not native fruit

american porch

One thing I miss in Berkeley is 'the front porch.'  I used to wonder about the dearth of porches here, and my husband said it was because there are no warm evenings.  Well, that seems like a reasonable explanation to me.

But there aren't any porches down in Los Angeles either, at least not in the numbers you see in other parts of the country.  I also don't see any typical 'American porches' in films set in Europe, don't remember seeing any porches in my own brief travels there.  So I began to wonder if the American porch, as an extension of a living space, not merely as a covered passageway, is possibly one of those vestigial native american influences we find scattered throughout american culture with no 'provenance' so to speak, because we deny all native american cultural influence as a matter of course. 

So, I started my research, looking at the etymology of the word 'porch.'  Wikipedia says:
"A porch (from the Catalan word porxo)^[1] is a structure attached to a building, forming a covered entrance to a vestibule or doorway.^[2] It is external to the walls of the main building proper, but may be enclosed by screen, latticework, broad windows, or other light frame walls extending from the main structure.

"There are various styles of porches, all of which depend on the architectural tradition of its location. All porches will allow for sufficient space for a person to comfortably pause before entering or after exiting the building. However, they may be larger. Verandahs, for example, are usually quite large and may encompass the entire facade as well as the sides of a structure. At the other extreme, the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan has the longest porch in the world at 660 feet (200 m) in length."  [Significant that the longest porch in the world is located in prime native american country, and I'll bet it has been lined with rocking chairs at certain times in its history.]

With a Spanish origin of the word and concept of 'portico,' it would seem obvious that porches are not really an 'Anglo' thing, although the American-Anglos have adopted them wholeheartedly.  However, you don't see porches in Great Britain.  Yes, there was much more Spanish and Portugese influence in early colonial East-Coast America than is acknowledged, but even in Spain, the porch was not really an extension of the living space, a place where comfortable chairs were set out and people did housework, like veggie-prep, household repairs, tools maintenance, child-care, etcetera.  This is the way porches were used in our regional area, especially by the native americans, who often sat low to the floor while performing these household tasks, surrounded by cooling grass-mat screens.  Porches in those other parts of the world - like Spain - seemed to be used for taking the air, being shaded while watching an event in the courtyard or looking out at a vista, not for daily living.

Wikipedia goes on to say that porches are found as parts of churches in England or as parts of temples in India.  Yes, that kind of 'porch' or really 'covered passageway,' is seen in lots of kinds of temples around the world.  In New Englad, according to Wikipedia, the porch evolved from a mudroom or covered vestibule.  I've been in mud-rooms, and they really don't seem like porches to me. 

On the other hand, the Algonquin-speaking Native Americans, like the Lenape, had bungalow-shaped dwellings with a roofed extension in summer, shaded on the top and sides by grass mats, much like those still in use in my neighborhood in poor Philadelphia in the 1950's. This extension to the house (wikaon) was called 'alewikaon' in Lenape, which is usually translated as 'porch,'  The less native/more white-identified households in Philly adorned their porches with canvas awnings, but there were still plenty of the old grass-curtains in use when I was a child.  We still had the old Lenape baskets in use, too - my grandmother had one, and I often saw them in the homes and yards around the neighborhood - and we also used a distinct local native-patterned cloth.  I wish I still had a piece of that.  I would not be able to recreate the pattern today even though as a child it was extremely familiar to me.  I'm afraid I very ignorantly scoffed at these native vestiges, influenced as I was by the many recent European-immigrant children to disdain my american roots.  Nobody's fault, just the way it is.  Kids will be kids, and we didn't know anything.  But I'm afraid I may have hurt my mother's feelings.  I'm very sorry about that.  I wish I had known, but my mother's verdict was that I looked unambiguously white and therefore there was no reason to teach me anything about our native roots, and it might even be dangerous to try to do so.  So, that's how it went.

