s, every Indian on the Eastern Shore would have had a matchcoat made of woolen stroud cloth, and they would have had a musket—they would have had a firearm.
Learn More
This video series was recorded on-site at Adkins Arboretum—the ancestral homelands of the Choptank people—featuring Daniel Firehawk Abbott (standing left) and Drew Shuptar-Rayvis (standing right).
Listen to a conversation with Daniel and Drew where they discuss the early history of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, what led each of them to work in interpretation (Part 1), tribal governance and tradition, language, the landscape of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and the importance of oral history (Part 2 ).
To learn more about the Pocomoke Indian Nation, visit their website at pocomokeindiannation.org.
To learn more about the Nanticoke and Choptank people on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, visit the Nause-Waiwash Band of Indians website, at turtletracks.org.
Credits
Chesapeake Homelands is a production of Beech Works. This video series was produced in partnership with Adkins Arboretum.
It was produced by George Burroughs and Lauren Giordano with additional recording by Ian MacAllister.
Special thanks to Daniel Firehawk Abbott, Drew Shuptar-Rayvis, and the Pocomoke Indian Nation Tribal Council.
This video series has been financed in part by Eastern Shore Heritage, Inc. with State funds from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority, an instrumentality of the State of Maryland. However, project contents or opinions do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority.