1523.org
The 1523 Project references the last year before Captain Verazzano sailed the Long Island coast. In his wake Native life changed forever.
WAR.
SASSACUSS.
MASSACRE.
THE END.
The war that ended traditional life on Eastern Long Island was fought in southern Connecticut. The Mystic War 1635-1636 disrupted the ancient power structures that had governed life on the Twin Forks for millennium. When the war was over, European settlers began flooding onto the East End. Within 18 years the Native people had been forced into small parcels of land and their 10,000 years of freedom, self-sufficiency, and independence ended.
SASSACUSS was a warrior Chief and the last Great Sachem to rule over the Pequot Tribe. The Pequot's home was in southern Connecticut not far from Orient Point and they were Eastern Long Island's protectors and stewards for thousands of years.
The Native people of Eastern Long Island cannot be said to have a tribal affiliation like many other Native groups of the area did. The Massachusetts Indians, in part were Wampanog. In Rhode Island they were Narrangansett, the Pequot held river systems and coastal areas and so on.
On the Twin Forks it can discerned from the historical records that they there was no Algonquin name for them. They were large family groups that had been living in roughly the same area since the landscape could support people. On the North Fork, the "Tribe" called Corchaug were actually just the Native people who happened to be living on the North Fork. Cutchogue, the proper spelling and pronunciation (Cut-Chawg) means the "Greatest Place, or Principal Place".
As Archeologist and Professor Lisa Cordani puts it,"The right way to think of it is that I am an Algonquin person living in the Greatest Place at the Big Village".