But anyway, I think - imo, in my opinion - the typical American porch is a vestige of our old Native American lifestyle, the lifestyle adopted by so many newcomers to America from Europe who did not only impose their own cultural imprint onto the landscape but were also influenced in turn by their new homeland and its people, or who married into a native or quasi-native family and tradition.  So much of the truth of all that has been lost in the struggle for survival, which has involved denials and denouncements, hiding and secrets, lies and white-lies, etcetera.  But let's not go there.  The season is hard upon us to go out and enjoy our front porches.  Bring up the rockers and the glider from the basement or garage, put out the grass carpet and the wicker furniture, set up the awning, make some lemonade.  I hope this kind of lifestyle is still happening somewhere in America.

whittinghams and wyoming valley

I'm trying to figure out where my pennsylvania whittinghams come from.  I've traced back births to 1759, and then there is a marriage certificate in 1751, which I think might be the parents of the 1759 birth, both in philadelphia county.  There are also some funerals in Philadelphia for john, william and mary whittingham in 1711, 1713, and 1716 respectively.  They may be relatives as well, and point to the family being in the phila area as early as that.  Those are our line's commonly given names which repeat through the generations.

There are very old whittinghams in virginia (1609, 1615, etc) and in massachusetts (1650's), so i'm assuming mine came from one or the other of those lines.  The Virginia-origin Whittinghams are nearly all african-american now.  There were also some Whittinghams in New York, but they seemed to move back and forth to Great Britain, and have different personal names from ours,  such as Richard, George, etc.  Ours tend to be almost exclusively John and William, although there is one rather recent George (in the 1870's).  Anyway, I don't think we are from that branch.  Then there were some Whittinghams who came from England in the mid-1800's and settled in northern Penna, NY, Canada, and they are no relation as far as I can tell, but they take up a lot of space when one is searching for 'whittingham' through the records. ('Don Whittingham' was a very nice man, and eager to trace his origins in England.  He has since passed away.) Also, a tremendous amt of data comes up from England and Scotland, all of mostly recent origin, so it is difficult to fill in that pre-1750 gap to connect our Whittinghams with those who came over in the late 1600's to Virginia and Massachusetts.

Another really ancient branch of our line, the Livezeys, came to Philadelphia from Virginia.  That is all researched and documented.  So, it would seem that that might be a fairly common route to Philadelphia early on, before and at the very beginning of the Penn colony.  Our Livezey ancestor bought land directly from William Penn in 1683 in an area that is now part of the district called 'Northeast Philadelphia,' specifically around Cottman Avenue and Street Road.  So, maybe the Whittinghams came that way - from Virginia - too.

Some Whittinghams came to Virginia as political prisoners, convicts (a George Whittingham), indentured servants, sometimes via Barbados.  Actual bonafide 'colonist' Whittinghams settled in New England, one John in Watertown as a saloon-keeper/inn-keeper.  Most of the New England 1600's Whittinghams ran to women who married into other names. 

But what I've found out recently that kind of fascinates me, is that there was a claim by Connecticut of land in northeastern Pennsylvania that was also claimed by the Pennsylvania colony and by the Native Americans as well.  This region, known as the Wyoming Valley, was fought over by all three parties concerned, very savage, bloody, burning warfare by all claimants.  Colonists from Connecticut just came in there and squatted.  Many were driven off, but some remained.  The land was very rocky and poor for farming, but apparently New England farmers were used to that and so the 'Yankees' were tenacious in their grip on their new properties.  They really wanted it.

I remember my mother and grandmother shaking their heads and saying, 'and now look at it, it's one of the poorest regions in the state.'  I think they must have known all about it (!) although for me it is something I just came across in a book ("Wild Yankees" by Paul Benjamin Moyer) and had to resort to link+ in order to get the book.  A truly fractious and horrifying tale.  So fascinating to me how close-lipped my mother and grandmother were about matters that pertained to my grandfather's family (the Whittinghams).

