“Gone a Hunting”: Deer Hunting and Indigenous Sovereignty in New England, 1600–1750

For the Algonquian peoples of the Northeast, deer hunting was political, a fundamental expression of territorial sovereignty long before colonization. One of the primary ways in which sachems (political leaders) expressed territorial rights over land was by hunting deer. Sachems continued to use deer hunting as a method of enacting their sovereignty in the 1600s and early 1700s, even as colonists sought to impose an English system of property ownership. By maintaining deer hunting as a sontimmoowonk (sachem’s right), sachems forced colonists to acknowledge Algonquian political culture. Some sachems, such as the Mohegan leader Uncas, even used deer hunting to expand their territories, dispatching hunters onto Indigenous and English neighboring lands to establish their authority. Ultimately, this article asserts that to understand the struggle over land between Algonquians and New English colonists, scholars need to view events through the lens of Algonquian political culture.