ALGONQUIAN, A KEY INTO THE NATIVE LANGUAGE, CUSTOMS, AND HABITS OF THE AMERICAN NATIVE TRIBES OF 1643 by Roger Williams

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The most in-depth document of native American customs, life, language, and history lives and breathes within Roger William's great 1643 treatise: ALGONQUIAN, A KEY INTO THE NATIVE LANGUAGE, CUSTOMS, AND HABITS OF THE AMERICAN NATIVE TRIBES.

The first English settler to acknowledge Charles I, the King of England, had no legal authority to grant charters and sell land grants in the New World that belonged to native Americans, Roger Williams was cast out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for daring to utter that Colonialists had not only a legal obligation to negotiate and pay for native Indian tribal land but a Christian obligation as well. In addition, he dared to submit that native Americans should not be forced to convert to Christianity as this choice should come from a man or woman's free will. He also argued vehemently for the separation of church and state amid the colonies.

Pushed out of Salem in the winter of 1636, he travelled 50-miles south to Raynham, where the local Wampanoags offered him shelter at their winter camp. Chief Sachem Massasoit hosted Williams there and they negotiated for the purchase of a tract of Wampanoag land only to be found out by the Massachusetts Bay Colony that Roger Williams was still within their territory that he was banished from. This necessitated Williams go on the lamb again until he reached “Narragansett country” in what is now Rhode Island, where its boundaries resided outside the charter of the colonists of Plymouth Plantations and Massachusetts.

Here along a celestial looking freshwater cove just north where three tributaries come together at the head of Narragansett Bay—the Nassau river, as the Dutch called it, the Woonasquatucket, and the Moshassuck river—Roger Williams acquired a fertile tract of land from chief sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi of the Narragansetts. Here in this “Eden” of the New World, Williams and his followers established a new, permanent colony that was considered a haven for dissenters and wholly separate from the “stuffed shirts” and Puritanical elders of Plymouth Plantations and the so-called United Colonies, of which Rhode Island was no part. Under the belief that divine providence had brought them here to this sacred place, where freedom and liberty of conscience could be found and lived free from harm; the settlers named this new great experiment “Providence” for its seemingly divine providence and “Plantations,” the English word of the time that meant settlement.

Roger Williams was the first person in the New World to live among the native tribes of the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nimpuc, Mohegan, Pequot, and various other native American tribes of New-England and Eastern New York. He recorded their way of life, their language, their culture, their food, their harvesting of crops, how they worshipped, their medicine, their food, their religion, their belief in their Gods, child rearing, marriage, the native monetary system, their belief about death and burial and even their thoughts of the English that came to them in the New World, and he recorded it all and published it in 1643 as A Key into the Language of America.

But more than simply being a translation dictionary or “phrase book” of the native American tongue it served, and still serves, as a record of the daily life of native Americans, of which no other book ever written so clearly defines the ways, nature, and humble being of the first true Americans. Now brought to you by ‘Lil Beethoven Publishing that Roger Williams so faithfully translated some 500 years ago before anything else was known about New-England the wilds and true nature of the Americas and the Americans that lived within its woods, plains, shores, and hills for a millennia, if not more.