Nevertheless, the early presence of Whittinghams way down in the southeastern tip of the state in Philadelphia suggests to me a Virgina origin.  Still researching.

spring wind

it was a single city block
or two,
clean, neat and orderly,
set aside
as a memorial park
dedicated
to something of significance
that had happened long ago,
in revolutionary
philadelphia,
the park a place
of inexplicable peace
in the chaos of the city,
now its young trees
grown tall and stouter,
more steadfast
in recent years.
beneath a clear blue
cloudless sky,
dark narrow trunks
like upright soldiers
topped by bare branches
putting forth
new buds
of leaf
in the swift keen air
of Spring
(verging on a warmer
current, just),
freshening my mind,
and my heart lifted
as if on wings.

was that the promise
of you I felt,
way back then,
when I was young,
before I even guessed,
or imagined?

devi and me

Over at my Great-Grandmother's Blog I recently posted this:

i've been thinking lately that it might make more sense to tell people that my mother was a kind of creole.  Doing research, i've discovered that academics identify a group centered in the chesapeake bay area as 'atlantic creoles.'  the atlantic creoles are a simiar ethnic makeup to the well-known louisiana creoles - french, english, spanish, african american, native american and sometimes caribbean.

Links to information about creole people can be found here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_people

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_peoples

www.frenchcreoles.com/CreolesWeAre.html - this is a nice one with music, slide-show, videos, etc

Atlantic Creoles can be searched on Wikipedia, yielding lots of links, although they do not have a page devoted to them.  I first came across the term in a text on the Atlantic slave trade when I was researching my African roots.

I know I've said before that I am grateful to all my ancestors for leading me on a search for them because I've learned so much about the world, especially Africa, Native America, and all places with so-called mixed-race populations.  I've met so many wonderful people online through the course of the journey too.

But I think the single most significant discovery I have made so far has been to re-connect with the Moorish Science Temple, to read their original teachings and realize how I absorbed them at my mother's knee.  This has always been my 'true' spiritual education, despite the fact that, on a conscious level, my mother tried to make me into a Catholic, something I continuously found to be at odds with my own spiritual experience and nature, and which I struggled with for years, and made various sorts of peace with, only to feel dissatisfied at the core.  When I studied theology at GTU, I was very fortunate that the feminist movement was active at the time, because I found people who could hear me say that I felt my real spirituality had come to me from my mother's line, and was not from 'the church' but seemed, rather, to 'ride' along with it, rather like I was doing with Catholicism at the time.  The feminists agreed that women had their own spirituality, although what they meant, and what I meant, by that phrase were not exactly identical.  What I know now is that my mother had a dual religious upbringing - one in the Catholic church, which was the societally-validated norm (in highly Irish-Catholic Philadelphia), and the Moorish Science Temple, which her father's church of choice.

My reconnection with the Moorish Science teachings and my almost irrational drive to find out 'the secret' and reconnect with my roots leads directly to my present spiritual path, with Amma,and Devi spirituality, out of south India.  My grandfather would be thrilled, and as for me, I feel ever-so-much, at long last, at home.

mummers as spiritual artists

i've written about what the mummers meant to me as a child, now i'd like to write a little about what they mean to me now.  (by the way this picture is taken from the cover of Patricia Anne Masters' book, "The Philadelphia Mummers, Creating Community Through Play" )

i find them inspiring because they represent ordinary working-class people expressing their spiritual creativity in a free and exuberant manner.  these folks allow their spirit and zest for living to spill out creatively filling space and air with color and sound.  against the backdrop of an often grim and always gritty-gray environment they project an alternative.  due to their circumstances in life, they aren't a part of the mainstream culture of art or performance, don't have much money, haven't gone to art school, or studied choreography (until very recently), and no one is paying them to perform the way they do.  They are just doing it! and have been doing it for hundreds of years, and for over one hundred years in the present form as a parade on Broad Street.  This is a grass-roots phenomenon, a manifestation of the creative surge that comes up from the ground, fills the body and spills out in an arciform design, not unlike the shape of the back-boards pictured above in these Handsome and Handsome-Trim suits, or in the shape created by nature in the white peacock, pictured below, which reminds me of some of the old Handsome Suits and Handsome Trim suits that featured a white snowflake motif.

