Nanepashemet was a sachem and bashabe or great leader of the Pawtucket Confederation of Abenaki peoples in present-day New England before the landing of the Pilgrims.
17 Facts About Nanepashemet
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Nanepashemet was a leader of Native peoples over a large part of what is coastal Northeastern Massachusetts.
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Nanepashemet took over his brothers' territories as sachem, except for areas that had been ceded to colonists.
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Nanepashemet's influence stretched north to the Pennacook tribe, which inhabited the White Mountains region of present-day New Hampshire.
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Nanepashemet was respected by his people as a warrior and a leader.
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Nanepashemet's name was translated as "the Moone God" by Puritan Roger Williams in his A Key Into the Language of America.
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Nanepashemet's tribe caught fish in the rivers and sea, dug and harvested shellfish, and raised corn on the Marblehead peninsula.
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Roger Williams 8.
Nanepashemet directed his wife and children to move inland to reside with friendly Indian bands until the crisis passed.
9.
In 1618, an epidemic of smallpox decimated his band, but Nanepashemet was spared because of his isolation in the fort.
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Nanepashemet is often confused with Awashonks, who was the Squaw Sachem of the Sakonnets in Rhode Island, but the two women were contemporaries and not the same person.
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Nanepashemet lived her last years on the west side of the Mystic Lakes, where she died in 1650.
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Nanepashemet controlled what is Charlestown, Medford, Revere, Winthrop, and Chelsea.
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Nanepashemet is mentioned in the poem Mogg Hegone by John Greenleaf Whittier.
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Nanepashemet controlled the Saugus, Lynn and Marblehead areas, and died in 1633 during the smallpox epidemic.
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Nanepashemet inherited the lands of both his brothers from Charlestown up to Salem, and went by the moniker George Rumney Marsh among English settlers.
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Nanepashemet was sold into slavery after participating in King Philip's War and shipped to the Caribbean island of Barbados, where he survived for eight years, then returned just before his death in 1684.
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Nanepashemet's descendants signed the Indian Deeds to Marblehead, Lynn, Saugus, Swampscott, Lynnfield, Wakefield, North Reading, and Reading, Salem.