 

since reconnecting with this aspect of my childhood - the mummers day parade -  i can recognize where i got the idea that ordinary people, working class people, had some sort of inalienable right to create art.  that the rich and privileged do not have sole domain over creativity.  (this has really been an issue for me, due to the fact that when i was young i was unable to swing the necessaries to attend art school myself - long story of 'lack of support' around preparing myself to study art in any kind of formal way.  another time.)  of course, we see and acknowledge that truth in the areas of african-american music, for example, or in appalachian blue-grass music.  perhaps in music, more than elsewhere.  and i'm certainly not saying that study doesn't add grace, refinement, complexity and many other features to the various art forms.  i simply mean that the impulse to create something beautiful, uplifting, fun and self-expressive was demonstrated for me by the mummers year after year from an early age.  even the forms of their costumes, such as the Handsome Trim suits, express the impulse of creativity and expression, and is it any wonder i picked that message up?  yes, we were working class folks, for sure, and thanks to our times a number of us moved up in terms of income and even class, but not everyone.  i have an abiding appreciation for what we had and still have, and i see the joy of that treasure expressed in the mummers day parade.

new year mummer's day parade

i can't let the month of january go by without writing something about the new year's day mummers' parade in philadelphia - "place where I was partly raised."

every january 1st my mother and grandmother, or if my father were home from sea, my father would take me 'downtown' on the subway to stand in the freezing cold and wind on Broad Street, sometimes in snow flurries, to see the Mummers' Parade.  All of us kids in Philly could do the Mummers' Strut, but not all of us participated in the parade.  That privilege was reserved for people, sometimes whole families, who belonged to the various clubs, often neighborhood or ethnic community organizations, which prepared costumes, music, routines and themes all year long for the coming of the great New Year's Day parade.

We participated by *being there,* by getting cheered up, entertained, and entranced.  My mother's favorites were the string-bands.  Their performance was often in question if the weather was less than pristine, and so we would strain our ears to hear them approaching.  We could hear them before we could see the round, square or oval backboards with their bright colors, magical feathers and sparkling baubles, approaching in ranks to the accompaniment of up-beat string music. 

Looking back from here I can see what a dynamic, magical,  positive start the Mummers' Parade gave us every New Year. 

My mother wanted me to grow up as a Catholic so I think she downplayed the significance in our lives of the paganesque Mummers' Day ritual.  Although many of the Mummers are also from Catholic backgrounds, I think it goes without saying that the roots of mummery, both in Europe and America, go back to pre-Christian cultures that were absorbed into Catholicism.  Similar activities include Louisiana's Mardi Gras and other Caribbean and east coast festivals of mummery, and are found notably also in Ireland, Sweden and Russia, to my knowledge.

The root neighborhoods of the Shooters (the original name of those later called 'Mummers' by outsiders) were in the old formerly native american enclaves in Philadelphia where mixed European-African-Native American people worked along the river, later to be joined by many European immigrants and melded into what I call 'old Philadelphians' (not referring to the so-called 'first proprietor' family lines here).  Anyway, people often trace the start of the Shooters to the 'Swedes' who lived down there along the river, but of course, the early swedes in Philly - people who arrived in the early 1600's - were *men* who created children with 'someone' (native american women?) who were later self-identified as Swedes.  but of course, my pleas for native-american/european contributions to early american society seem to be falling into thin air.  nevertheless, i state my paltry case yet again.

The overall impression of the Mummers on my psyche can be summed up in this list of words: exciting, beautiful, musical, spherical, wheels, whirling, spinning, rotating, ringing, revolving, pivoting, circulating, curved, ruffled, bulbous, annular, dome-shaped, sickle-shaped, colorful, gyrating, laughing, arching, curving, crescent-shaped, glittering, gleaming, comical, imaginative, arciform, circular, coiled, waving, dancing, and finally last but not least, strutting!

there are quite a few good resources out there on the Mummers of Philly.  I'll just list a few:

the Mummers' Museum, available online
Strut! a DVD by Robert Downey Jr's father, Robert Downey Sr, a must for all Mummers' fans with footage of the 2000 parade
Oh! Dem Golden Slippers, by Claude Welch, an excellent older book on the subject - the classic!
Life, Liberty and the Mummers, by E.A. Kennedy III, an African-American author from New Orleans who became interested in the subject and who features oodles of photos and also some very interesting text
The Philadelphia Mummers, Building Community through Play, by Patricia Anne Masters, mostly text, perhaps a doctoral dissertation looking at the working-class roots of Philly's Mummers, a good read

many stories

as i continue to read and do research in the area of my family history, i realize more and more just how many and varied the stories are, yet to each of us it seems as if our own story is 'the' story.  Whether it's the stories of former slaves, of the various native american tribes, of the 'mulattos,' and probably even of the oppressors, there are unique experiences in every region.  back east, there must be unique experiences about every twenty square miles.  i am finding it fascinating to read all these different accounts, often finding something i can relate to, or that applies to my family.  of course, i am mostly reading about the east coast where my mother's people are from.

i now realize that my mother's father's people, in particular, come closest to what used to be called 'free people of color,' or sometimes 'the intermediate class.'  dr. pauli murray, a harvard graduate, writes a great deal about free people of color and also about slave-mulattos (the progeny of white slave-owners and their slaves) in her book 'proud shoes.'  one of the most poignant, for me, stories in the book relates to how much the offspring of the family that endowed or founded the university of north carolina longed to partake of its education, but could not, because of their color-status.  even dr. murray was turned down by the institution when she applied, and she had to take her undergraduate degree elsewhere.  she chose a good school, but still the pain of applying to a school created by your own direct ancestor and being rejected despite her excellent qualifications - i'm sorry, but that is just totally dysfunctional to say the least.  later she graduated from harvard law school, no mean feat.  

i'd like to share with you a site dedicated to a people i feel are very familiar to me.  it's called 'the minqua people of the welsh mountains of southeastern pennsylvania' and here is the link.  these are some lovely, gracious people, people i know both of my parents respected to the nines because of their excellent values and manner of living, and my mother felt herself and her family to be a part of.  i hope you'll enjoy the site as it gets rolling.

native american language idioms

i've been studying lenape, the indigenous language of my area of origin, the Delaware River Valley, as it has been preserved in various sources.  i've been studying on the lenape nation of pennsylvania's site www.lenapenation.org where there are lessons designed by Chief Shelley de Paul. 

anyway, two of the 'idioms' i've noticed and found interesting in lenape are that 1) one can say 'this squirrel' (na hanikw), or, in order to be more specific as to the exact squirrel one is referring to, 'this here squirrel' (wa she hanikw).  now doesn't this sound familiar?  isn't that the way the so-called 'mountain people' used to talk?  ("This here road, this here knife' etc -) it was considered substandard English.  i always thought people who talked like that were supposed to be 'white people,' but it turns out, according to my research into their history, that i was mistaken.  maybe that was why it was okay for them to be the object of humor by the dominant culture for so many years.  just something to consider.  

and 2) that the lenape had a way of saying 'you all' and also 'you' (but including me too).  For example, let's say a group had set out on a journey but decided the weather was so bad the group had to turn back and go home.  Someone might wish to say 'you all are going home now (but not me, i'm not going home, i'm going forward)' - this is the 'exclusive' form of 'you.'  On the other hand someone might want to say in a rhetorical way for the sake of argument, 'you are going home now, and in the subtext, i am going home now too, but for the sake of argument let's just say that 'you' are going home now.'   in other words, i'm not arguing with you here, but i want to make a point about this plan to go home.  of course, if you go, i will go with you, but first let me present my ideas about going forward instead of going back.  This is the inclusive 'you' which is more of a 'we.'  I really 'get' the difference here, and when I first discovered this grammatical form, I got really excited about it.  so here is how it looks in lenape: we are going home, nemachihena; you (excl) are going home, kemachihemo; you (incl) are going home, kemachihena.

there is nothing like studying another language to clue you in to completely other ways of thinking about things, about life. A whole other approach to life.  it is really sad that the early explorers, friars and so forth did not have a better grasp on the cultural dimensions of the new languages they were struggling to learn and to teach.  i wonder how that might have influenced the outcome of things.

liquor laws/blue laws

anyone remember the blue laws? 

i've been reading in C.A. Weslager's book on the Delaware Indians that liquor laws were introduced very early in the delaware river valley to try to prevent sales of liquor to native americans who couldn't deal with alcohol.  of course, now science has shown that native americans completely lack the enzyme necessary to metabolize alcohol, which explains a lot.  but i just have to say that i had no idea that pennsylvania's liquor laws, blue laws as we used to call them, were in place mostly because of the native american population. 

later, others came to the area who may also have been perceived as needing these laws too, but by and large, most people were christians - even most of the native americans were eventually - so not working on sundays and other aspects of the blue laws were probably just fine and dandy with most folks.  my recollection, however, is that as a child i heard a LOT of complaining about the blue laws.  now of course they've been revoked.

today, it seems to me, intoxicant abuse can only be prevalent among people who are not happy with their lives.  doesn't that make sense?  poverty is usually a direct result of oppression and racism everywhere in the world, and i would say only secondarily a result of material lack - famines, lack of trade goods, and so on.  extreme poverty is more than likely a fairly strong condition for creating unhappiness, i would think. 

and also, of course, another strong predisposer towards alcoholism is genetic as well.  Even rich people, oppressors and the like, can become strung out on alcohol.  how can something so good also be something so bad?

history of bucks county/early spanish presence middle atlantic states

i'm finally reading 'the history of bucks county,' one of the resources i downloaded in the past two and a half years since i've begun researching my mother's family's background.  my great-great-great grandfather, william whittingham, is listed on the 1790 census as residing in bucks county.  his wife, rebecca livezey, is a descendent of the original Quaker Thomas Livezey, through his son Jonathan, who were 'First Proprietors' in Pennsylvania, so the history of bucks county is partially my family's history as well.  i'm interested in their history, and especially in the intersection with the local native american people which occurred, at the very least, when my great-grandfather, Alfred, married Mary Carney, a 'Moor' in 1872.  his parents were both deceased at that time, but alfred's brother refused to visit the home of alfred and mary, according to the civil war pension deposition filed on her behalf.

the so-called moor indians are usually given very little credence even for having existed in the past, so i've found it interesting to look into it a little.  i've found evidence for their existence in brewton berry's 1961 classic 'Almost White,' and also in 'Delaware's Forgotten Folk' by C.A. Weslager.  Weslager also wrote a book called 'The Delaware Indians' and in that book he states that the southernmost clans and bands, who spoke a Lenape (Algonquian) dialect similar to Unami, disappeared early by being absorbed into 'many peoples.'  In 'Delaware's Forgotten Folk,' Weslager makes the educated guess that the Moors were actually a remnant of the Lenape (Delaware) Indians, and I would assume he means the southern people, the Unalachtigo.  So, why was this remnant population known as 'the Moors'?

keeping all this in mind, it's interesting to read in different sources that there was a fairly strong Spanish presence all along the eastern coast of North America, at least as far north as the Hudson River as early as 1513 and throughout the 1500's.  In most of the American historical tradition and literature, a claim is made for the pre-eminent presence of the Dutch and English in these areas, but as we say, history is written by the victors, and I guess that's how the English wanted it to look.  An anti-Spanish, pro-Anglo bias has dominated American culture up until very recently, so I think it's important to keep that bias in mind.  Apparently, the Spanish - and their 'Moors' - were more present in the middle-Atlantic states than has been acknowledged up til now.

Paula Gunn Allen writes that Jamestown was situated 40 miles up-river in order to avoid Spanish ships as late as 1609.  According to the 'History of Bucks County,' the mouth of the Hudson River was first glimpsed by Verrazana in 1513, also a few years later by Stephanus Gomez who called it 'Rio de Gomez.'  "Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the service of the Dutch East-India company, discovered [for the English] Delaware bay August 28, 1609, but he made no attempt to ascend the river.  Captain Cornelius Jacobson May ascended the river some distance in 1614, and two years afterwards Captain Hendrickson discovered the Schuylkill.  In 1616 three Dutch traders struck across to the headwaters of the Delaware, down which they traveled to the Schuylkill.  Here they were captured by the Minquas (Susquehannas) but were rescued by Captain Hendrickson at the mouth of that river."  All of this takes place a full hundred years after the Spanish first began exploring the region.  The Spanish also had two aborted colonies in the Chesapeake Bay region in the 1500's.

Historical record shows that many people came to the area and it is likely that there were more whose recorded names have been lost to the corrosive effects of time or who were never noted down in records to begin with.  The people we have records of are mostly those who were associated with one of the big trading companies who were all excellent record-keepers.  "About 1624-25 the West India company established a trading house on a small island (in the Delaware River) just below Trenton Falls, and located upon it three or four families of French Walloons.  The post was broken up about 1627, and the Walloons returned to New York.  In March 1685 Peter Lawrensen stated in a deposition that he came into that provice a servant of the West India company in 1628 (and) that in 1631, he, with seven others, was sent into the Delaware, where the company had a traditing house, with ten or twelve servants attached to it; that he saw them settled there.  A considerable body of Waldenses and Huguenots were sent to the Delaware in 1656-1663, but it is not known what became of them."  These are just people we can keep some kind of track of, thanks to the written record of these trading companies, but how likely is it that there were more who did not come under the auspices of an official institution?

For example, between 1623 and 1634 there was a group known as "The Albion Knights" who settled along the Delaware.  "Colonists were actually introduced and made their homes on the Delaware, but neither the number nor exact location can be told." (p.9)  This group is sometimes referred to as 'Plowden's Colony.'  William Rawle, who has studied the colony, "believed that some of those who welcomed Penn to the shores of the Delaware, were the survivors of the Albion Knights." (p.10)

It's no secret that these early Europeans started mixing their stock in with the Indians.  "During the early period, the river of the Sickoneysincks at Lewes, Delaware, received a new and vulgar name - Hoeren Kill (Whore's Creek), "From the liberality of the Indians in generously volunteering their wives or daughters to our Netherlanders at that place." (p. 294, Weslager, Dutch Explorers) "Evidence of miscegenation was soon to be seen in some of the Delaware villages when dusky-skinned females gave birth to lighter-complexioned, blue-eyed infants.  The process of Europeanizing the Indians had a subtle beginning, and unplanned cross-breeding preceded the technological changes." (p.109 Weslager, The Delaware Indians)  This sharing of the bed was part of Indian hospitality.  The Europeans were, by and large, Christian men (with the exception of the early Moors in America) and due to Christianity's emphasis on the sacredness of virginity, and their patriarchal slant on monogamy, there was very little understanding of a society where sexuality could be more liberally shared. Certainly such an offer implied a very close tie, a real acceptance of the Dutch or the Moors into the tribal network, and not just 'casual sex' which was more likely to have been the assumption made by many of the sailors or their captains. The name the Dutch gave to Lewes reflects their distorted view of what was going on.  But the subject of sexual distortions in Christian society could be a lengthy discussion, as we all know by now.

If people-making was happening among the Dutch, why not also with the Moors?